Thursday, April 20. Crowd Levels: Predicted 8 / Actual 7 out of 10
Today was our very last day, so we had to work in theme parks and packing. I had offered that we could sleep, pack, then park, but the kids were still gung ho for one final early entry, and still motivated to be on the first ride of the day for the Dragon Challenge, so off to Islands of Adventure it was. Our only plan variance was that I “allowed” our crew to ride the ferry today. Normally, just as we were walking past the boat dock, we’d hear the sound of the recently departed ferry, and I’d have none of that ‘waiting for the next boat’ request. This one time, it was still there as we approached, so our feet were happy to take advantage of the serendipity.
This was the day that we noticed there were a few turnstiles that had formed no queues, and asked a Team Member if there was a reason for it. Nope, no reason, except that people are more inclined to follow the pack, so no one had ventured to that turnstile yet. Yay! We were happy to take one for the crowd and get that queue started! We also had an interesting conversation with the Team Member who came out to manage our turnstile.
Here was our discussion topic: Universal park-goers who wear their Disney attire to Universal. We saw a ton of this all week, and we commented amongst ourselves that we understand many Universal guests are carving time out of their Disney vacation to come to Universal, but for Pete’s sake, pack at least 1 or 2 non-Disney t-shirts for your time spent at Universal. And take off your Mouse Ears. Seriously. Mouse Ears running amok in Universal parks. We don’t expect everyone to go full-on Potter robes or Minion t-shirts, but we found it a wee bit disrespectful for the full-on Disney clothing and the unwillingness to remove a Magic Band for the day... Don’t get me wrong, I love a good “matching family t-shirt” wardrobe option when we’re at Disney, and have at least 4 sets of t-shirts and even 2 sets of Hawaiian attire that totally match and can be packed on a moment’s notice plus my family is a good sport about indulging me in this when we are at Disney or Aulani. But, for our Universal vacation, I didn’t pack those. And when we’ve added on days from Disney to Universal, I’ve made sure we had Minion, Simpsons, Thing 1 and 2, or just plain old non-theme-park logo’d tops for our jaunt to the Dark Side…
So, when we noticed that several members of the IoA Family of the Day were wearing Disney attire, we were super surprised by this, and as we were discussing it in what we thought were hushed tones, the Team Member at our turnstile joined in on our conversation. By the way, here’s our speculation on the Family of the Day, just our guess as to how it went down: it appeared to be 2 families on a trip together, most likely related, such as two sisters and their families meeting for a Disney vacation. Out of the 8 of them, 4 in one family unit were wearing adorable matching Universal t-shirts and looked like they had camped out for the opportunity to get chosen. The other 4 were the “we’re not wearing matching t-shirts” relatives and still had on their Magic Bands, mouse shirts, etc. So, we surmise that the Universally-attired family was selected for this honor, and then said, oh yeah, we’re a package deal with our brother/sister/cousins/whatnots, and that’s how a Disney t-shirt and Magic Band opened up Islands of Adventure. Or, I just have a vivid imagination. The Team Member at our turnstile said they find it disappointing that so many people wear Disney clothing to their park, but they are routinely coached NOT to say anything about it. She said the only time someone might slip in a “fun” comment to a guest is if their ticket and fingerprint just won’t work, then they might be tempted to say: well, must be that mouse on your shirt doesn’t want to let you pass through these gates….
Moral of the Story: If you’re doing a combined Disney/Universal trip, try to pack a few non-Disney shirts for your awesome time at Universal. Universal deserves the respect, and they also have awesome shirts, hats, and accessories to choose from. Heck, immerse yourself here, too! At a minimum, kindly remove your mouse ears.
