I've treated myself to a second visit to Orlando this year for my Birthday! Staying at Universal Orlando, but hope to visit Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, but I only have 5 days in total including departure day. I'm thinking of going to the Mickey Christmas and Jollywood parties, but I'm only interested in rides (and not shows, food or character meet and greets), and probably won't have time to enter the parks early. In fact, my flight arrives at MCO after 6pm on 13 November, and there's a Jollywood party on that night! Is that cutting it too fine? I guess by the time I go through customs, check-in at Universal, then uber it to Hollywood Studios, it will be about 8.30pm!! Is it worth going to these parties for the rides only? If I enter the park an hour or so after the party officially starts, do I still have a good chance of getting on all the big rides? I've done After Hours at both parks before and most rides were pretty much walk-ons apart from Tron and Seven Dwarfs...I guess the parties may be busier though! Thanks for any tips :-)

Here’s my totally chaotic and random Genie Plus strategy, which kind of developed because I was traveling with my 79 year old mum, she couldn’t take more than 3 hours in a park, and we didn’t know until 10am or so what we would do that day, so there was zero planing ahead. This also worked because we had a 14-day all park ticket which you can buy in England!! As soon as the decision was made to go to one of the Disney parks (this depended on the weather, how we felt over breakfast etc), I bought Genie Plus and immediately booked any random ride which had a return time about 1.5 to 2 hours later. I didn’t care about the ride - the key was to lock it in. At the same time, I went for the individual lightning lane ride (and whilst these had sometimes sold out by this time, I noticed they do come back). Then en route to the park, I started playing Rob’s Disney Slots for the most difficult ride - this usually worked and I got the times I wanted for Remy, Navi, Jungle Cruise, Peter Pan etc. Then if we didn’t hit the park until 2 hours after I booked the first ride, I started stacking and booked the next, again any random ride with a return time about 30 mins after the first. Then I literally just went round the parks, booking any random ride even one I didn't want to go on, then playing the slots doing all the rides we wanted over a period of about 3 - 4 hours. If on a particular day we decided not to hit the parks until the evenings, then I stacked rides like crazy and kept on moving back their times to later in the day by playing the slots over and over. Whilst I aimed to stagger the rides, sometimes I had small overlaps but that didn’t matter given the length of the return times. There was only one miss and one near-miss with this strategy - Frozen at Epcot and Slinky Dog at Hollywood. Frozen was sold out by the time we had decided to go to Epcot, but I played the slots during every queue I stood in, eventually got a time for later that day! It was massively hard work though. Slinky I had to give up on, as mum was beat and wanted to go home, but we did get a great ILL for Rise of the Resistance and Avatar for about an hour after we arrived at the parks, even though the ILL kept on showing up as sold out.  Moral of the story - sold out rides do come back but you need real persistence. I also noticed that I often lost return times between the time the slot showed up to the time I clicked on it - even a 1 second delay and I missed it. So basically - my Genie Plus strategy was completely random, chaotic, unplanned, and probably totally the opposite of what I should do (forced by circumstances), but we did get on everything - of course that only worked because we were there over 14 days so could do the same parks twice if we didn't get our rides in on a particular day. This strategy (if you can make sense of it because my post is a bit chaotic too just like my strategy) is recommended for seniors, people who don’t like to plan ahead, or people who are just a bit disorganised! :-) Maybe Rob can make a video on it, ha ha!

What do you guys tend to do on the last night of a Disney vacation? Go out with a bang and stay at the parks until late, or chill out, have a good meal, and relax? My last night of a 2 week holiday from the UK will be on May 22, and I've just seen that there's a Hollywood Studios After Hours event on that night, which I'd love to go to, but think that it might be a bit much to be up until 2am or so (and then have to fly home the next day)! Maybe a relaxing meal would be a better way to end the vacation (I'm staying at a Universal Orland resort hotel for the 2 weeks, but have a 14 day Disney ticket), but the thought of Rise and Slinky without lines at 1am is pretty tempting...! What to do!

I'm treating my mother to another visit to Disney World this May, and I'd like her to experience some of the more technically advanced rides. Problem is, she's 79 and generally terrified of theme park rides!! We did all the classic gentle rides last year in the Magic Kingdom and Epcot, but she commented "this all feels a bit old fashioned"!! I told her that's only because she's too scared to go on the bigger rides! So I'm thinking this year I'll push her to go on some more "extreme rides" so she sees the newer side of Disney. Here are my thoughts of what may be ok - Rise of the Resistance, Slinky Dog, Test Track, Dinosaur. The main one I'd love to get her on is Rise....that should be ok for a 79 year old? She's physically in decent shape, but does get scared pretty easily. Any thoughts on whether Rise or the others are too extreme for a senior? Thanks :-)