RideMax Roulette at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Tomorrow!

Tiger at Disney's Animal Kingdom

I’m headed to Animal Kingdom tomorrow, April 10th, to test a half-day RideMax plan. You can follow along for live updates from the park:

I’m calling this “RideMax Roulette,” because rather than using a predetermined list of attractions, I decided to plug in a (mostly) random list of shows and attractions into RideMax, then created my half-day plan from there.

I say it was “mostly” random simply because I knew in advance that I wanted to visit both of the trails — Pangani and Maharajah Jungle Trek — and I also wanted to see the Lion King show. (Sorry, but I also knew I didn’t want to sit through the 40-minute-ish Finding Nemo show, and I didn’t want to get soaked on Kali with my DSLR in hand, so I omitted these from the list of possible attractions.)

After adding my three “must-do” attractions to the list, I used a random number generator to come up with five others, and I was left with the following list of eight attractions altogether:

  • Dinosaur (twice)
  • Expedition Everest
  • Festival of the Lion King
  • It’s Tough to be a Bug!
  • Maharajah Jungle Trek
  • Pangani Forest Exploration Trail
  • TriceraTop Spin

I know this may seem like a pretty wimpy attempt, given that the plan doesn’t include the Safari, but hey, it is what it is. I think it’s also good for me to test RideMax plans that include non-obvious ride selections, as it has sometimes helped me to see and/or fix problems that might come up with various ride choices.

Given this list of attractions, I decided to use FP+ for at least Dinosaur and Expedition Everest. I would normally use the other FP+ for either the Safari or Kali River Rapids, but since neither of these are in my list, I’m using the third FP+ slot for It’s Tough to be a Bug! (Yeah!)

After crunching on this list of attractions, here is what RideMax came up with. Remember, RideMax’s goal is to minimize BOTH waiting AND walking time:

Disney's Animal Kingdom RideMax Plan

Notice the large-ish block of “free time starting just before 9:00am. I think I’m going to use this to go see DiVine near the park entrance.

After creating this plan, I went into Disney’s “My Disney Experience” application and reserved my FP+ time slots to correspond with the times shown in green on the plan. (And yes, I realize that I most likely won’t need those Dinosaur and ITTBAB FP+ tickets that early in the day. If this were a full-day plan, you’d likely see those FP+ slots set up for later in the day.)

I’ll keep you updated on Facebook and Twitter as I progress through the morning. Feel free to comment there or below as I go!

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One thought on “RideMax Roulette at Disney’s Animal Kingdom Tomorrow!”

  1. Just a quick post-mortem note here. For those who followed along, you know that this went fairly smoothly. There were a couple of glitches in the day that I thought were worth mentioning.

    First, there were a couple of large backups on the freeway due to accidents, which put me in the park about 10 minutes late. Fortunately, since Dinosaur was the first on my list and wasn’t super time-critical, this worked out fine. In general, if something super-time-critical were first on my list (nothing at AK, really, but Peter Pan at Disneyland is an example), I might have had to skip that first attraction instead, or recalculate the plan with the later arrival time. At Disney World, I only want to recalculate as a last resort, due to those FP+ reservations.

    The second glitch was that when I arrived at It’s Tough To Be A Bug, it was temporarily closed due to technical difficulties. In this case, I just moved on to the next item on the list and then came back later, which worked just fine.

    By the way, something that helped me stay “on schedule” despite the late arrival and taking time out to post live updates on Twitter and Facebook, was the fact that there was a block of “free time” in the plan. I sometimes see requests from people creating RideMax plans questioning this free time, but I think you’ll usually find that it works in your favor in the end. You never know when something unexpected might come up, so the free time offers a margin of safety in the plan, and allows you to have some bumps in your day without the whole plan falling apart.

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