Now back to our regularly scheduled Trip Report. Here is how our Early Entry time was spent. You could probably write our ride list for me, from 7:55 – 8:35am, since it is pretty much a rinse and repeat of our past few days:
Dragon Challenge – first ride, front row, red
Dragon Challenge – front row blue
Forbidden Journey – Single Rider * surprise! We split up, and my husband and I sprinted over to Forbidden Journey once we knew the queue was open for Dragon Challenge and the kids more than knew what to do. We quickly loaded a locker (yup, on the top row!) and the hopped up the Single Rider stairs. We had a nice unplanned surprise. We reached the end of the queue for Single Rider at the same time the first passengers reached the standard queue. They were a group of 6, so we figured we might ride together at the tail end of their 2nd bench, but the attraction Team Members were not quite ready for their group to be loaded, so we were sent ahead and given our own bench. Sore! We were, quite by accident, the first riders of the day on Forbidden Journey!
No time to celebrate, as we scooted over the Dragon Challenge to watch for the kids.
They did Dragon Challenge one more time after we arrived, then we told them to say goodbye, as we were heading to Universal Studios and would not be making it back to Islands of Adventures before flying out this afternoon.
We headed to Hogwart’s Express – queued up by 8:35 and were easily in Universal Studios by 9:02.
The kids’ “final day” plan was to get in as many Rip Ride Rockit rides as possible, so we bolted out of Diagon Alley – armed with yesterday’s knowledge about when to come back for Single Rider, walked against the humongous crowd with a real appreciation of a day in the life of a salmon swimming upstream, and to the front of the theme park to hop in line for Rip Ride. I heard someone shouting “Hey, Aunt Karen!” and turned to see my niece and her two boys, who were visiting their friends in Orlando from their home in Northern New York. Well, I probably shouldn’t say it on this board, especially after my mini rant about Disney clothes in a Universal Park, but, wow, it truly is a small world, after all. No time to catch up on too many family updates, just enough time for a joint family picture and hugs good-bye. We all had urgent, important business to attend to.
The three kids headed off to Rip Ride Rockit, my niece headed to Gringott’s, and my husband and I found a seat in the shade for a moment of peace. Our morning shaped up as follows, from 9:05 – 10:25:
Rip Ride Rockit
Rip Ride Rockit, again
Rip Ride Rockit, again again
Attempted Transformers, but it was down, so…
Mummy, which was dead, a near-empty car
Mummy, instant re-ride (we asked, and they sent us back through the Child Swap)
Then, off to Gringott’s Single Rider
So, the reason we asked for a Mummy re-ride was because we had the very most annoying, screaming, never gave our ears a break, kinda rude group on that ride with us. This was over the top poor Theme Park behavior, and really ruined the ride for us. We’d ridden Mummy many times this week, and of course this generates screams and shouts at certain times, and it’s just fine by us if you want to holler your lungs off during an attraction. That’s fun for some people. But something about this rowdy group, well, they were obnoxious beyond belief, making far too much out of the ride than was necessary, which caused my gang to look at me like “are you going to do something about this?” when the ride had its few moments where you could exchange glances like that. While there are some battles I might take on, some feedback I might give, this group and this issue was not on that list, not for me. So when we hopped off the car, I signaled to my group to hang back. It was just the 5 of us, and the 6 of them on the car. But, they wouldn’t walk away from us out of the attraction unloaded area, so I signaled to their group “Go, go, go” to encourage them to move along, then tried again to get the cast member’s attention. Which at that point I certainly had, as he covered the ride communication system by practically flinging his body on it and said: what’s wrong? I said, well, that group pretty much just ruined that ride for us, any chance you’d let us walk through the Child Swap for a quick repeat? The ride was still a walk-on and running near-empty cars, so he said of course you can, head on over. But please don’t yell “Go, go, go” into our communication system, as that is the signal to shut the ride down, and we would have been on a 15-minute delay. I apologized profusely, and now you know, The Rest of the Story, as Paul Harvey would say: don’t shout Go Go Go in the exit area of your ride, or you could have some unintended consequences. For us though, it ultimately led to a great re-ride so that our final Mummy ride would be memorable for all the right reasons.
