Florida Jan 2006

[Dobbo2006]

Hey all! I'm new around these boards, so please do excuse me if im not posting in the correct section!

My name is Wayne i'm 21 and from the Midlands, UK. I currently work for a theme park group which is not Disney (so less about that i guess :P).

Anyway yesterday I returned from a 2 week vacation in Orlando, visiting all of the Disney parks, Universal, Busch and Sea World. I had a fabulous time, a few of the pictures i took can be found on my photo bucket account (which i cant post the link to because im a new member- but if someone would be kind enough posting the link below - basically go to account "wayneburton" and it is under the Florida 2006 file). I am working on writting a detailed trip report and my friend who i went with has 8 hours of footage which we hope to cut down into a reasonable downloadable trip video.

Love and kisses for now :) :cool1: :bounce:

[Miffy2003]

Hi and welcome to you Wayne!

Your trip sounds fabulous. Would love to hear more about it :goodvibes

[Miffy2003]

Here's the link to Wayne's photos :)

http://photobucket.com/albums/v287/wayneburton/florida2006/

Thanks for sharing those. It looks like you had a great time!

[Dobbo2006]

Yeah, I really did have a great trip! My Favourite park of the trip was MGM, it was just so much better than my expectations (having visited disney studios in paris previously!). I really can't wait till we get Tower of Terror over here in Europe now!

I know im a guy and im 21 but after watching Beauty and the Beast live on stage in MGM i now have some of the great music on repeat on my computer :P and even dug out my old VHS of the movie to re-watch!

Wishes WDW was much better than Paris Wishes (quite obviously that was going to be my conclusion seeing as paris cut most of the fireworks out of it and replaced it with projections).

I saw Fantasmic twice and both times it was fantastic - another theme tune i have on my play list at present! Don't get why we have captain hook come on with a British Flag though.... was he british? I mean it was almost as if we were encouraged to boo the british?!?

Epcot was nice and highlights were mission space and Soarin, shame that Test Track was closed for maintenance!

My pin trading lanyard is now coming on quite a treat and i have some real nice ones on there - i'll take some snaps later on of what i have so far!

[Cyrano]

Hi Wayne and :welcome:
Glad to hear you had a great time. Thanks for sharing the photos :)

[cannp123165]

Hi Wayne :wave:

It sounds like you had a great trip!!! The photos are great!!!


princess:

[mark&sue]

Thanks for sharing this Wayne. It is always nice to hear from someone on their first visit. It brings back all those feelings again.

Thank you


Susan

[cazzie]

Hi Wayne :wave2:

Your photos are great it looks like you had a fantastic time. I am looking forward to reading your trip report. :goodvibes

[JohnnySharp2]

Hi Wayne,

Welcome - your photos are great :thumbsup2

[bells]

Hi Wayne,
Loved your photos looks like you had a fantastic trip :cheer2:

[maureen4200040]

Great pictures wayne :thumbsup2 .

[Minniespal]

:wave: Wayne and :welcome:

Your piccies are fantastic :goodvibes

[Dobbo2006]

I have started to write trip reports but for two weeks it takes a long time, so please bare with me! Unfortunately i haven;t got to the disney trips yet, so sorry if this isnt relevant to this board, just skip if so!

Florida January 2006

Part one

Saturday Jan 21st – We set out from our travel lodge in Reading and headed off towards Gatwick for our 9am check-in, unfortunately our flight had a four hour delay, so we had a long wait around the air port! When eventually on board it didn’t help when the pilot tried to explain the reason for the delay, which included the line “One of our planes had a fuel leak in Australia”. Anyway, 9 and a half hours, three films including Charlie and the Chocolate factory and two surprisingly nice air line meals later and we touch down at Sanford international. I needed some fresh air, but was shocked when I took a step outside to find the air warmer and muggier than the air inside! We got our transfer to our accommodation – Parc Cornich, by this time it was 5am GMT and midnight EST time. I was exhausted and so went straight to sleep!

