Spring Break! we are back!

[Sandy321]

I found a few pre trip reports invaluable to my pre trip planning - thought I'd come and see how things have been - sparse in this room!

The Adventurers: First Trip to Dark Side

Me - 50 something, love roller coasters, until vertigo or old age came my way - still love Tower of Terror and RocknRoller coaster - can not ride Star Tours!

DD - 15, 9th grader. Had to forego our Jan Marathon trip due to school - straight A's, so nana rewarded her to see Harry Potter for Spring Break

Nana - 60 something Loved our combined Birthday trip to Disney a few years back and can't wait to see how I plan this trip!

After reading the Hotel and all the sticky threads here on the Dis - I made mom pay for one night, and I paid for one night at an on sight Universal hotel for the early entry + the express pass -

now I did such a good job selling the express pass mom told everyone we are getting the Royal Pacific Hotel for $99 a night! And you thought Disney Math was magical ! I told mom how much 1 front of the line pass would cost and would only be good for one ride - so times that by 3 and subtract from the cost of the hotel and viola - $99 a night for Royal Pacific.

Of course my cousin was so astounded she called me yelling at me! Her and her sister and mom are going to Disney at the end of April and want to know why its costing her 4 times as much! I explained Disney Math. Not sure she bought what I was selling tho!

PLAN:
Leave Chicago Today - soon
Arrive at Nana's Ft Myers Fl
Drive to Orlando on Monday - stay in cheap hotel
Explore Universal with no passes
Tuesday - check in to RPR - get to early entry line up for Ollivander's
Tuesday - 2pm drive to OKW for lunch with internet friends!!
Tuesday night - back to Universal
Wednesday - Universal
Thursday - Disney
Friday - drive to Ft Myers
Saturday - Fly back to Chicago
Sunday - crash!!!

 

[Carol17]

Sounds good! Safe travels and looking forward to hearing more!

 

[Iheoma]

Looking forward to hearing more too!

 

[TCB in FLA]

We are a week behind you! Your mom fell for the magical hotel math more than DH did. Have a great trip!

 

[jcc0621]

Looking forward to hearing more.

As for the missing TR's if you scroll to the bottom of the page, there are drop down boxes. Change the last one to beginning or last year and they show back up. I thought the same thing you did until I found that!

 

[Sandy321]

Looking forward to hearing more.

As for the missing TR's if you scroll to the bottom of the page, there are drop down boxes. Change the last one to beginning or last year and they show back up. I thought the same thing you did until I found that!

Great Tip - Thank you!

We are HOME!
(not sure if we are happy or sad about that! I need a vacation from my vacation!)

I plan on uploading photos tomorrow -

Just know, if you are a Harry Potter fan - it is so worth it!

I cant believe what a great sport my mom was! 74 years old, and she was the best sport - we dont slow down, we just go - go - go!

We did get in Monday - and I wanted to use all 3 days of our tickets, so we parked the car, and headed into Island of Adventure! I'm glad I had the opportunity to take it slow - let DD take all the pictures, and just look at everything - as others have often reported - it does get less crowded after 7 - which shocked DD - but it was true!

Tuesday we got a later start (checking in to get our hotel/express pass tickets) so we did get to the park at 8am - but that was the back of the pack - but it all worked out! No worries.

My favorite - we went straight to Forbidden Journey - and my 74 year old mother rode the ride! It is so hard to describe, but the ride is fine, but it is intense - so worth it, mom is proud she did it - but once was enough! I reminded DD that I expect her to take her grandchildren when she is 74!!

 

[Sandy321]

DD 15 took over my camera. Turns out DD does not believe in taking pictures of people! She is appalled that Nana took crowd pictures, dd knows I post pictures on the disboards - looking at her 2 scan discs - She filled a 4GB scan disc... of things. Lots and lots of things!

I did find one picture of DD and I from our trip - but its from the start of our trip - our first full day in Florida we went to Sanibel Island. Sanibel has strict codes, and so it is a beautiful island, hard to find a parking place - so we got on the island, and went to the bike rental place and rented bikes to bike to the Lighthouse end of the island - app 2 miles I believe someone told us (I'll have to google)

Well here is DD and I

I do not like the way I look, I do tend to 'hide' behind when a picture is taken, but there are so many questions about fitting on Forbidden Journey, I found it helpful and hope a picture of me will help others as well

 

[Sandy321]

We left Ft Myers at 9:30 am, dropping off my Aunt and her husband at the airport, then headed for OUR adventure!

