I am back to continue sharing some pictures and information about our trip to Universal Studios for our anniversary. Sorry that so much time has passed between the first post and this one, but life has been a bit crazy the past couple of weeks. Hopefully things will start to calm down a bit now, though.
THURSDAY - DAY 2
One of the biggest perks (at least we thought) about staying at the hotel that we did was that we were able to get into the HP park an hour before everything opened. Unfortunately, it was only the HP park on the Universal Studios Florida side, which was fine for day two, as we would just go back and see everything from the previous day again. It is at the far end of the park though, so it did take several minutes to get there.
I kept missing the dragon going off because we would step into a store or something, so I made M stand outside with me for a few minutes until it finally went off again and I could take a picture. This really was so cool; it probably made me more excited than most kids would be, but I could not help it. We got in line for the Gringotts ride again since we were there before the park opened, but then the ride decided to mess up and we would have been in line forever while they fixed it, so we decided to get out of line and do something else.
At that point, it was pretty cool because we were already in the park before everyone else could get in when it opened, so we were able to go on most of the rides without waiting in a line. We did the Mummy one right away, and it was pretty frightening to be the only two people on that ride (perhaps I was just scared of it in general, though). Then we went on to the Transformers ride, which was pretty fun, another one of the 3D simulation things.
Then we went back to Springfield, and checked out The Simpson's stuff again since the park was closed after we finished the ride the previous night. We love the Simpsons, and we would go to this ride anytime we wanted to get out of the rain, which happened a few times for us. We probably did this ride 6 or 7 times, and I never got bored of it.
Oh look! It's Curious George! How stinkin' cute is that?
Then we did the Shrek ride, which was, eh. It was probably my least favorite one, if I'm being honest. It was a whole lot of standing around waiting to get to go into the theater, and then it was just a theater of chairs with a video and some water that shot out at you. Not the best, I must say.
Next was the Despicable Me ride - neither of us had actually seen the movies, but we had to decided to do all of the rides - so we waited in line for 45 minutes despite knowing very little about all of it other than it involved cute little minions. It did end up being a very cute simulation, though.
Not pictured, but before this we grabbed Panda Express for lunch, we are both big fans. We decided to take a break from the rides (since we had done almost all of them in that park, anyway), and decided to do some miniature golf. This is something that we have enjoyed doing together since we first started dating, though I think that we have actually both gotten worse in the last seven years. It was still a lot of fun, though.
When we finished mini golfing and went back to the park, M convinced me to get on this roller coaster with him. I am terrified of them, but I did want to give some a try since I know how much he enjoys them. I was terrified as I waited, but it actually was not nearly as bad as I had expected. Dare I say that it was even a little bit fun. We tried to do it again on our last day, but it was shut down the whole day due to some sort of issue. Boo!
After finishing up all of the rides there, we decided it was time to take the Hogwarts' Express over to Island of Adventures. We had to wait in line for awhile to take the train, but it was definitely worth it. They did some awesome things with it, and I was very impressed.
Hogwarts! Upon reaching Hogsmeade, we looked around the shops a little before letting my roller coaster confidence get the better of me. I tried one of the suspended dragon coasters with M, and nearly lost my lunch (hours later). I think that a lot of it had to do with being dehydrated because it was much warmer than we had expected and I didn't drink enough water during the day. We watched some Hogwarts' students sing, and then decided I was feeling way too ill to do any other rides, so we headed back to the hotel for the afternoon.
We had dinner at the hotel diner, which was way expensive for a pizza that was really just a whole lot of cheese. I guess we expected the food to be pretty expensive, though.
That pretty much sums up day 2. It was a lot of fun up until I started feeling awful. No worries, I began chugging the water and felt better by day three. Like last post, I will leave some more pictures here at the bottom for you to see. Day 3 will be coming to you soon!