Sunday Jan 22nd- Today I discovered the hotel offered a lovely buffet breakfast which included bagels and doughnuts, my favourites! By the end of the holiday this breakfast became quite a ritual for me to see how much I could take! Anyway we took a trolley up International Drive and checked out a few shops and information centres and by midday we decided to head on over to Universal Studios. What a first park this turned out to be, the sun was shinning down on the rotating globe and glaring off the lake surrounding it. A massive entrance archway invites you into the park; we had already pre-booked all of our flexi tickets and park hoppers before the holiday so it was simply a case of walking up to the turnstile and popping the ticket into the machine. Well so I thought! Seems that in the US, security is much more involved than in the UK, with most parks requiring a signature and a bag check as the bare minimum. Disney even do finger scanning on entry, to stop tickets being passed on, which is a great move I think! Anyway back onto Universal here’s what we did:

Shrek 4d: We queued for little more than 10minutes before we were invited into a room with some nice Shrek theming, sounds and costumed staff. A member of staff gave quite a comical speech on the stage at the front and then we were invited through into this 4D cinema attraction. 3D glasses, seats which moved, water and air sprays were timed perfectly to the great custom made Shrek 4D projections!

Jimmy Newtron: Another great cinema attraction but this time we are seated in a moving capsule, of which there are many to choose from. Nice throughput and experience preferred Shrek for the animation though!

The revenge of the Mummy: We did this a couple of times throughout the day, first off we did single rider queue which still equated to about 25minutes, but was worth it anyway! Basically this is a highly themed dark roller coaster, theming on a similar scale to Valahalla at Blackpool, large fire bursts and physical effects along with steep drops and tight turns.

Earthquake: A studio tour which starts out on foot with some interesting and comical audience participation sections, the finale sees us board a train on which we experience a massive earthquake, using physical effects, water and fire to help create a fantastic show.

We grabbed some dinner at Ritchers Burgers and discovered a great treat with the salad bar – something which is quite rare in burger bars UK! Me and Gareth piled up on the salad in a manly attempt to see who could make the best meal! We sat on the decking overlooking the lake eating our food, a litter picker came over talking to us about the seagulls and generally passing the time of day, it was really nice to have this one to one interaction with a member of staff.

Back to the Future: Being a big fan of the films I really enjoyed this simulator ride, riding through time to help Marty and Doc fight against Biff.

Men In Black: A dark interactive shooting ride, which I expected to be similar to Duel at Alton, though there weren’t the mass of LEDS we see in Duel, which confused me as to what I was shooting! The cars are able to spin around at quite a rapid pace which gave some nice suprises!

Kidzone: Morgan really enjoyed this fantastic water play area, with loads of interactive elements! There were two giant buckets which filled up, releasing gallons of water over unsuspecting me down below! I could have spent hours in this zone so I can only imagine that Morgan loved it as much as I did! We did Woody woodpeckers coaster a few times which again was a nice kids ride and the staff were nice and interactive.

ET Adventure: You hop upon a bike and set flight above the streets in this nicely themed dark ride classic.

I really liked Universal Studios and look back at my afternoon there as probably one of the best spent of the holiday, it may have been the weather and the first day excitement which gave it the wow factor for me, but in all the great atmosphere, music, theming and friendly staff really started us off on a magical holiday!


Monday Jan 23rd: Sea World! Had a really good day at sea world, saw loads of fish, sharks, dolphins, penguins, sea lions and other mammals throughout the day! Had a really nice moment with a dolphin at the end of the day, he came and lay on the side and let me stroke him for a good minute or two, which was really magical! The park was really clean, staff were approachable and knowledgeable about all of the species. As with most of the Orlando parks this is a non smoking park with smoking only permitted in designated areas. This is a great feature which means non smokers do not have to be subjected to smoke in their faces. The smoking areas are plenty and scattered around the park evenly which means you are never more than a few minutes away from one! After walking through the horses stables we found my dream – free beer…..! Well tasters of half pint size, but all the same, a memorable moment was sitting outside on the decking, beer in hand, shorts and tshirt and nice hot sun belting down on us!