I told the GPS we wanted to go to Downtown Disney for lunch - get us there!

Lets just say there was a hitch or two, but the GPS did get us to DTD - and yes, I am weird, when we walked under the sign - I took a deep breath and told DD - it smells like Disney! We ate at Emeril's place, it wasn't that great, really greasy pizza, and the creme brûlée was disgusting - it tasted oily, like olive oil oily, texture was weird too...

So, now its 4, we drive to the.... "bargain" hotel. Mom grew up with a mother who survived the depression, so frugal is important. While we were spending 2 nights in luxury - our first night was Bargin - that Days Inn, with the rate of $50 a night. While getting in to the hotel, we noticed a helicopter going up - hmmm

Well we check in, and decide, one night, it will be fine. (no one said this out loud, if one of us said, can we get out of here, all of us would've agreed, but I decided it seemed safe, just very old, tired, no carpet, the bathroom very small, the towels very thin, the a/c in the window... well its just hard to describe)

I purchased us 3 day park to park tickets - originally this trip was only going to be a Universal trip... plans changed! To take advantage of that $5 upgrade from 2 day to 3 day tickets, we were going in tonight - Monday! Its Spring Break, we've never been here before - but we can get acclimated to the place - lets go!

Parked the car in the garage - and walked in to Island of Adventure. Mom could never get in with the finger scan. never. ever.

Now I've read how crowds go down after 7 and Universal was open to 9 this night. we were there by 5pm.

 

[Sandy321]

(my mom has couple hundred pictures as well - these tell the story of what dd found)

It was crowded - the lines outside for butter beer were long - - we passed the line for Ollivander's - (no pictures, thanks dd! she pretended to take the picture)

Then saw the wait time for Forbidden Journey - 90 min - I asked the TM if we could take the castle tour - she said "no" I tried to explain this to mom and dd.

- we went in to see the locker madness - and I decided to try it out, another running theme for the trip was the locker failures. Every. Time.

I then went in and asked if we could take the castle tour (just in case) This TM said, yes - and in we went! There are lots of pictures, and movies out there for the inside of the castle - it was wonderful!

We then went out thru the Jurassic Park area and took more pictures and wandered around, lines were long, all over 60 min, so we decided to wait till tomorrow and the express pass!!

I think we left around 8 pm, drove to a Walgreens to get some supplies, found a Burger King behind the Walgreens, and ate dinner.

Back to the hotel. It was HOT in the room, called maintenance, and they came within 5 min to work on the a/c - he opened the front and left to get a vacuum - it was filthy clogged. He vacuumed then set the compressor - it did get cool fast.

We wanted to be up and out by 6:45 am - so we went to bed. and laughed. The absurdity of the compressor turning off or on - sounded like that helicopter! just the loud blade sound for a few seconds.... every 20 min.

We got out of there by 7am (its hard to get up and moving when you didn't sleep well)

We drove to Royal Pacific Resort!

and DD picture -

We decided to save time to Valet park - it was $7 more, but worth every penny!

Checking in, I realized I forgot my notes on which tower to request... I remembered Tower 2 was the pet tower, and I didn't want that one - I thought it was Tower 1 - well a room was ready on the 6th floor in Tower 2... I asked if would be too much trouble to ask for, and we'd be willing to wait for a room in Tower 1 - higher floor? Sure, no problem..

she printed our passes (other wise known as room keys) to get in the park at 8am and express pass -

Off we go - out the front door, down the sidewalk, to the left, people walking the path!!

 

[Sandy321]

Well I did have a few pictures on my smart phone!

Here - we got to DTD!!!

Then our creme brûlée

As we were walking to Forbidden Journey - there is an area with the House Flags, and they do a few shows there - this one just started when we got there - dd made a movie of the show

Now I remember reading here that you could stand in line outside to get your butter beer - or you could go to 3 Broomstick to sit inside get your beer and absorb the atmosphere -

Atmosphere here we come!

We ordered one frozen butter beer, one regular in a souvenir cup and one apple pie to share!

Not much left!

DD preferred the regular butter beer - it has a cream soda and butterscotch taste (we actually googled and found a recipe to make at home, dd tried it, and couldn't wait for the real deal!) The foam stays till the very end!

me? I enjoyed a hogshead brew!

