Our Disneyland Experience: The Planning Stage - Timing Your Trip
We’ve already talked about our Disneyland Budget and Tickets, so let’s move along.
When should you go to Disneyland?
NOT in the summer. I mean, seriously. Why would you do that to yourself? It’s massively hot, especially if you are running from ride to ride or standing an insanely long line because EVERYONE and their grandmother decided to visit while on their summer vacation.
I consulted several websites that showed Disneyland crowd levels, and my favorite one was on Touring Plans. They rank the days on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the most crowded. Check out those summer months and you’ll see what I mean.
I’m going to talk to you as a former teacher now: Any time your children spend on a family vacation, especially one that takes them to a new place and exposes them to new things, is time well spent. It’s a valuable educational opportunity. Don’t feel guilty about taking them out of school.
It’s even better if you create teachable moments. For example: ”The sign said the wait is 30 minutes, and we’ve been in the line for 12 minutes. How many minutes do we have left?” My 6-year old was ALL over that. We also talked about rounding up to the nearest dollar when buying food from the carts, had a little lesson about taxes (since we don’t have sales tax in Oregon, the boys had no idea that there was such thing as tax), and learned a bit about California geography. PLUS, before our trip, we watched Disney classics so that my boys would become familiar with some of the characters they would see! My homeschool friend told me that it was as if I were teaching a unit with a field trip at the end! Yes, ma’am, I was!
If we get to go to Disneyland again any time soon, we will do it in January, February, September or October. September crowds are the lowest, though! We actually had planned on trying to do our trip over Thanksgiving, but then I saw the crowd level and immediately changed plans! I’m SO glad we did.
We arrived on a Sunday, and the crowds were terrible by mid-day, and they were only a 5 out of 10. Monday through Thursday, they were 1 or 2. WONDERFUL! We were able to get right on most rides and our longest wait was probably 25 minutes at the busiest time of the day (for Midway Mania, of course).
Timing also plays a part in the cost of your hotel. I’ll talk about our hotel experience in my next post! Stay tuned!
Question time: How were the crowds on your Disneyland trip and what time of year did you visit? Share in the comments so we can all benefit!
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Thanks for this info! I was thinking of having our trip be in Jan or Feb and having no guilt for taking children out of school. If I plan on spending this much time, energy and money on a great trip, it will happen at the best time - school or no school!
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Kelleigh Reply:
October 2nd, 2012 at 12:15 pm
What’s even cooler is that we arranged for our boys to not have any homework. I promised Cole’s teacher that I would make sure we exercised his 6-year-old brain, and she trusted me. We suggested to Grant’s 4th grade teacher that he take a spelling test and 2 Accelerated Reader tests when we got back, and he was cool with that. We took a ton of books, and Grant ended up acing 3 AR tests! He takes his spelling test today, and another AR test on Friday. He’s totally up to the task!
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And our other hot spot to visit was going to be Lego Land. Did you venture that direction or not?
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Kelleigh Reply:
October 2nd, 2012 at 12:19 pm
We are looking into that for our next family trip - possibly even this Thanksgiving, if we can swing it. Tickets are pretty cheap (they have BOGO deals and buy one day, get the second free, which apparently you can combine. Hotels can be pretty reasonable if you stay off-site. We figured that 2-day tickets for 4 and 2 nights at a hotel would be less than $500. Our problem is transportation. If we had reliable cars, we could do it no problem, but we don’t.
One thing to consider is that the water park is closed this time of year. Check the calendar to make sure all three parks are open on the days you visit, if that is important to you. I know that my kids are the PERFECT age to go right now, so I don’t want to put it off too long!! I’m just not as excited about it as I am about Disneyland, and I hate the idea of paying $500 when I could be saving it for Disney!
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We went at the beginning of May, did a Sunday-Thursday as well and Sunday was definitely the busiest day! The only thing that was a bummer about being off season was that the hours were shorter and they had the fireworks scheduled for one night which then got canceled b/c of the wind.
My husband wanted to go in September when we first started talking about it but we needed time to save money.
