Ah, remember when I threatened to post my TR and everyone left?
Well, tough, ladies here you GO!
The details:
Peeps: Me, and my adult BFF Jodi.
Days: Friday, Oct 12th until Sunday, Oct 14th.
Lodging/Tickets/Plans: Two nights in the HRH, 3 days, 2 days of park passes, no real plan.
Travel Agent: Our own Amiee!!!
Background:
Jodi is in charge of this HUGE annual event in Oct. Like 500 people, tons of vendors, fashion shows, etc etc. Her magazine sponsors it. So this big party was Thursday night. It is 5pm to 9pm, but she is there all day setting up and all night cleaning up, and then the colleagues that didn't do any work want to go out! She had dinner after and drinks with the 22 year olds and a result didn't get to bed until 2:30. Woke up at 5am to pick me up at 6:15. Ugh for her.
I had left the party early - a first for me with ANY party - and gone to bed at 9:30 and woke up at 4:30 to pack. Another first - I wasn't packed DAYS before. But I was happy and perky! But I kept quiet because I wanted to live.
Airport, plane, Orlando. Standard stuff. It's kind of stunning to me how normal it feels to be landing in Orlando. I know that airport about as well as I do Newark and that's just weird. I guess it's all the recent trips in the recent years.
We go find the Mears shuttle. At first the lady doesn't know how to look us up. Then she finds us. We go to the spot outside and they give us a beeper. We change into shorts and in about 10 mins a van shows up and our beeper goes off. Easy. Jodi sits up front because she gets car sick (make note of this) and chats with the driver about beer and BBQ. He's from St. Louis and into both.
The driver is nice and gives all of us the lay of the universal land. Just basically talks and tells us things of interest or places he likes. We are the 3rd stop.
Hard Rock Hotel. I'll give my overall impressions. Nice lobby. Love the music piped in everywhere. Rock music that's my thing. I'm singing along all the time. Nice check in guy. Passes not on our room- we turn to each other and say "nld" which is Not Like Disney. We discuss this lack of one card to rule them all with the check in guy.
We get our express passes at a machine in the lobby (it takes a really weird pic of you! We look like zombies) and head to another to get our park passes. Then we drop the luggage and go to the Kitchen to eat. That's the name of the restaurant .
We sit outside and instantly order a lot of food. I kind of feel like John and Kevin doing a restaurant review. (Podcast) Everyone raves about this place. Front desk guy included. I thought it was okay. The fries were hot and good. The jerk chicken wings were yummy. My sandwich and Jodi's were not good. Not awful but not tasty at all. We ate because we were starving. She actually turned to me and said "how is your food?" Which she never ever does. It was disappointing. But the setting was very pretty and we were full.
After that we walked to the boat that would take us to the parks and city walk. A very short and refreshing boat ride and guess what? Music on the boat! Rock on.
We exit that lovely and refreshing boat and head to Universal Studios. Its about 2:30pm now. We head towards the first thing we see, minions! If you love minions you will love this. I liked it. I didn't love it. It's a motion ride. Like Soarin. But there are outside focal points. If you ever get motion sick, those matter.
We end up in the gift shop. Universal dumps you out into a gift shop for everything! More so than Disney. This is okay because we like to shop. Jodi sees many things she wants. She is into minions.
After some looking we keep moving. We do Twister. Then revenge of the mummy. Twister has a long pre show and is nicely non challenging. Entertaining. Revenge of the mummy is more intense than I expected and shorter. Nice but so far I didn't love love love an attraction.
We miss blues brothers and instead go to disaster! Cute. Amusing. First one without a gift shop exit. We debate MIB or Simpsons and we foolishly go for Simpsons.
We walk on with express pass as we have for every other ride. Very quick. Long ramps up! Interesting preshow. No idea what to expect.
About halfway through the ride I start to focus on the actual cart we are in and just glance at the screen. Jodi is not doing that and I can tell she is not doing well. It finally ends and we exit quickly. To her credit she did not puke nor did she bail and go back to the hotel but it took her and hour and a half to recover from that ride.
It's 5pm by the time we are off Simpsons and we head out as the park is closing early for horror nights. We go next door to IOA. I like how close everything is.
IOA is nice when you enter. Visually interesting. We go to the right, passing through Seuss landing. We have some popcorn and soda and sit in the shade. Then we go through the lost continent, looking around, and to hp to check it out.
It is cool. It is really neat to see if you like the books. We got a butter beer to share, draft, and stood in line for olivanders wand ceremony. Took only 20 minutes. It was very cool. Emily would love this. It made Jodi want a wand!
We browsed in this shop for a bit. Jodi got her wand and a ravenclaw scarf I got Emily the gryffindor scarf. We took the castle tour because Jodi wasn't up to riding anything. After the tour and seeing what the ride seats look like Jodi decided she did not want to ride this. At all! I was still hoping to change her mind.
We went on the flight of the hippograff. As Jodi said, it was like the one at home on the boardwalk (our real boardwalks that the Disney one is modeled after). Except the one at the boardwalk is way way slower. Everything here is intense. Even the kiddie rides!
We went to three broomsticks, got dinner and I got a London pride beer. Yum. By this time it was 8pm and the park was closing. We walked over to city walk and shopped at margaritaville. I got my dad a shirt and Jodi got some shirts. Everything is sized super small. Like Erika would need a 2xl. No joke.
We got back to the room about 9pm and were in bed by 10. And thus ends the first day!