Getting the Most Out of RideMax for Disneyland
A weakness of the program is that it doesn’t include shows and parades, so they don’t get on your schedule. Another problem is that you can only schedule two breaks. That’s not enough if you plan to get there by 8 am and stay for the fireworks. We wanted to take a lunch break around 11:30, go back to the hotel to rest for a couple hours around 1:30, have dinner at 6:30 and watch the fireworks at 9:25. There was no way to factor four breaks into the program.
Trial and Error: Working Around the Two Break Limit
The disadvantage of this, is that since we were staying in the park after the fireworks, it didn't take advantage of the program’s ability to calculate the shorter lines later in the evening. We may have spent longer in a line earlier in the day, because we didn’t know we could have had a much shorter line after 10 pm.
If you're totally flexible, you can start by running an itinerary with all the rides you want to do with your earliest start and latest end time and no breaks. This will give you an idea of the short wait times you can have for popular rides with no FASTPASSES at the beginning and end of the day. Since those periods have the shortest waits, the program will automatically schedule most activities at those times, leaving a break of several hours in the afternoon or evening where you can see a show, sit down for dinner or go back to your hotel to rest. If the program schedules over something specific you want to do, like watch the fireworks, you can go back and program a break at that specific time.
Every Change You Make Produces a Completely Different Itinerary.
We began our second RideMax day at California Adventure. Our itinerary advised us to grab FASTPASSES at Grizzly River Run and keep going to the California Screamin’ roller coaster. At Grizzly River Run, the Stand-By wait was only five minutes. I heard a chorus of "Let's just go on now!"
"RideMax says we should resist the temptation…" I mumbled, ready to give in myself.
"OK, we trust RideMax," Karen said without argument, and we went on to have another wait-free day.
RideMax is $14.95 for a 9 month subscription or $24.95 for a year. This investment will drastically increase the value of your Disneyland vacation. I won't visit Disneyland again without it.
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