UO portion of a DCL/UO trip

[jlowejd5]

I'll put our three days at UO over here, as well. If you want to read the whole ginormous thing, the cruise portion is over on the DCL Trip Reports board. Hope you like it!

Some background. It's just DW and I, both 35, longtime Disney geeks. This is our first trip to UO together. I was there a long time ago with my family, and we did a day trip to the California version when were at Disneyland last year and had a really good time. So we decided to tack on three days at UO onto the end of our 5-year anniversary cruise. Here's what happened...


Thursday, February 19th.

Back on land. We knew we had all kinds of time, so we slept until about 7:00 or so, showered, and headed out the door. We sat for a few minutes on Deck 5 overlooking the atrium and watched people leave. That’s always fun, to see who is cool and prepared, and who is freaking out because something’s gone screwy. We wandered off the ship by about 8:15 or so, headed down the escalator, and picked up a porter. I have to say, these folks are worth every dime we tip them. I have to schlep my bags around all the time, so why not find a dude to help me for a couple of bucks. Plus they make it easy because they know exactly where they’re going, so you gain a few minutes of standing around time.

Breezed through customs and headed out to the Budget pick-up area. Again, this is the first time we’ve experienced this particular form of transportation, so it’s all new to us. Major kudos to DCL and the porters on how easy they make it to get where you’re going. We were the only ones who got on the shuttle at the DCL terminal. We thought, sweet, this will be easy. Then we drove over to the Carnival (I think, I wasn’t really paying attention) terminal, and completely filled the shuttle, and left people standing there who couldn’t fit on. I guess there’s something to be said for the Magical Express, after all. The whole shuttle waiting area was packed full of people, but I have no idea where all they were going (other rental companies, hotels, etc). But, since we’re vacation ninjas, we quickly (and quietly) worked out our strategery. When we got to the rental place, I would take care of getting the car, and she would handle the baggage. I was third off the bus. Yay. Got our car easily, loaded the bags, and headed out toward our new destination, Universal Orlando.

We had skipped breakfast, so we ended up stopping at a Denny’s just outside of Orlando for a quick bite to eat. Once we were done, we headed on to UO and our hotel, the Royal Pacific Resort. Holy cow. What a gorgeous place. Imagine the beauty of the Polynesian, with the advantage of being 30 years newer. I can’t imagine staying anywhere else when we come to UO. The bellmen and front desk folks were awesome, and they had a room ready for us when we got there at like 11:00. We were in a water-view room (the pool complex) on the fourth floor of Tower 3. We were actually the very last room in that wing, continuing a long-standing tradition we have of being as far as humanly possible away from the elevators in whatever hotel we’re staying in. It’s become something of a joke at this point. But again, that’s a small thing.

The hotel brought the bags up while I went to park the car. We unpacked, relaxed for a few minutes, and headed out to see the parks. The grounds of the hotel are just amazing. The boat ride from the dock over to the CityWalk area is very convenient. I don’t think we waited more than about 8 minutes at any point during the stay. Very happy with the transportation.

We had decided to go to Universal Studios first. I had been there forever ago, all the way back in 1991, and I remember almost nothing about it. But when we were in California last October visiting Disneyland, we rented a car and met some friends at the Hollywood version of Universal, and had a really good time. We got our tickets from the little electronic kiosk, which was pretty convenient, and got through the turnstiles and into the park. Now, anybody who knows me won’t believe this, but I had absolutely no plan to follow. Normally, I’m “Pal Justin”, the one who knows which shows to go see, which attractions are skippable, and what time the 3:00 parade starts. Plus, occasionally, I’ll wiggle my arm and spout out inane Disney trivia. But for this one, I was in full-on wander around mode.

We headed back into the park and just sorta soaked it all in. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, perfect temperatures, a little overcast. It looked like everybody there was stopping at Jimmy Neutron and Shrek 4-D, so we kept walking back in and rode Revenge of the Mummy. A word of warning: UO prohibits any kind of carry-on baggage on about 75% of their attractions, which means no camera bags, backpacks, or anything like that. They have free electronic lockers next to the headliner rides, but I decided to leave the camera bag back at the hotel. Not worth fighting through the crowd. Mummy is awesome. Very cool.

