If there’s one thing our family agrees on, it’s how we spend our time on a Disney vacation and it’s not sleeping!  We hit the parks early – I’m talking get there before they open and be ready to make the most of the day.  There’s a reason our vacation motto is “We’ll rest when we’re dead.”.  Honestly, once the kids stopped needing naps, it became common for us to leave our resort at dawn and drag back in 15+ hours later.

I’m not going to lie – getting everyone up and out the door super early is challenging – and gets harder over the course of a week-long trip.  I have discovered one simple trick that helps a bunch.  It’s this:  Have a portable breakfast ready to go every day!  For us, this means that we pack granola bars and Pop Tarts – but if you need honey buns and mini doughnuts, no problem, those’ll work the same for this purpose.  Just fyi….if you take the Pop Tarts out of the boxes, they’re easier to pack but you cannot tell what kind they are.  I have actually gotten to expert level in detecting Pop Tart flavors strictly by feeling them in their shiny silver packages – a necessity when one child eats only strawberry frosted and the other only chocolate fudge.  But I digress…

Waiting for the Bus, Breakfast in Hand

Here’s how it goes:  Mickey wake-up call comes in, everyone’s up, washed and dressed.  Then we check to make sure we each have the necessities (keys-to-the-world, lanyard, breakfast foods, pins for trading, camera, etc.) and we are out the door, headed for the bus or monorail stop.  Seldom does our ride show up immediately when we get there, thus allowing time to consume our portable breakfasts, dispose of the wrappers, and get ready to board.  By no means am I suggesting that mere breakfast-bar-type items keep our tummies happy until lunch, but it gets us to the park in time (with no hungry whining) to catch a couple of our favorite attractions before they get too crowded and that’s the whole idea!

What’s your strategy for getting a jump on the day at your favorite Disney park?