Day 2: the rest of the park. Quickly
Leaving Harry Potterville at 9AM, we headed back towards the front of the park, through Seuss landing. Ben is a Dr Suess fan, his favorite stories are the Lorax and the Star Bellied Sneetches. We saw the costumes of the CMs in this area had stars on the bellies and thought it would be great if we could find a Sneetch shirt. But first we rode Cat in the Hat. It was a cute and fun ride. We were also the only ones on it.
We were disappointed to find that the merchandise sold was all Thing 1 & 2 (and 3 & 4...) with a sprinkling of Grinch thrown in. It was the same stuff we kept seeing all over the parks (this reminded us of Disney!) Seemed kind of a shame to have an entire land themed to these stories, but not selling anything unique. But Ben did get a picture with the 'Suess-y trees'
We considered Suess Landing a success and moved on to the super hero section.
The first ride you come to is that big green coaster, The Hulk. So that is where we headed. I had heard some good things about it and I was pretty sure it was a launched coaster, which are usually my favorite. This was yet another walk on and all I can say is thank goodness we did not wait for this ride. My notes about this ride were: "OUCH! Hated it" It was so painful, slamming my head back and forth in the restraints. I didn't find it thrilling or scary, it just hurt! I took a moment to recover, and when I felt up to it we headed to Spiderman.
Not only did we not wait, we had the whole car to ourselves! This was a ride that lived up to my expectations. And it had plenty of fire.
The water rides looked like a lot of fun, and people were walking around soaked. We were hot and wanted to ride, but with a camera in Ben's pocket we thought it would be smarter to come back after lunch better prepared.
We did ride Jurassic Park, because it didn't seem to be to big on the splishy-splashy.
Look, more extra fire!
This was a great ride. I love the music! We only got sprinkled, not wet at all.
We had now been in the park for a whopping 2 hours! It was 10AM and we were
starving. Having only a couple of very sugary drinks for breakfast meant we were both crashing. Ben and I both get very angry when hungry. Uh oh. We tried to find something small to eat, but were just too grumpy to settle on anything. So we wandered out to City Walk, which actually took a little while because the security guy at the gate needed to talk to Ben about his shirt (Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute!). Then he had to tell us about all the great shopping in Orlando. He was really excited about the entire Timberland store at some outlet place. He talked for a long, long time. He was a nice guy, but we were hungry and sweating and not planning on doing any shopping. The funny thing is that when he was done he abruptly dismissed us as though we had been the ones keeping him!
So
now we headed to CW and only had to waste almost an hour until we could eat lunch. I finally broke down and got the World's Saltiest Pretzel at a little snack kiosk. It was gross. But I ate it because hunger has no pride. After standing in Margaritaville's gift shop for a while, we finally could go in to eat. This place was fun- good atmosphere and we had a friendly server. I had the crab cake sandwich and Ben ordered fish tacos.
Having already had a beer (well, a fake one...) I figured it
had to be 5 o'clock somewhere...
If the waiter hadn't carded me, I would've sworn this was a virgin margarita. Which is probably not a bad thing except that it cost $9.
This was an expensive lunch, but we were lucky to get our AAA discount- $3 dollars off! Woohoo, we're rich!
I'm glad we ate here, but probably don't need to go back.
After lunch we went back to the Portofino for more pool time. We had some drinks by the pool (great waitresses out there- super nice, very good service!) and used the water slide a bit more. We even went in the hot tub (for about 30 seconds... it was hot outside!) I was so happy to get this resort time.
Revived and relaxed, we kept our bathing suits on (I wore shorts over mine) and left the camera in the room. We were heading back to IOA for some water ride fun! Bluto's Bilgerat Barges were up first. We got
drenched and had a blast. One of the best raft rides I've been on!
Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls was next. This may have been my favorite Universal ride... definitely top 3. It was funny and well themed and we got wet all over again.
The weather was hot enough that we started to dry almost immediately. We walked around back to Hogsmeade and checked out the line for Forbidden Journey. It was about an hour and we considered using the single rider line. But I really wanted to see everything in the castle, so I asked nicely if Ben would please wait with me. He's a good guy and said yes. We headed into the greenhouse area, which is pretty warm. By now I started to get a few painful spots from my
Crocs. I was kinda happy to be standing still-ish in line but also ready for some A/C! We finally made it into the castle... and got to experience the best queue ever. I'm not going to talk about anything in there. Plenty of spoilers can be found if you want to know, but I really enjoyed being surprised.
The ride was still great!
The Hog's Head wasn't very busy, so we stopped in for a beer. The special ale made for this place was actually pretty good! We had fun in there- it has a great atmosphere. It made the list of things we wanted to re-do before leaving.
We headed back to Ripsaw Falls to ride one more time before leaving. On our way over there, we saw a weird and gross thing.
The Comic Strip area has a lot of water features. People were having fun playing in them and cooling off. There is one that looks like this:
The water turns on when people are in it. A correct use of this area would be something along these lines:
(We took these pictures the next day)
An incorrect use could include a lot of things. What we saw was a man holding a naked, soiled baby (I'm terrible with child ages... this was less than a toddler more than an infant) and using this fountain to clean junior's hiney. The effect was that poop water washed off the baby onto the spongy ground. Yummy.
We left the park and walked to the Royal Pacific hotel to look at it. It was nice, but more crowded than the Portofino. Definitely closer to the parks, though!
We water taxied back to CW and got to hear a bizarre fight between two adult sisters. They were arguing with each other, and with their mom who was on the phone. But they weren't sitting together, so the whole boat got to hear the exchange. When we switched boats to the Portofino, they did to! The fight continued, still across the boat from each other. Everyone was trying not to react, but we were all pretty baffled.
We ended up eating dinner at Mama Della's at the hotel. This was a very nicely decorated restaurant and turned out to have some yummy food! They brought a salad to the table that was really delicious. We shared a fried calamari appetizer. Ben had chicken Parmesan and it was really, really good. I had food envy. Mine was a ravioli dish that was good, but not amazing. Desert was a chocolate cake we split. (Again, not a cheap meal... the bank continues to suffer for the sake of our stomachs...)
After dinner, we headed to bed around 9:30PM. Pretty early for us, but we were very tired!
Up Next:
Day 3: Let's do it again!