After we got off, we got picked off the street to participate in a tv watching and rating thing. Basically, they showed us seven differently cut previews of the new NBC/Universal series “Kings”, and we had to tell what we liked and didn’t like. I tried to give coherent answers, but I wanted to jackslap the people around me. I could see their monitors, and I saw things like “I liked it when the tank blowed up” and “When your a king life is good” and “AWESOME!!”. (all grammatical errors [sic]) So now I think I have to watch at least the first couple of episodes of this thing. Plus they paid us $10 each, which was cool.

A word about Universal attractions. As a guest at a UO resort, we were entitled to flash our room cards and take advantage of the Universal Express Plus option, which, in Disney-speak, meant we got all-time FastPasses for every attraction and show. Wow. Now, granted, the park was not overly full, but what this meant was that we could do the entire park in about four plus hours. I think the longest we waited was about 10, maybe 15 minutes. And the posted time for the Simpsons ride was 70 minutes when we showed up. Obviously, it would be very hard for WDW to put a similar program in place, simply based on the fact that they have like 70,000+ hotel rooms on property. Day Guests wouldn’t ever be able to ride anything. But I can tell you that I will never again visit UO without participating (either by staying there or by buying it). It gave us SO much more free time to see the parks.

After that, we knocked out Jaws, Men In Black, Simpsons, got some lunch at the slowest-moving pizza line ever, did the E.T. Adventure (which made me twitch for Reese’s Pieces for a day and a half), then the Horror Make-up Show (which is underrated and really a good time), and then decided that we’d pretty much had enough for the day. Jaws is still fun. The MiB ride is better than either Buzz Lightyear (Orlando or Anaheim). The Simpsons Ride is one of the most enjoyable rides I’ve ever been on. It’s really well done, it’s funny, and it’s self-deprecating enough to be funny for the park-savvy guests, too.

We wandered out of the park, jumped the boat back to the hotel, and wandered out to the pool for a while. Eventually, we had to come back in and change for dinner, which was at Emeril’s restaurant at CityWalk. Now, having just gotten off the cruise ship, we weren’t expecting too much, but I have to say the food may have been better here than on the Wonder. The service was perhaps the best I’ve ever had, anywhere, and I filled out a comment card onsite and sent them an email when I got home to let them know what a fabulous time we had. Amazingly good food, and our table was out on the little porch area so we could watch the rest of CityWalk go by. If you have the opportunity while you’re there, I highly recommend Emeril’s. And, including dessert and a huge tip, the two of us got out of there for about $125. Back to the hotel and crashed out for the night.

 

[jlowejd5]

Today is Islands of Adventure. Whee! The park didn’t open until 9, and we were not in any kind of hurry, so we took our time getting ready. Now, the temperature today was predicted to be a high of 62. Which, for Ohio in February, is downright balmy. But we spent most of the day giggling at what had to be Florida natives wearing sweaters, scarves and gloves. Yes, gloves. First, most of the people wearing six layers looked like they weighed 85 pounds soaking wet, so step one is eat a sammich. We were perfectly comfortable in shorts and a windbreaker, which is honestly what I’d wear 365 days a year if I could get away with it. So yay us.

Huge benefit to the Royal Pacific Resort: their breakfast bar. I wish every hotel I ever stayed at for anything ever had exactly what the RPR had in their lobby. It was absolutely perfect. Milk, juice, coffee, tea, bagels, donuts, assorted pastries, cold cereal, instant oatmeal, plus all the toppings and fixings you could possibly want. So incredibly convenient. If I’ve got a big day of park touring in front of me, I don’t really want to sit down and have eggs and sausage. A bagel and an OJ and I’m ready to go. Granted, not the cheapest bagel I’ve ever eaten, but I’ll pay for the convenience.

Plus, I’m convinced that Disney has genetically engineered their breakfast sausage to drain every ounce of liquid out of your body about 45 minutes after you eat it, giving you just exactly enough time to get from your resort into the parks. So you come off of your first ride and you’re so dry-mouthed you can’t speak. But hey, here’s a $3.00 Coke to soothe your parched tongue. Brilliant!!

I have a general question about our vacation, which we happened to take when apparently all of Lawn Guyland, Bwahston, and New Hampshah were completely empty. And this is directed (mostly tongue-in-cheek) at my East Coast brethren: Are any of you ever happy? I mean really content with the world? We spent two and a half days in the theme parks watching one domestic squabble after another. Everyone was angry at everybody else in their traveling party. So we got to listen to hours of the most stereotypical nasally New York accents you’ve ever heard, getting louder as the day went by. Imagine being in a park where half the people sound like background actors from The Sopranos and the other half sound like Chandler’s girlfriend Janice from Friends, and both of them are having a bad day.

