Universal Resort

This is part 2 of my trip to Florida.  Because my fellow traveler really really really hates Sea World, we decided that Universal was the way to go.  Of course, there were about a billion people who had the same thought.

Fortunately, we arrived pretty early with the help of my GPS enabled phone, which was now working thanks to Grandma's Christmas gift of a car cellphone charger.  Over the course of 10 hours, we managed to get on 11 rides, which is slightly above average compared to Disney's resort.  We probably could have done 12 too, except one of them broke down after we were waiting in line for nearly 40 minutes.  One of our first rides, though, was Dr. Doom's fear fall.  Initially, I thought it would be a great ride for getting a high-up shot of the entire park.

It was a bit scary seeing all the warnings.  Fortunately, I'm not pregnant.  Unfortunately, I am a bit afraid of heights when traveling rapidly.

But I had no choice.  I was forced to ride it.

I took a shot at the bottom of the ride, and even though they said you weren't allowed to have loose articles with you, and even though there was a security camera staring right at me, I kept the camera to take a shot at the top.  I was determined to get a nice picture of the whole park, and with a name like "Fear Fall" I kinda assumed that I'd be dragged up to the top with plenty of time for snapping pics before being dropped.

But apparently you fly up at 50 or so miles an hour, and my fingers were too busy holding on for dear life to push the button on the camera.  Sorry everyone.  I let you down.  At least I didn't lose the camera.

Next we hit up the Jurassic Park section.  This was for sure one of my favorite movies growing up.

And I remember really really wanting the replica of this vehicle as well.

The main ride in the Jurassic Park section was a log ride type of deal, and because it's winter in Florida too, I decided I really didn't want to get soaking wet just yet.  That forced me to decide to purchase this lovely $8 poncho.  Prices were definitely more scary than the rides.  Don't even ask me how much we spent for lunch.

There's that blasted Fear Fall again.  The roller coaster next too it also does some tricky thing where you think you'll be pulled up to the top of the first hill really slow like, but then end up getting propelled at some insane speed to the top, experience weightlessness and loss of stomach, and then go plummeting down.

Finally, we got into the new Harry Potter exhibit.  This was kind of a huge deal for most people there.  As a result, you had to wait in line to get a time ticket so that you could wait in line to get into the exhibit area so that you could wait in line to get on the rides.  In fact, there were also people waiting in line to go to the store to pay exorbitant prices for Harry Potter gear.  Insane.

Actually though, this was definitely the best area in the park.  Surprisingly, we only had to wait 15 minutes to get on the roller coaster, so we did it twice, and it was pretty sweet.  This isn't the roller coaster, but everyone was taking a picture of it.  I present the Hogwarts train sans-josh.

And there's me.

The roller coaster was the best ride, but what everyone really wanted to do was go on the ride/tour of Hogwarts.  The line looped around most of the exhibit area.  We were standing in it for about 40 minutes before we realized that the line was really to use the lockers, and since our stuff was already in another locker, we could just shoot straight to the real line.  Ridiculous.

That ride made me so nauseated though.  I can't deal with moving seats and motion-simulating screens.  It took both of us nearly 2 hours to recover from that ride, and so of course the next thing we did was do the same thing, only in 3D with Spiderman.  Ugh, my head.

Much to our delight, once we finished up, we found a great Korean restaurant nearby with much more appetizing food than lunch.  It put our stomachs back at ease.  We almost got alligator galbi (actually a menu item), but instead we settled for spicy soup.  Mmm mmm.  So good.

I realized that in the first couple posts I put the explanations after the images and now I'm doing it before.  Not sure which way is better, but if you have an opinion, leave a comment.

To be continued...