Late Morning Touring at Disney's Animal Kingdom Winter 2020

A very easy touring day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom continues from Parts One and Two. So far, this is what we’ve accomplished with our arrival at temperature check at 7:20am:

Flight of Passage: 7:35am – 8:02am
Na’vi River Journey: 8:05am – 8:24am
Kilimanjaro Safaris: 8:39am – 9:08am
Kali River Rapids: 9:16am – 9:36am
Expedition Everest: 9:39am – 9:54am

That’s five, sometimes lengthy attractions, completed in under two official Park hours. Our waits have averaged just a couple of minutes for the most part, even after moving purposefully slowly to Flight of Passage and Kilimanjaro Safaris as we enjoyed the decorations in the morning glow.

Everest hit triple-digit waits over the previous weekend, in large part due to excessive downtime. After it reoepend late in the day and people hurried over to ride, you can bet these markers leading to the attraction’s entrance will quickly fill.

They stretch back to DinoLand. At some point, they may have to move a line into what used to be the stands for Rivers of Light. I’m not sure if it would be more or less comfortable to slide down the benches and then be led to the attraction once you could basically walk on it versus moving very slowly somewhere closer to the ride. The line for Flight of Passage now goes back and into the theater for Festival of the Lion King. Talk about a wild time.

Crowds won’t be a problem today as we head to DinoLand for TriceraTop Spin and DINOSAUR:

TriceraTop Spin took about five minutes total in there somewhere.

DINOSAUR is posting five minutes at 10:15am. That’s unusually short for this time of day. We can take a look at posted waits here from the last month or so. This was supposed to go up on the 9th, so the last day we see on the chart is the 8th:

Larger: Here.

The average wait at 10:15am is 21 minutes, before the countdown to extinction arrives at a 40-minute average at 11:45am. You may notice that the averages are typically lower on weekdays, even with the shorter operating hours. On busier days with later closes, the ride is typically a walk-on to close out the day, though capacity reductions can come into play as well. Most people will want to spend their last hour in Pandora, getting in line for Na’vi River Journey with about an hour to close, followed by Flight of Passage. If DINO is posting a wait that’s longer than you’d like, returning two hours to close should mean a short wait most of the time. But you can also see how forgiving it is in the morning, with five minutes typically posted during at least the first two hours of official operation. With the Park typically opening 30 to 45 minutes before the stated time, you’ll have even more of an opportunity to get there in time to potentially re-ride it without much of a wait if you’d like.

We’ll be able to walk right on:

Disney installed plastic barriers behind the second row in each vehicle, but doesn’t fill it as far as I’ve seen.

We were onboard about five minutes after getting in line:

It’s now 10:26am, which means our total experience time was just 11 minutes, which may be the shortest of all time (of all time). The pre-show is just more queue, so we saved a couple of minutes with Dr. Seeker doing his thing off-camera. Hopefully you will survive your roofless trek into a storm of asteroids in about as much time.

And we’ve made it through all the rides before 10:30am. We could extend our day by walking Maharajah Jungle Trek and Gorilla Falls Exploration Trail, in addition to the paths around the Tree of Life. There’s the “Feathered Friends in Flight” show in the UP! theater in Asia. We’re due for lunch at some point. We could head out to Rafiki’s Planet Watch for Affection Section and The Animation Experience, along with riding the Wildlife Express both ways. There’s also Wilderness Explorers and It’s Tough To Be A Bug.

But with Festival of the Lion King, Finding Nemo the Musical, and Rivers of Light all dark, that’s at least 2.5 hours slashed off the day.