We Saw the Shamu killer whale show, which I have to say, was quite spectacular, despite it being interrupted because of baby whale needing to be fed by its mother. Shamu quite easily soaks the bottom dozen rows of seating with swipes of his massive tail!

Journey to Atlantis: We managed to ride this great water coaster twice, without much of a queue and without getting too drenched! It’s got a nice and tall first drop and at the bottom non riders can pay a quarter to spray unsuspecting riders below! The second drop surprised me because it turned into a water coaster with an angled drop which was very fun!

Kraken: Wow! My new favourite coaster! Managed to ride this floorless coaster 5 times today, twice at the front, twice at the back and once in the middle. I found that the front seat offered the best ride, as your feet felt they were going to be hit by the track. This ride maintained speed and surprise throughout and even after some mid ride brakes found enough energy for a vertical loop and more! Something I noticed about Kraken was how clean the ride was (the trains, seats, restraints, wheel covers) compared to UK roller coasters. It looked brand new and shining and not a bit of oil or grease to be seen, as if from day one of opening the ride had been looked after and cleaned on a daily basis!

End of part one

[mandymouse]

Thats a great start to your trippie Wayne. Thanks for sharing your lovely photos too :)

[cazzie]

Great start Wayne. Sea World is one of my favourite parks I could stay with the dophins for hours. :goodvibes

[florida sun]

Wayne

What a fantastic start to your trip reports, Love the photos as well :goodvibes

[Strommie]

I am really enjoying your trip reports so far Wayne, and your photos are great :cool1:

[carolfoy]

Thanks for the trippie Wayne, and love the photos, did you feel taht there was any thing you could learn from the american theme park attitude? I mean for your own work? did you feel they were far superior? and in what ways?
sorry for the ???? just curious ;)

[mark&sue]

Looking forward to reading the next bits.


Susan

[Dobbo2006]

Part Two

Tuesday 26th January: This was to be my first Disney Park this side of the Atlantic, my expectations for this park were pretty low as I thought it would be something similar to Disney Studios in Paris, how wrong was I? This actually turned out to be my favourite park of the whole trip and we managed to fill a whole day there despite there not being a big crowd at the park. The entrance is not as grand as the Disney Studios entrance which I have to say I really love, but the centre piece of Mickey’s hat really does make up for this.

The Great movie ride: This was a highly themed dark train ride which took us on a journey through the movies. Something which made the ride extra special in comparison to other “movie rides” was the cast member who guided us through the scenes and on several occasions took part in a show for us. We see our host try to stop a bank robbery and finally blow the villain into a skeleton! Really was a good ride!

Star Tours: I had previously ridden this at the Disney Land Park in Paris and as expected it was nearly the same except this time it was in English which was nice! It’s a fairly old moving simulator themed around a tour which goes wrong. Wasn’t the strongest ride the park had to offer, but Morgan (Gareth’s 5 year old son) seemed to enjoy it- hence we did it three or four times in total.

Muppets 3d: I thought things couldn’t get as good as Shrek 4D! And I guess this show doesn’t quite match up to Shrek, unless you’re a big fan of the Muppets! Which luckily I am. There are some really comical scenes which appear to hit you in the face, looking back without my glasses on I saw an audience dazzled by the 3D effects, all reaching out as if to touch Kermit! Some interesting use of animatronics too, with characters up on the balcony telling some quite funny jokes and a finally ending on the back wall!

Tower Of Terror: Now I realise why the Disney Studios in Paris are taking so long to build this attraction, simply because it is so amazing and great attention to detail has been paid. (Interestingly the hidden message In the waiting area was there on our first visit to MGM but had gone a few days later!). We near enough walked straight onto this attraction a good few times, after watching a short video in the library room telling you about the Twi-light zone, we follow a queue path to one of many service elevators through a themed boiler room. We are given our seat positions and we enter the elevator to sit down and secure our safety belt. At this point I was under the pre-conception that the lift would start moving up and down gently and special effects or projectors would give us the effect of the fall but how wrong was I? Instead we move slowly up to see a ghost family and then our elevator car moves forward onto a track, that was impressive enough for me, just as I was coming to terms that I was in an elevator which moved sideways, we had entered a shaft which was about to drop us down hundreds of feet- well more than drop us, but the way the shaft works means we ware pulled down faster than gravity I believe. About 40 seconds of being pushed up and down this elevator we have survived and go running around for another go! Wow this is an amazing attraction! My only problem was that as we passed the windows in the hotel the sun was too bright in my eyes so my photograph was never very good!

