these tips are awesome. thank you so much for your words of wisdom.
i am considering a subscription to touringplans as i know for dlr you can (in sept/nov) mostly just wander around and stumble your way into having a great time with a little pre-planning but at wdw you would end up in huge lines and spend your day trying to figure out how to get from point a to b and that is NOT how i want my first visit to wdw to be. also, i know it's not high season in september, but we do want to get as much in as possible, while still being reasonable about our expectations.
we know we won't see everything. we will be going bne-lax, then dlr for 5 days (mostly for carsland/bvs and to reacclimatise and to do most of the big ticket rides in the cooler weather (not by much) and smaller park) and then on to wdw for 4/5 days. i'm excited by this as it gives us a lot more time at wdw to see/experience the things that are unique to wdw rather than trying to make that our only disney experience. we will get to do the unique rides and unique parks and really focus on the differences, rather than just repeating the
disneyland experience, although i do plan on riding some of the same attractions at wdw and dlr just for comparison's sake.
i will def look into f&w festival.
we aren't huge souvenir buyers, but i would rather carry than parcel delivery to the resort since we're only there such a small amount of time.
i'm currently immersed in the whole qs & cs menu review thing. one of our party is a piscetarian (vegetarian who will eat fish, but no shellfish, seafood or eggs) so trying to find several 'options' within each park that will serve both us regular eaters and our fussy eater are proving ... interesting, and time consuming. i go to bed dreaming of food menus
i think fastpass is awesome and would never not use it. i know they are enforcing return times now so will have to factor that in.
i totally had planned on doing the park hopper option. it just makes sense to me and the parks we had mostly planned on hopping to/from are AK in morning, HS in the afternoon and MK in morning/EPCOT in evening.
dining - we will probably (hopefully) be eligible for free dining while there, so will stick with the QS option and just pay OOP for any TS meals or extra snacks etc. we are at AoA and their food court looks well stocked for any additional needs we have.
trying to think about whether to get groceries delivered for breakfast/snacks/water/drinks etc but the food court does offer all of those options for not very much more money, and not sure if i want to worry about delivery of groceries on top of everything else.
trying to decide on decent walking shoes. i need something open toe with an ankle/slingback style with a really good cushioning sole.
we plan on hitting the parks relatively hard for the duration that we're there, and taking advantage of rope drop and EMH as we are on our cruise immediately afterwards. we are also probably only going to do 1 or 2 CS meals in the parks as we will have access to all that lovely CS food while on the cruise, and since it's included in the cruise price, it seems silly to pay for it OOP in the parks when if we can wait several days, we can eat as much of it as we want for free (well, included in cruise price which we would have paid OOP anyway).. if that makes sense...