Outside of the 3 Broomsticks you can see the Wanted Poster!

it is a "moving poster" really cool!

 

[jcc0621]

Great start. Can't wait to read more.

 

[Iheoma]

Love your pictures! Can't wait to read more.

 

[macraven]

sandy, good to hear you survived the night at days inn.

from how you described it, sounds like they renovated it since i was there.



i always love pictures with trippies!

 

[pixeegrl]

I'm in

 

[Sandy321]

In convincing my mom to stay 2 nights at Royal Pacific, she convinced me to stay at the cheapest (money wise) place she found online - Days Inn Universal Maingate.

This hotel comes up at $40 something + fees it comes out to a bit over $50, it is within blocks of the entrance to Universal. There are a couple of other hotels in this area as well - all are over $100. I did see kids walking, but it has been mentioned the area is high traffic, and it has to be well over 2 miles from hotel to entrance of Universal.

Check in Lobby, looked fine - there was a long line at 4pm to check in.

The tile floors were a theme btw. There were 2 people checking all of us in, and they did seem efficient. I had my reservation confirmation - a person in front of me had some problems at another Days Inn with over charges

The buildings are labeled A-B-C-D so it was confusing. We had a 1st floor facing garden (away from I4, as we were getting to our building - we saw a helicopter, it looked like a sightseeing helicopter - it was loud, didnt last as the copter flew away)

I made the mistake of parking next to the building, I did notice a bank of parking places in the middle - this made it very very difficult to leave the next morning - talk about a 10 point turn... it took patience to get out of our parking place!

The rooms are well used.

Tile floors, window a/c unit. nothing new, again, its $50.

The shower was yucky. it had rust spots and places coming up and torn everywhere - the shower curtain didnt look secure

The toilet seat wasnt level - and the towels were not top quality - scratchy feeling.

We dropped off our gear, turned the a/c on and headed to Universal!

Parked and took a picture
Jurasic Park 4th floor
This was a theme, thought we were being so smart!
yeah, not so much! (I deleted the picture!)

It was $14 to park - so mom finding out we wouldnt pay that price added to the value of Royal Pacific!

Left the park, knowing the routes and places we wanted to be at Tuesday at 8am! As reported the crowds did go down considerable at around 7pm! and its a beautiful time of day! Much easier shopping in the candy store!

Advice, tip - do NOT buy chocolate early in your visit, because you dont want to carry this chocolate trying to keep it cool the rest of your stay! Who knew we couldnt eat our Goofy's pretzels this night? Chocolate frog? DD wants to keep it?

So we left our park, found our car, and now its night, so slowly find our way out - decided to take a left to find a Walgreen's to help mom's denture that broke - she tried to put gum on the part, I told her they make a dental wax. The Walgreens is so close - there is a couple of places to eat in this strip mall as well (and a sign, that says Burger King!) We bought cups, some wine, a cosmo mix and ice. (I did not want to find the ice machine at Days Inn - I spent $1 on ice!)

Now we drove down looking for that Burger King - it was BEHIND the Walgreens! It had that fancy coke machine that you touch and tell it what one of 100 combinations that you'd like in your glass (they had these machines in universal!)

Got back to the hotel, and it was HOT and HUMID in the room. Called front desk, they sent the maintenance guy in. He told me the air compressor wasnt going on... (well ok, now you know why I called - can it be fixed?)

He came back with a shop vacuum, took off the cover, it was thick with dust, he vacuumed and let me tell you all over our tile floor those dust bunnies flew - he did not vacuum those up. But the a/c worked.

sort of.

When it came on, or went off (two hours after he left btw, after we got in our jammies, and after we were in bed - it was now about 2am) It sounded like the helicopter was landing. At first we did think that was what it was. But about 20 min later we decided, it was the a/c. We were too tired, it was too late, just make the best of it!

We got out of there by 7am and drove across the street, followed the signs, turned left - ROYAL PACIFIC here we come!!

easy check in
Friendly people.

I forgot my notes - I wanted to request a tower. Which one? The one closests to the path? wait, a room is ready? Tower 2? Wait, isnt that the pet friendly one? um... would it be ok to request Tower 1 high floor and wait? If not, its ok, dont want to be a pest. Its ok? Here's our keys to Universal.