Rock n’ roller coaster : Very similar to my experience at Disney Studios, we queue through the parks own recording studios where we are introduced to Aerosmith, they have to dash off but leave us with a “fast car” which turns out to be a launched Vekoma roller coaster. Launching straight into an inversion, this ride is quite smooth for a Vekoma and has the nice addition of an onboard soundtrack and stunning visuals throughout. Still prefer my Space Mountain Mission 2 though!

Lights Motors Action: I had previously seen this at the Disney Studios, a very clever car and motorcycle stunt show set against the back drop of Paris. It is very similar to the Paris version, again it is English which makes a little easier to follow, but some bits are done in a little different order. Also this show doesn’t have the audience participation we have in Paris.

Fantasmic: This was something spectacular which I never expected, a firework/ character / projection show set in a massive stadium at the end of the night. To pull off an event on this scale every night really is a credit to all of the cast members at Disney! The soundtrack is still playing in my head today. We had quite a laugh when we watched back our video footage and saw Mickey fall backwards down the mountain for the finale!

At the end of the night we caught the boat over to Epcot as we needed to get to the transportation centre. We walked through Epcot during Reflections of Earth. Quite a weird experience walking straight through a theme park at night that I have never even been to! Which lead us to make the decision? Tomorrow is Epcot!

End of Part Two :)

Sorry i'm taking my time writing these! I'll try to fit more into part three :)

As for, did anything in America inspire me? Indeed it did! There were many initiatives and ideas which i have brough back with me such as the "No smoking on park" and "No bags in the queue line" which i think would really benefit parks back at home! I'll try to end my reports with a sum up!

[mandymouse]

Another great trippie, I look forward to your visit to Epcot (my fave park), thanks for sharing :)

[Dobbo2006]

Sorrys its taken so long coming, i have been busy with work! heres part 3 of 5 :)

Part Three

Wednesday 25th January

So our second Disney park was to be Epcot, a park I had passed through briefly last night but now could see it in true day light. It was the easiest park to get to for us because our coach dropped us off the Epcot transportation centre which is literally a 2minute walk across a car park to the entrance. The famous Space ship earth or “Golf ball” as most guests like to refer to it as fills the sky line. I was quite interested to look on the monuments / big blocks of stone on entering the park, with hundreds of people’s names and faces carved into plates from over the years. We told Morgan one of the faces was him from last time he came but I don’t think he believed us! Our first ride was spaceship earth; this is a slow moving train journey telling the story of time. I was very impressed with this attraction and how well it fit inside the ball. It makes its way up and down in a very unique way, interestingly it has no safety restraints keeping passengers in their seats, so all of the declines are taken backwards as the cars revolve around.
Next we headed onto Universe of energy. We start our journey in a pre-show room with the American funny chat show host Ellen and a story about her nightmare of knowing nothing about energy in a quiz show she enters. At this point we are told it’s a 45minute ride, to which many people in the audience were quite shocked, we had to laugh at the old people behind us who were complaining that they were going to miss “the rest of the world” because of this eating into their day! In fact it was well worth 45minutes of my time; it was not only very educational and reminded me of a lot of school physics but also was an entertaining and funny journey! You begin the journey in a large capsule, six of which are arranged in a cinema layout, then we pass through different rooms and these capsules form a line. It is really impressive with how the whole thing is put together!

