For my husbands’s birthday, we decided to take a day trip to Disney World with one day at Magic Kingdom and a one night stay. Orlando is a two hour drive for us (though traffic on 1-4 is usually pretty bad) so it is easily doable to leave in the morning and be at the park when it opens. The day we were there, the park closed at 6, because of the nightly Halloween Party, but we found it was plenty of time.
We have not been there since we moved to Florida and have not been as adults without children in a very long time. It definitely is a different experience and skipping a lot of the children’s rides, plus the character interactions gives you a pretty easy day. The system where you can book ride times (costs extra) worked really well for us too. We managed to ride 3 of the more popular rides within the first hour by utilizing this system, plus standing in a short line when the park opened.
I highly recommend a random Tuesday in September when kids are back to school, because wait times were generally short if we didn’t have a reservation (lightening lane) and overall the park was not crowded. We were even able to ride the 2 mine rides twice.
Since we were out of the park by 6, to keep the Disney vibe going, I made dinner reservations at Disney Springs. We had been there last summer and found it to be a great spot for lunch or dinner. We tried Raglan Road, an Irish pub that everyone raves about. It lived up to the hype; great food and a fun atmosphere with Irish dancers and singers.
We are not necessarily Disney people and probably won’t go back until it’s time to take grand children, but it was a fun getaway and a nice perk of living in Florida.