Next time though I think we will go in September!
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I really really wish we could go on times OTHER than school vacations, but we parents are both teachers and I really don’t think the school would just let US skip out on a week of class in September!
Bummer. Someday we’ll go though! I’m definitely waiting until my youngest is at least 4 so we can all enjoy it. I figure then the other one will be 6 and big enough to go on all the rides and the oldest will be 9 and finally not too scared of the rides so it should be perfect!
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Kelleigh Reply:
October 3rd, 2012 at 7:34 am
You might consider it, though, Krista! I have a teacher friend who just took this week off for a hunting trip, and another who took a week off in February a few years ago to take her kids to Disneyland. She and her husband are both teachers. Maybe they “got away with it” because they are dearly loved, but teachers DO get vacation time! I once took a week of vacation while I was a teacher so I could go to India. Certainly don’t count it to be impossible! You DO get vacation time, and you are parent FIRST, right?
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We went in mid-September, and it’s true that the crowds are the smallest during the time that we went. We also used RideMax, a software download that helps plan out your day or days so that you aren’t waiting in line. It totally worked! We were seeing everyone wait in these long lines at rides that when we were going to them, there were no lines! It was amazing. We only waited in short lines a couple of times during our 3-day stay.
We were able to go on every single ride in the Disneyland side of the park on our first day there, due to the RideMax software. Wow!
And on our first day to California Adventure, again we were able to visit every single ride in one day - and keep in mind that at least in mid-September, the hours are MUCH shorter than normal.
It was sunny, still warm (hot and muggy the first of our three days at the park), and no chance of rain or anything.
The only fireworks (this was back in 2008) was on Sunday night when we arrived at the hotel, right after we arrived. We were able to view them from the viewing deck at the hotel.
I’m thinking that California Adventure closed at either 6 p.m. or 8 p.m. on one of the days we were there, but since we had already been on all of the rides, it was fine. We were tired, anyway, so we went out to dinner at Boca, about 15 minutes away. Very reasonably priced at the time, and so good! It was our first visit to Boca - yum!
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Can I encourage you NOT to cross off summertime as a time to go to Disneyland? I had been wanting to get back there since I hadn’t been for 30 years and we finally had the time, ability and money to go THIS past summer (2012) My husband had had a lot of overtime, I’ve been a SAHM for 17 years, and while we are doing good, we just did NOT have the extra money it would take to go to Disneyland. That all changed with a ton of overtime at my husband’s job, AND since it was our 20 year anniversary as well, we decided to go for it—even tho his only time off was the week of August 13!
Can I just say that Disney does a marvelous job of taking care of its people? It was 96 degrees when we got there, I had only READ about Fastpasses, I had never tried them. Once we did, tho, we spent very little time waiting in line! When we DID wait in line, there was shade strategically placed everywhere, we carried water bottles with us, and don’t buy the Mickey shaped ice cream—buy the frozen lemonade for $4.99! Lasted a whole lot longer and doesn’t melt all over you! We left around 1 or 2pm, had a big lunch, and took the kids back to the hotel for a swim and a nap. Then back to Disney around 6 pm, and closed the park down every night. We were ALWAYS on Indiana Jones, or Thunder Mountain Railroad, or Soaring over California Star Tours, usually waiting only 10 minutes. And we were very thankful for Fast passes to Splash Mountain and Grizzly River Run. It was amazing how the Disney folk were able to get you in and out of a ride in a timely manner. I’m not afraid to go in the summer anymore, we had a WONDERFUL time. (And I got a great tan as well)
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We have been all times - and while summer is HOT and crowded - it is doable. Just like Kelly we left mid day napped and closed the park - skipping the heat and biggest crowds. Our favorite time to go is the first week of December - Christmas decorations but not the crowds. We go often for our fall break in October but we have it with Arizona and Hawaii so it can be crowded.
We are in s ca now - and after having annual passes for years we are doing everything but Disney this time. Lego land earlier this week, knotts berry farm tomorrow and universal after that. We opted to move around so we were not traveling as far to each location.
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