Tanya & Matt's Big Adventure: Day 14 - Universal Studios

We got up - I was feeling ok, which was more than I had been expecting to feel - so we caught the cab to Universal Studios.

We arrived and headed straight to Harry Potter World - along with everybody else! There were a lot of people - and I say that after spending 5 days within Disney parks - there were a lot of people. We took a ride on the Dragon Flight rollercoaster, we walked up to the Castle and discovered - shock horror - a Line! Once again America does it with Lines and Cues.

The posted note on the ride entrance said the wait was 120 minutes. With some quick calculations I worked that out to be two hours of my life waiting to get to the ride. And worse, the sign was a good 45 minutes further down the line - so the line was longer than where the timed section ended. I think the sign is only legally allowed to show 120 minutes as well, as if it showed 200 minutes and someone passed out or pissed themselves, Universal would have a lawsuit on their hands. So we begrudgingly decided to skip the Caslte - something I think we both now regret, but at the time we were happy with.

I think by now we were too "Disney" to remember what real theme parks are all about - standing in line with a bunch of snotfaced little buggers and their doped out parents to get to a mediocre ride or attraction - in short, we believed that Disney would have done it better.

We moved to the food hall, which was called something HP related... the Fartsbreath Inn or something... we ordered a lunch meal and a butterbeer... which was sweet and buttery, not much beer though. The shepards pie was quite nice, which was a welcome change for Theme Park Food.

Then we tried to go HP shopping - big mistake. The shops are the size of the waiting area at most Red Roosters, small, cramped and filled with people just wanting their FREAKING CHICKEN... ok I might have gone off track with the analogy there, but you get my drift. Alavanders was a joke, so we went to the candy and whizzbang shop which was the same. So we got a chocolate frog, some bertie bots beans and hightailed it out of there. All in all we were very happy to have visited and gotten a taste of the "Theme Park that could have been so much better had it of been done by Disney" and we were glad to leave too.

Sorry HP fans - Disney kicks your butt each time.

Feeling the "Magic" as we entered into Crowd Heaven

The famous Little Engine that Could

Tanya approves of the scenery

The proportional Castle - is it huge and far away? Is it small and close? It's the second one - still, a mighty good optical illusion until a crow sits on the spire and looks like a Dragon... that kind of throws the illusion out.