Hope your Father’s day was a great one!
On to day 3 of our Orlando trip. So we took advantage of the extra hour again and this time we stayed in Islands of Adventure, there are many more rides on this side in the Harry Potter area. So first thing we did was Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, I don’t remember the story line, since we were so early there were no lines so I didn’t catch what Harry, Hermoine and Ron were trying to tell us in the Defense of the Dark Arts room. Like I mentioned in my previous post they keep you extremely entertained when you are waiting in line. You go through the green house, see the entrance to Dumbledore’s office and see the portrait of the Fat Lady. This ride is very like the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland/World, you wear 3D glasses and the chair moves you around and you get twirled around to see different things happening. At some point they take your picture, I think they need to re-think the location of this camera, my sister is clearly bored
I’m not too amused either, but Mr. A is clearly freaked out.
Then we rode Flight of the Hippogriff and this ride Ian could ride, but Jensen could not. Ian could’ve rode this ride forever if we let him. We went during an excellent time when crowds were very minimal and the weather wasn’t sweltering. In the later afternoon around 4pm most of the rides had 15 minute waits. We got spoiled by the wait times being so short. We then ventured next door to Jurassic Park. Mr. A and I rode Jurassic Park River Adventure and we got very minimally wet, probably because the boat we were on only had 4-5 people on it. Less weight = less splash? Because my sis and Mr. A went right afterward and got drenched and their boat was full.
After that there were some carnival type games that Mr. A tried to win, but narrowly missed. They also had this “game” geared towards small kids where you pick a dinosaur egg and put it under a x-ray machine and it shows you what kind of baby dino it is. The prize you won depended on the type of dinosaur.
The egg Ian picked
I forget which dinosaur it ended up being, but Ian got a little green toucan as a prize. He now has to sleep with this toucan, it has replaced his monkey lovey. Well not replaced but added. The kid has 5 stuffed animals in his bed. While walking through the Jurassic Park section there is camp Jurassic where it’s basically a huge play ground, it has hidden slides and bridges and a little splash pad. Also, here is Pteranodon Flyer ride, it is for kids, meaning you have to have a kid with you in order to ride. I got to take a little video of Ian riding it.
Of course he loved it and told me all about it afterwards. Here we are watching the video afterwards…haha
Also, you’ll find Jurassic Park Discovery Center, which is a building with a little shop and food on the top floor and the lower floor is a museum of sorts, it reminded me of the building in the actual Jurassic Park movie (the original one). You can see a dinosaur hatch and experience how a dinosaur sees and hear.
We decided to go back to the hotel a little earlier since we were tired from the days before and we promised Ian we would go play in the pool. On the third day we took it easy since we saw most everything we wanted to see on days 1 and 2. Also my sister had to leave around 3pm to catch her flight home. So I bought a wand (I ended up choosing Fleur’s wand) and walked around trying to do all the spells around Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley.
That’s me pointing my wand at the shrunken heads.
We rode the train back and forth a lot and the station at King’s Cross has you actually walk in-between platforms 9 and 10!
We rode the minions ride and it was very cute. This had the longest wait time. We found out that if you choose to sit in the non-moving seats in the front there is virtually no wait time. You just don’t get the 4D experience, which was fine with us since Jensen couldn’t ride it otherwise.
There was also no wait for the Stormforce ride, partly because of all the construction around the area.
There is a comic book section before you get to the Marvel superheros section and some of these little blurbs were funny.
So that was Universal Days 2 and 3. We head to Disney’s Magic Kingdom next!