One of the problems I had (and this is just a pet peeve of mine) is that at every opportunity, someone was right behind me, reading a sign out loud. That drives me to distraction. Unless you’re traveling with a small child, a foreigner, or some sort of special needs person, everybody can read the signs. For example, the pizza place. They only had like three things on the menu. Pizza, chicken fingers, and beverages. Why do we need to recite the entire contents of the vast menu out loud? Three times? Grr. But anyway, please understand that I was glad to have all y’all there. If nothing else, it will make it that much easier the next time I talk to my friends from Parma (and that one’s just for the Clevelanders our there). Plus I like to study other accents so I can do them better, and this week was a mimic’s dream.

So on to the park. I had a little trepidation before we got here, based on some of the things I’ve read about the restraint systems in the big rides. I’m 6’4”, 270, but carry most of my size and weight in my chest – my suit jacket is a 52 Long. I’m athletic and relatively healthy, I’m just barrel-chested. Which always puts me on edge when I’m dealing with anything other than a lap bar. The over-the-shoulder harnesses are usually okay, unless (as they are at UO) they’re the ones where you have to buckle the strap to the seat. For example, I’m perfectly comfortable on the Mummy, Expedition Everest, Mission:Space, Space Mountain, etc. because none of those have the additional buckle at the bottom. And it’s even more frustrating when I see people who are grossly more out of shape than me who can ride with no problems because they carry all the weight in the hips and thighs. You can squoosh butt-fat. You can’t compress a ribcage.

Thankfully, UO has taken that into account. They have a couple of “Modified Seats” (in row 3 and row 6) on Hulk and Dueling Dragons that are specially designed for people with larger chest measurements. There are tester seats outside both rides, and I was extremely happy to realize that the modified seat actually gave me about an inch or two wiggle room. Yay! So I was able to relax a little bit, because those coasters are the big draw at IOA, and I would have been extremely disappointed if I wasn’t able to ride them.

So we did the Hulk first thing, and wow what a ride. That’s maybe the fastest / most G-forces I’ve ever pulled on a ride. But smooth and fun. Then we did the Spiderman ride, and that is honestly the best motion simulator I’ve ever been on. It was just outstanding. Not to be missed. We skipped the “Toon Lagoon” section, because it was a little too cool for water rides. We did stand around and watch some of the people coming off of Ripsaw Falls, and I have to say, those boats are absolutely flying when they come down that last drop. Very cool. Jurassic Park didn’t have much for us, as we weren’t doing the water rides, so we just sorta meandered through and looked at the theming and the decorations.

Next up was the Lost Continent and Dueling Dragons. Almost. I’m hoping when they open the Harry Potter area that the congestion eases up a little bit, but it’s a real nightmare to get from the Jurassic Park area to the entrance to Dueling Dragons. Non-riders congregate at the entrance/exit to DD, and just stand there, sheeplike, right in the middle of the way. They’re perched on every available surface (including the tester chairs, which had two squirming children in them getting what looked like ice cream all over the handles and seat surfaces) just sitting there. MOVE!! It’s also confusing to first-time riders, because the people exiting the ride are coming back down the “Express” entrance, so you begin to think the ride is down or something. We heard from a ton of people as we salmoned upstream that they were down to one car on each track. So we ended up turning around and coming back later.

After that, we walked over and did the Dr. Seuss sky trolley thing, which was pretty neat. I loved Dr. Seuss books growing up, and the attention to detail they have there is just outstanding. We backtracked a little bit to Dueling Dragons, and then took in the 8th Voyage of Sinbad stunt show, which is a fun time. The only downside was that the ampitheatre where they have the show is very shaded and was probably 15 degrees cooler than the outside. Great when it’s hot, but when it’s only 63 outside, not so much. That was a fun show, and we had great seats and enjoyed ourselves. We did Spiderman again, just because it was awesome.

We couldn’t bring ourselves to eat another round of park food, so we headed back to our hotel and ate at the pool-side bar. Just a turkey sammich, but so delicious. We did some hot-tub time for a while, then went upstairs and took a nap. Our dinner reservations that night were at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville. Great food, an amazing ambience, and good service. If you don’t like Jimmy’s music, don’t go. But we do, and the videos they were showing were fun and entertaining. And we got to see the volcano erupt twice. Very cool.