After our awesome and easy experience with Gringott’s single rider, it was time to head back to Hard Rock Hotel to pack up and sadly rescind our Rock Royalty privileges. Check out was technically at 11, but we banked on the fact that their staff would not likely have a swat team knocking on our door to clean at 11:01, and we were right. On our first day, the room had not been cleaned until well after 2:00 and then interrupted my husband’s afternoon nap, which we had great fun teasing him about. I recalled a tip on this board that if you are heading out early and want your room done by a certain time, you should call housekeeping to pleasantly request it. So, we did that for the rest of the week with a great outcome; that’s what gave us the courage to be a little late on our check–out time, too, knowing they probably had a mix of early requests and slightly delayed check-outs… It was 11:45 by the time we took our luggage to Luggage Services, and it seemed like many of our fellow guests were taking that same approach, as we all hit up the Club for one last round of water bottles and to say good-bye and thanks to the Club Team. While we were in the Club, I was able to easily print out our boarding passes for our flights that evening, which was a great added feature. Especially when we noticed the TSA Pre-Check surprise – it was randomly assigned to us – on our boarding passes. Not sure what prompted that to happen, but we’ll take it!
We then headed over to Bubba Gump’s for lunch. While I know this one is hit or miss on reviews, and mostly a miss with lots of people saying they will never go back, everyone in our group loved his or her meal and our service was great. The restaurant was mostly dead at this early lunch hour, so that could have helped. Also, I’m a die-hard Pepsi fan, and this was my first Pepsi after 5 days of Coke, so they could have served me straw with cocktail sauce on top, and just from my Pepsi reunion joy alone, I would have been fine… Then it was back to the parks for the final, final rides, snacks, and moments of the trip. We had from 1:45 – 3:45 in the parks and strategized this list while at Bubba Gumps:
Rip Ride Rockit, at least twice
Transformers, if by any miracle it was back up
Men in Black
Simpsons
Lemon Slushies
Memento Shopping, since so far, all we had acquired was chocolate frogs…
And, that’s about how our afternoon went. Except for Transformers. Yes, it was back up, but it was back up to the 170 minute wait with 45 minute Express Pass forecast, so we decided we had enough fond memories of it from 2013 and it was better to have guaranteed fun on our last afternoon, than to wait in a line that may never reach its destination.
All in all, we had great fun, shopped for t-shirts, hats, mugs, and I curse the retail store designer who put the banana Minion tic tacs in so many tantalizing places as we have a lifetime supply of those now…, returned to the Hard Rock Hotel, changed into travel clothes suitable for the 40 degree temps we were returning home to, and awaited one of Tony Hinds’s drivers to pick us up for our return to the airport.
A note about Tony Hinds: What a really great guy. He, himself, was our driver for our late night Easter Sunday arrival, and he was just awesome. I told him that this message board had instructed me that he was the best driver in Orlando. He said: Only Orlando? I’m the best driver in the country and will need to improve my reputation then. So, let the record reflect: best in the country.
Another driver took us back to the airport, and again, flawless execution on the transportation. Many thanks to all who have recommended him then posted, re-posted, and re-re-posted his contact info for the people who repeatedly ask. It was from one of those re-re-posts where I scored his contact info and this great, plus inexpensive ($100 round trip for our party of 5 ‘adults’ with tons of luggage), ride.
From our moment of check-in to our final hours post-check-out, Hard Rock Hotel was a terrific home base for us. We found all of the Team Members to be helpful, courteous, and as magical as we wanted or needed for this short trip. We almost upgraded our tickets to annual passes on this last day, but our next few vacations are starting to take shape even if they are only penciled in right now, so it was a certainty we’d be unable to make it back or Orlando within the next year. But, we’d love to return again and the kids have already made me a t-chart of pros and cons for returning to Universal Studios. When I said before that they are reading to carry on the torch for a Theme Park passion? Maybe, just maybe, I have over-prepared them for a life of loving Theme Parks!
