SHARE
Not only were the sights and details amazing, but we had a fun time with the rides and experiences. Okay, we had fun with MOST of them. The first ride we did on the very first day kind of burned us for some of the rides to follow. We hopped onto Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey because the line was surprisingly short. Unfortunately we didn’t research this one first. Two of us got off the ride with motion sickness, two got of crying and one (Mr. Fun, of course) could hardly wait to go on it again. I am no longer a fan of motion simulated rides!
Never fear, though. We rallied and found that our favorite ride was a mini roller coaster called Flight of the Hippogriff. We liked it so much that we did it six times on the last day!
One of the other cool things we did was visiting Olivander’s Wand Shop. There was an hour long wait both times we did it but it was totally worth it. What happens is a group of 20 people is let into the ‘shop’ and then Olivander comes in and chooses one subject to match a wand to. Amazingly he picked Jill for our first visit. It was a neat show where he would hand Jill a wand, ask her to do a spell and then watch as crazy things happened because it wasn’t the right wand for her. He eventually matched her to the right wand for her and then dismissed us all into Dervish and Bangs where the rest of the folks could pick out wands. Jill ended up getting a character wand (Ginny Weasley) but we all enjoyed the experience! (It was incredibly dark in there so here is an incredibly blurry picture. The shutter was open for a whole second on this shot. No wonder it is blurry!)
On the third day we took a break from Universal and went off to Sea World. This was our coldest day with a high of 55 degrees. We didn’t really come prepared for this so we were all happy that Mr. Fun had these little gems in his backpack:
The shows at Sea World were fantastic. We saw four and my personal favorite was Clyde and Seymore take Pirate Island. Sea lions are just plain funny. Allen’s favorite show was the pet show where they had rescue animals (dogs, cats, rats, skunks, pigs, birds, etc.) putting on a funny musical number. (When did Ellie become such a ham?)
We also enjoyed seeing all of the sea animals but that was a bit harder to capture with my iphone. Here’s one.
On day four we hit all of our Harry Potter favorites and then branched out to some of the other Universal rides too.
And a few last shots in Hogsmead because we like to come full circle and that is where we ended our trip too!