We left Disney at 1:00 PM
& other ways we dropped the pressure on a high-stakes family trip.
Travel is always something I’ve enjoyed immensely. But since having kids, it has proven to be a massive logistical lift — expensive and exhausting. As a result, we’ve just done less of it.
For a while, I wrestled with this expectation that if we were going to go through all the effort to take the family out of town, it had to be the “perfect” trip to make it worth it. And by perfect, I guess I mean I felt like we all needed to enjoy ourselves, the kids still needed their familiar structure of naps and regular bedtimes, and we had to make every single moment count.
But over the years, I’ve realized those ideals were really just setting me up for frustration. I was coming home overwhelmed, stressed, and depleted.
Caitlin Murray actually said it so perfectly in this reel — distinguishing a “family trip” from a “vacation” was the piece I’d been missing in my expectations. Getting out of town with the kids doesn’t serve the same purpose as a vacation does. Shifting that mindset helped me move away from trying to enjoy a vacation while also caring for children.
A case study in that shift, for us, is Walt Disney World. It’s arguably the trip that comes with the highest amount of pressure to get your money’s worth, to make the best memories for your kids, and to choose the perfect attractions and restaurants that will keep everyone happy.
We did this trip a couple of years back, and I can safely say we did not tackle planning it the way all the blogs tell you to. And it’s exactly why we’re eagerly going back.
The biggest shift was how we defined success. The default expectation is that if you pay that much for a park ticket, you have to go from rope drop to fireworks to make it worth it. We knew that would make everyone miserable. So success for us meant explicitly planning to leave the park by 1:00 PM. We’d go back to the hotel, get in the pool, take showers, and eat an early dinner. Then we’d stack our Lightning Lane passes for the evening and head back in — well-rested, with big rides waiting for us. We spent almost as much time leaving the parks as we did inside them, entirely by design.
I also had to do a lot of unlearning around managing everyone’s emotions. I used to feel like I had to prevent my kids from having big feelings just because we were on a trip. But a meltdown in Fantasyland is just a meltdown in a different place than home. It’s not my job to force the magic. Building in that massive chunk of daily downtime meant we weren’t constantly putting out fires with emotionally exhausted kids.
Jason and I also got extremely clear on our morning roles ahead of time. He handled booking the Minnie Vans and getting the brown-bag breakfasts together. I handled getting the kids dressed and their shoes on. We split the invisible labor so I wasn’t the default person holding the whole morning together.
And I opted out of the planning noise entirely. You can so easily get sucked into a spiral of Disney tips and tricks looking for the perfect strategy. I chose one trusted resource — Ali at Wish Upon a Planner — and blocked out the rest of the internet.
Finally, I skipped the performance of the trip. No matching family wardrobe. I bought myself a hat and saved myself the stress of managing the coordinated orders. I took the same approach with photos — I refused to force tired kids to stand in the heat and smile. I just grabbed video of us walking around and pulled stills from them later.
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The logistics followed from the mindset. I stopped stressing about where we’d eat every meal. We found we didn’t actually save money on the Disney meal plan, so instead I had a Target order delivered to the hotel at the start of the trip with easy breakfast stuff and snacks. I packed little brown-bag breakfasts the kids could eat in line while we were waiting for rope drop. Between the intermittent snacking and sharing a quick-service lunch, we never found ourselves starving. Which meant the second time around I didn’t book so many sit-down meals. I focused on just one proper restaurant meal a day, which freed up so much time because we weren’t constantly scrambling to make a reservation.
For characters, I didn’t want to spend time waiting around in the hot sun. So we used that one sit-down meal a day to do character dining — like lunch in Cinderella’s Castle. The characters come to your table in the air conditioning, the kids get their photos and autographs, and it sets a really clear expectation: these are your opportunities. Then you’re not constantly chasing them down for the rest of the trip.
For souvenirs, I consolidated. Every ride exits into a gift shop, and I’ve seen families give their kids a daily dollar amount to spend, but that gets exhausting to manage and you’re still fielding questions every time. We do the pin exchange instead. The kids brought their trading pins from a previous trip, and you can trade them at shops, at hotels, and with Cast Members. It gives them the excitement of getting something new without me having to shell out money at every turn or constantly say no.
The phone piece was the biggest one for me. Disney basically requires you to be on your phone constantly right now. I tried to plan a loose order of the rides I wanted to go on before we even got there, which helped me stay off my phone in the moment because I already knew roughly how I wanted to move through the park. But the real thing that made the difference was paying for a third-party app. Last time I used Standby Skipper, and this year I plan on using Thrill Data. I spend a few minutes in the morning plugging in the rides I want, and once we check into a Lightning Lane, the app finds the next ride for us in the background. Doing that manually in real time is a lot to manage, and the app was honestly the only reason I wasn’t glued to my screen all day.
On parks, we bought the Park Hopper pass, but I realized you can absolutely get by without it if you want to save the money. There isn’t a whole lot to ride in Animal Kingdom, so it’s a quick day. Hollywood Studios is really the only park where we felt like we needed to stay longer to check the boxes. For the rest of it, we just split Magic Kingdom and Epcot — morning in the park, afternoon at the hotel resting, evening back in the same park with stacked passes ready.
None of this is really about theme parks. Whether you’re navigating Disney World, going on a standard family road trip, or just trying to manage a busy weekend at home, the only way you actually get to enjoy the life you’re managing is by protecting your energy.
You don’t have to adopt any of what I just described. I just hope seeing the breakdown gives you permission to build margin into your own plans. If bailing on a dining reservation so you can go sit by the pool is what keeps everyone intact, bail on the reservation.
A trip with kids is still going to be exhausting. There will always be tired feet, overstimulation, and moments where things fall apart. But remembering the difference between a family trip and a vacation changes the entire metric for success. Dropping the pressure to make every single second magical or perfect actually gives you the space to just exist there together. If you have to bail on your plans by noon because everyone is tapped out, you didn’t fail the trip. You just honored your family’s capacity.
And honestly, that is the only real way to make the effort worth it.
Talk soon,
Erin
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I’m Erin—a former teacher, wife & mom of two in Boulder, Colorado. And this is where I write about what it looks like to stop running my life the way I was told to & start trusting what I know about it instead.
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