Happy Anniversary, Andrea!
What a great place to spend some alone time with your hubby, too, at the
Epcot International Food & Wine Festival!
We've attended the soft opening which often takes place the day before the official first day and found those crowds to be manageable. However, we've also noticed that weekends are clearly more crowded than weekdays, so if you'd like to avoid crowds, try to visit during the week. For day-to-day, park-specific information about crowd levels, visit touringplans.com, a great, unofficial crowd-predicting site. You'll get predictions based on everything from historical crowd levels, local school holidays and many other factors, making estimates generally very accurate.
We did run into one snag on a recent Epcot International Flower & Garden Festival visit, when we returned near the end of the Festival (I had been there three times this year, and this was the last of the three visits.) A fellow Moms Panelist was looking for a Festival-specific set of Mickey ears, which I had seen on my previous visits, but they had sold out by this trip. If Festival-specific souvenir-shopping is on your to-do list, you might want to consider heading in earlier in the Festival, just in case.
Keep in mind, too, that you can sneak in a visit to
Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party if you are there in October. It's not just for kids!
Send more questions as you think of them, Andrea; we love to help!