One day over Thanksgiving. Am I crazy?

[laughinplace199]

We haven't been to Universal in 20 years and our kids (17, 15, 10) have never been.

We're going to WDW over Thanksgiving and decided to spend a day at Universal. It will be a long day, as we'd like to see both parks. We are also considering booking one night at Royal Pacific to get the Express Pass. The Harry Potter stuff is important to us, and the older kids like thrill rides, but we're ok with not seeing everything.

Will we be able to do a decent amount in one day? I've seen conflicting crowd info for that week, but I'm assuming it'll be very busy. We were thinking of going the day before Thanksgiving since I've heard weekends are more crowded.

Any thoughts and advice would be welcome!

 

[macraven]

which day in for the Tgving holiday?
some days are extremely busy and a few are not.

staying onsite gives you the early entry and ep lines if you are at the deluxe hotels.
can't go wrong with that if it will be a one day only trip.

you can cover a lot in that one hour of early entry for potterville in the park you are at.

take HE to the other park and hit potterville there but it will have waits once the general public has been let in

www.universalorlando.com
check out the layout of the parks.

find locations of rides you must hit that day.
make a tenative plan.
better yet, make two plans for an alternative day in case rides are long or some are shut down.

 

[PantherPete]

I hope not. I'll be there the same time as you. I been there before but never over Thanksgiving. I hope that when MacRaven says that some days are extremely busy and others are not he means that the days I'll be at the parks aren't busy. Our planned park days are Mon, Tues & Wed and we are staying at the HRH. We fly home Saturday night. We will go to the parks for a little on Thur and Fri and Sat AM. But if they are too crowded, we will just hang at the pool and City Walk. Might even spring for a cabana on Thanksgiving so that I can watch football by the pool.

 

[macraven]

Pull up last years threads about crowd level during Tday period to see what others had to say about it

You can read the trip reports and UO threads for that using the search button

Each year is close to the previous years patterns
A decent way to predict reasonable crowds to large crowds

 

[dsmom]

I would definitely go for it. We have been Thanksgiving week at least four or five times. Wednesday before has never been bad. Even thanksgiving day wasn't that bad. We had been Christmas week before and it doesn't come close to that. Friday starts getting bad and Saturday and Sunday were very busy.