Misadventures at Epcot

By Dave Shute

EPCOT ITINERARY REVISIONS COMING SOON

Danny challenged me earlier this year to re-think my Epcot itineraries, and I’m in the middle of doing so.

Here’s some of my current thoughts—I’d love to hear everyone’s reactions!

This site is meant to help easily create the best Walt Disney World visit for first time visitors who may never return, and at multiple places encourages seeing almost everything.

But fitting all this into the site’s standard eight night itineraries—and still leaving some time for goofing off and recovering from the parks—is not always easy.

So I do in fact leave some things out—usually minor street events or character greetings (covered by character meals instead).

But at Epcot I’ve explicitly listed all kinds of stuff as

• To be sampled and only explored further based on reactions to the sample (e.g. World Showcase)
• As basically optional for families with kids (e.g. Agent P, Innoventions)
• As “skippable”

And some stuff (like Club Cool) I’ve just plain ignored.

This is actually a change from the early years of the itineraries, when wide swaths of Epcot—for example Innoventions and Agent P’s precursor, Kim Possible—weren’t even mentioned.

Slowly over the years I’ve added stuff to the Epcot itineraries, usually framed as optional or to be sampled–but if you do all these, and spend a lot of time in them, you won’t come even close to being able to meeting the suggested timetables of the site (which was one of Danny’s key points).

Moreover, with the re-do of Test Track, the best thing to do early on has changed.

There’s two problems with the new Test Track:

1. It is now even more popular than it was before the re-do, so it builds longer waits even earlier than it used to
2. Its Fastpass and single-rider lines give a profoundly different family experience than the standard “stand-by” line does.

Now personally, I don’t think that the “profoundly different experience” actually matters much—but that’s a personal call, and not one I’m willing to do on behalf of everyone else.

So the issue is adapting the day to doing the right things first thing, and incorporating somehow all the sorta-optional attractions.

Adapting the morning is fairly straightforward:

1. Be at the turnstiles by 8.30a—earlier in more crowded weeks
2. Go to Soarin and Fastpass it
3. Walk the ten minutes to Test Track and ride it
4. Go into Innoventions East, check out Sum of All Thrills, and if it looks like fun, ride it.
5. Head back to the Soarin side and do at least two of the three attractions in The Seas with Nemo and Friends Pavilion:  See The Seas with Nemo and Friends and Turtle Talk with Crush, and check out the Seas Main Tank and Exhibits.  Spend a much time with the exhibits as works for your family.
6. Go to the Land Pavilion, and catch your Soarin Fastpass; do Living with the Land if you have an interest in history, farming, vegetable gardening, or technology; and if you are a huge Lion King fan, or an ironist, see The Circle of Life…

Ok, see the problem? We aren’t at lunch yet, and there’s already four attractions that are basically optional.

The cool thing about Epcot is that it’s willing to go beyond pure play and try to capture the imagination and intellect of your family.  The problem with Epcot is that mostly as a result of this willingness, different families—and different members within a family—will love some stuff that others find just dull as dirt. And it’s hard to say ahead of time which will light a spark in your kids…

There’s four different types of attractions at Epcot

1. Ones most people will find lame—the Gran Fiesta Tour, Journey into the Imagination with Figment, Captain EO, the Norway Film, Circle of Life, much of Innoventions (VISION House, anyone?), etc.
2. Minor attractions—nothing wrong, but not worth a lot either—Maelstrom, The Seas with Nemo and Friends, Agent P’s World Showcase Adventure, etc.
3. Bi-modal attractions—some love them  and some find them unspeakably dull: the rest of Innoventions, Living with the Land, Ellen’s Energy Adventure, the Seas Main Tank and Exhibits, the American Adventure, the rest of the films in World Showcase, etc.
4. Attractions worth seeing for pretty much everyone 8 or older: Spaceship Earth, Soarin, Test Track, Turtle Talk with Crush, Mission Space, and Illuminations

So to get the best out of Epcot without spending two full days there, the trick is to have a sense of what might be your family’s “don’t-miss” attractions in addition to these last six, and see them either when they are right there at hand (like the ones in the Seas and Land pavilions) or later in the day—in times my itineraries right now mark as free time back at your resort.

WHAT’S COMING NEXT FOR THE EPCOT ITINERARIES

So I’ll be doing a couple of things to support this approach to Epcot.

• First, revising the early mornings so that they better respond to Test Track
• Second, publishing many more reviews of the rides at Epcot—with the focus being on the first three categories above, to help families with choices among them
• Third, grouping many of the rides from the first three categories above into new “optional” times that (optionally) re-capture time currently indicated as at the resorts, with as little back-tracking as possible

These changes and reviews will all be coming out over the course of the summer!

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