After dinner, we walked across to the Blue Man Group, where we had great seats on the aisle about half-way back. I’d never seen them live before, and we had a great time. It was loud, fun, entertaining, and very very cool. I highly recommend going to see them. That’s pretty much it for our last full day of vacation.

 

[jlowejd5]

This was kind of a goof-off day. We got up, finished packing, and dropped our bags off with bell services. After breakfast, we headed back on the boat to the parks. We started at Islands of Adventure. We were heading toward the Hulk when we both sort of realized that no cars were running on it. It was spooky quiet, and when we came across the little bridge, hundreds of people were heading back out of the queue area. Apparently, it was down. So we went over and did Spiderman again instead. The only other thing we wanted to do at IOA was the Poseidon’s Fury show, which probably wasn’t really worth the wait. It was neat, I guess, but there were WAY too many people and it was very hard to see what was going on, as most of the people just stopped in the middle of the viewing areas and forced those of us behind them to stand on the steps and try to guess what was going on.

Speaking of, I want to say a word to what I like to call the “four-wide” or “five-wide” families. You know the ones. They walk hand-in-hand down the streets of theme parks, and, depending on the size of the family, they could be fifteen or twenty feet wide. And almost always the outside of the line is a small child, being drug along, slamming into the hips of people trying to negotiate their way around the rolling blockade. And, of course, the speed of the five-wide family is set by the smallest and weakest among them, usually a crying child.

Now, I’m not saying every group should VonTrapp their way down the street in a single-file shortest to tallest line, but come on people, have a little common courtesy, please. Pair up, at least. Two- or three-wide is perfectly acceptable. Almost every theme park avenue is wide enough to allow four, maybe five pairs of people to pass each other. But if a six-wide meets a six-wide, you will shut down even Main Street USA. Not all of us want to walk as slowly as your three year old. So do us all a favor, skooch on over and let the traffic flow. Thank you.

We walked back past the Hulk, and it didn’t look like it was going to be open any time soon, so we left IOA and headed back over to Universal Studios. Here we mostly just picked up on some of the stuff we skipped on Thursday, such as Jimmy Neutron, Shrek, and Disaster!, plus we did MiB again. By that point, we were tired of being on our feet, so we sadly said goodbye to Universal and our vacation and headed back to the resort. We picked up our bags (again, the staff at the Royal Pacific is great), loaded them into the rental car, and headed for the airport.

Budget makes it ridiculously easy to turn your car back in at MCO (they come to meet you with a little hand-held thingie that even prints your receipt), so that was simple and easy, which I appreciate. We will rent from Budget next time we need a car. We head back in to the counter, where again we realize that not everyone is having a magical vacation full of dreams, wonder, and pixie dust. We were flying business class (6’4”, 270, remember?) so we were able to use the special check-in line. We paid a good deal of money for the convenience, and don’t feel guilty about it at all. There was probably a 15-minute wait in the coach check-in area, and nobody in the business class check-in line. So the guy at the business class terminal was helping to move coach class along, which makes perfect sense. So we step into the business class area, and he finishes his coach passenger, and then calls us over. The “next” lady in the coach line gives me this “excuse me?!?”, super-loud, as though I’d slapped her. The guy explains that he’s actually at the business class area, and that he needed to help us. And she keeps saying “but I’m next”. I was amazed I was able to keep my mouth shut. Yay for me. Michele said she spent the entire couple of minutes it took us to get checked in giving me an extra large helping of stink-eye. Whatever.

Relatively uneventful flights home, except we felt so bad for one of our fellow passengers. She was an off-duty flight attendant, either heading home or heading to Atlanta to fly out first thing in the morning. She was a very attractive young lady who (as we learned) was Thai. She got seated next to this guy, probably mid-fifties, balding, paunchy, overly loud, clearly in the middle of a midlife crisis. He talked to this poor girl from the second she sat down until the second they got off the plane, and probably followed her up the ramp and into the terminal. When she sat down, she had a rather large book and a pair of headphones, obviously intending to have some solitary time on the plane. And as the guy downed his fourth Irish coffee (on a flight that only lasted seventy minutes), I wanted to reach over, knock the Deepak Chopra book he was highlighting out of his hands, grab both lapels, shake him ever so slightly and say “dude, she is NOT going home with you…” But again, I did not. My force of will is something to behold.

And that’s pretty much the end of our vacation adventure. Thanks for reading, and I hope it was enjoyable.