What we have planned for our 2020 Disney Vacation

Our 2020 Disney vacation may be 229 days away, but we are already knee deep in our planning. Back in February we booked our home resort for the dates of our vacation to secure accommodations and in just a few weeks we’ll be able to try our luck at booking rooms at other Disney Vacation Club resorts. With our ability to book our dining reservations only a month way, we thought now would be a good time to put together a blueprint of our vacation.

There are two major purposes for this trip, one is to celebrate our son’s 5th birthday and the second is to run some runDisney races. With these two things in mind we planned out our week and a half. We arrive late Sunday evening and stay until the following Wednesday. We’re planning on six park days: a Magic Kingdom day, an Animal Kingdom day, two Hollywood Studios days and two Epcot days. We figure by hitting Hollywood Studios up twice we should be able to get into Galaxy’s Edge at least one of these two days. The day we’re planning on picking up our race kits, the day after we arrive and the day of the 1/2 and Kid’s races were claiming as non-park days. From there we were able to place in our park days. We chose park days based on days we didn’t want to be at each park. We didn’t want to be at parks the days they had Early Morning Magic or After Hours events. These are special ticket events. At Early Morning Magic Events, guests get early access to a chunk of the parks attractions. This creates a wait time for the busiest rides before we’d even enter the park. The After Hours events allow guests to enter the parks 1 and a half before their event, which boosts the crowd for fireworks or nighttime entertainment. This made it very easy to pick which days we wanted to go where. Tuesday is Hollywood Studios. Epcot is Wednesday. Friday is Animal Kingdom. Sunday we’re back at Epcot. Monday we’ll head to the Magic Kingdom and our final day we’ll spend at Hollywood Studios.

With our park days in place, we were able to pin point where we wanted to eat. We asked the kids where they want to eat and they’ve chosen Rainforest Cafe, so we’ll eat there on our Animal Kingdom day. Jeff has chosen Teppan Edo to celebrate his marathon. I want to get to Liberty Tree Tavern at the Magic Kingdom, to mark off the last table service restaurant we haven’t tried at that park. We filled in the rest of the days with restaurants at the parks we’ll be visiting. Mama Melrose and Sci Fi Dine In Theatre at Hollywood Studios. Garden Grill and La Hacienda de San Angel at Epcot. Beaches and Cream, Artist Point and hopefully the new restaurant at the Riviera on non-park days.

Now that the blueprint is done, I can come back to our plans in a month’s time to book our advanced restaurant reservations. A couple of these restaurants are going to be tough to grab. Beaches & Cream and Artist Point are fan favourites so I’ll have to be ready to spend some undivided time the moment I’m able to make those reservations. The only thing that will cause these plans to adjust is if they add a DVC Moonlight Magic event during our visit. If that’s the case then we’ll be sure to make space for that in our itinerary. Can’t pass up a free park evening.

The next step in our planning process comes in a couple weeks, when we’ll be able to change our accommodations to another DVC resort if it’s available. We’re hoping to stay at Old Key West, the original DVC property, and at Beach Club Resort Villas. We’ve never stayed at Old Key West and we’d love to take advantage of their low point value studios. We want to finish our vacation at the Beach Club because of its close proximity to Epcot and its amazing pool: Stormalong Bay. Stay tuned on whether we’re able to get the rooms we want and how we do it.

Happy Planning, Friends.