Waste Not, Bored Not

Once upon a time, I was in Frontierland in Magic Kingdom while everyone else in my party went on Splash Mountain. My twenty-two month old daughter was far too little to ride. Everyone had sort of meandered over, leaving me at a spot at stroller parking. It was meltingly hot. It would take about half an hour for my family to return.

This will happen sometimes, you don't want to or can't go on a certain attraction that everyone else is going on. Then you wait, twiddling your thumbs, for everyone to return. In my situation above, I'd had enough of that after ten minutes. It was hot, it was boring. My daughter wanted to be occupied. But most of all, I was wasting a half hour doing nothing! This is fine if you're at the point where you just want to sit for awhile and people watch. However, this was a spot with no seating available and it was early, I wanted to do something!

Even though we had made the fatal mistake of not arranging for a meeting place before the rest of the group broke off, all was not lost. I figured they would be coming back for their stroller sometime. So my daughter and I made use of the time by sharing a Mickey ice cream bar. That in turn required that I use some of the time doing melted chocolate clean-up duty and I might as well get a diaper change out of the way rather than at a more inconvenient time. We also wandered around in Splash Mountain's gift shop briefly. Then my daughter happily watched the deadly storks that like to attack people for their food. (Remember: Do NOT feed the birds, unless you like that Tippi Hedren look.)

This happened again at the Tower of Terror while doing the child swap. However, this time I right away started to make use of my time browsing the shops nearby. This strategy only backfires if your party returns wanting to browse the shops. In which case I merely told them to meet me at Sweet Spells further on down the street.

As long as it's clear that the whole party doesn't have to do absolutely everything together, this works well at making sure that there isn't one person in the group constantly shorted on fun and always waiting. So take a look around before the party splits up at anything else close that you can do. Take advantage of roaming characters, so that when everyone comes back beaming at how much fun something was, you can beam right back that you met Figment. No one gets tired or grumpy, toddlers can be occupied and everyone vacations happily ever after.