Next we did Mission Space, which we did twice in the day! This was probably my favourite ride at Epcot if I am honest. The first time I went in I was given the role of Pilot, which gave me certain responsibilities and a sequence of buttons I had to press in order to successfully complete our mission to mars! Four of us board a flight sim, which in reality spins at quite high speeds to create G Forces, unless your closing your eyes you don’t feel your spinning though, as the screen in front of you tricks your mind into you thinking you are being launched forwards and pressing back in your seat for this reason! It is a very realistic effect! Afterwards we spent some time in the advanced training lab where we completed some simple tasks on screen but I got very competitive and motivated to help our team win – which we did, also sent an email from space back home :) !

We then made our way around the showcase of different countries, starting on the Mexico side and through countries like Norway, China, Germany, Italy, America, Japan and ending over near the UK set. Enjoyed about 8 different cultures in a matter of hours, favourites included Maelstrom boat ride in Norway and just seeing all the different buildings and side shows! The British area was very quaint but seemed quite exaggerated, with a Twinnings Tea Shop and Ye Old pub which was quite like the queen Victoria inside!

We headed over to Soarin’ which was one of the latest attractions to open (from California!) and so one of the most popular! Luckily we arranged our fast pass entry which helped us get on in just under 10minutes. Again another simulator experience, this time to give the impression we are flying across many of the earths most stunning landscapes, unfortunately I had the lower side seat which meant the edge of the screen was just in my view. This lead to the experience not being quite up to my expectations, but still a nice addition and something I would like to re-ride in a middle seat.
“Reflections of Earth” is the Epcot firework display set in the middle of the lagoon. It has a really catchy soundtrack and some excellent quality fireworks, but I discussed this with Gareth and he still argues to this day with me, but I really don’t like the globe feature. Fair enough it is ok for a minute or two, but it seems the globe projection takes up half the show and didn’t particularly interest me! Maybe others will disagree, but it is not as re-watch able as something like Wishes!

Epcot has a lovely atmosphere throughout, it’s very clean and is set out so its not too crowded. There’s modern architecture and buildings displayed next to lovely grass areas and flowers. Again there were smoking designated areas to control litter and smoke and we enjoyed several meet and greets throughout the day including space Goofy and Aladin and Jasmin!


Thursday 26th January

Me and Gareth waited at the trolley stop for way too long but finally made our way to the supermarket, for beer and doughnuts mainly! Hehe! It was a very interesting experience in the supermarket, with a million brands I didn’t recognise! When I pick up a milky way… that’s what I want, not a mars bar! Oh well!

We returned to the hotel we spent the rest of the day in the hotels outdoor pool and Jacuzzi which is right outside our balcony. I didn’t put any sun cream on which was very silly of me and I paid the price for it! 5hours in he red hot sun and I was toasted! At night we went to Ponderosa for an all you can eat buffet, wow! I want a ponderosa back in England!

Friday 27th January

Today we headed to south side of International Drive to a shopping village with loads of discount outlet stores. We found loads of bargains including some new trainers for everyone, a nice t-shirt and some Disney pins. We dreamed of our dream life I nthe Bose shop and watched the presentation of how Bose sound systems can change your life and now I’m saving up for some! Tomorrow we’re heading for Magic kingdom!

[PChef]

I'm enjoying your trip report. Thanks for putting it together. Sounds like you had some good weather!

Michelle

[Desire 2b a princess]

Really enjoying your Trip Reports.

See if you can amend your title to say "updated" so that people know you are writing your report under the same title as some people might be missing out thinking you are writing your report under a separate title :goodvibes
Hope that made sense!!!!! :thumbsup2

[cazzie]

Really enjoying reading your reports; I wish we had gone into the Bose outlet last year I would love to hear the difference in the sound. :)

[SusanEllen]

What an excellent job you are doing with your trip reports, Wayne. Thank you for them. I'm enjoying seeing things through your fresh eyes and reading your professional observations of the parks. Although everyone looks happy in your photos, I think happiest of all must have been Morgan snuggled next to Jasmine with arms crossed like Aladdin. That's one satisfied Disney guest.

[bells]

Really enjoying your trip report Wayne :banana:

[ely3857]

Wonderfull photographs & Excellent reports Wayne :thumbsup2

:sunny:


Jodie