Florida Trip no3 - Day 7 - September 2019

[AJ86]

I thought the other day that I hadn't gotten round to finishing my trip report off for my September holiday. It was all written out just needed to tidy up a little. So with all the time on my hands i'll try and get the remaining days up.

So welcome to Day 7...

Index Here

Day 7 - 20th September 2019 - Universal and Epcot

Today we are up around 9 and are still enjoying the massive king bed, and much better upgrade from the queens we have had at Disney! What better way to start the day by having cheesecake for breakfast, the food of champions!

We have already paid for parking so I don’t bother to check out as the line is massive, I dump the stuff in the car and head out again to the dock to get the boat to the parks.

I don’t think there is a better way to travel really than by boat, would take this option any day over getting the bus to the parks or Disney Springs, yes it might take a bit longer but it is so much more relaxing!

After being dropped off we head to Islands of Adventure to pick up where we left off yesterday, we head into the shops to cool down as the sun is beating down hard already and we find ourselves where else but looking at Christmas decorations again! First ride of the day is the Hulk, on our Honeymoon this was being redone and on our last visit the line was to big for us to wait in, so today with the express passes is the perfect chance. We both try out the test seat, and fit in using the modified seat with the orange seat belts. Onto the ride and we are allocated the back row, I check if this has the modified seats on, which she says it has. Now instead of having the modified seats together say on the last couple of rows they dot them around the train, so we couldn’t ride together, they pull my wife off the train and send me on my own then pop my wife onto the next train, but rather then putting a single rider next to her they split up a group of friends and pop my wife in seat 3 of 4 with the friends all around. As I was half way round the ride unfortunately I wasn’t around but this was mortifying for my wife and they could have handled it so much better than they did, so my wife comes off the ride, tells me what happens and breaks down in tears. We go to find a staff member to complain to about how this was handled but they brush us off to guest services at the front of the park. Not wanting this to spoil our day we leave it as it is, and if there isn’t a queue when we leave we will address it then. So we take a sit in the shade, have a drink and people watch. I know we are both overweight and larger than average, but as we sat there I would say about a quarter of the people that walked past us were same size/shape as us if not bigger. I really don’t see how Universal can alienate that many people with their rides, if Disney can manage it don’t see why it is so hard for Universal.

We continue our day walking via the Jurassic park area, there is not a great deal going on here anymore, a lot of walls have been put up ready for the new ride, so I guess it will look a lot better in a couple of years. We end up again in our favorite place, the Wizarding World and Hogsmeade. First up and to make use of our pass again we head to the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, we check out the test seat and for both of us the lights turn green, we save a 40 min queue with the express pass, and once on the ride the restraints come down fine, he needs another click on mine, and for once they help and give it a little shove for me and with it comes the extra click. I think this ride is really cleverly done, the use of the screens and the movement really makes you think you are there, but after coming off it does make us feel a little wobberly!

Hagrids ride is open for a change and is currently showing a wait time of 90 mins, so we head to the test seat again, and we both manage to get green lights again just about, the guy monitoring it says that if we can hold the green for 5 seconds we will be fine, and also says its ok for us to help each other out and push the bars down. So we put out bits in the locker and the queue moves fairly quickly, and as far as I am aware the ride doesn’t stop once. We are in the loading station within the hour. They then ask you to do the test seat again and they very nicely select some thin people from the queue and of course the larger guests to make sure they are ok also. It comes our turn, now we know we have managed to get the test seat to go green twice outside now. Does that light turn green, not a chance, my wife gets hers to turn green with the help of me pushing down, but the lady says i’m not allowed to help, and I very briefly turn mine green also with a lot of tugging down. She then says we can’t ride, and I very sternly say to her that we did it outside and the attendant said it was fine for us to help each other, and that I was not waiting in an hours queue for nothing. She asks me to have another go and this time I get it to go green for a few seconds and she begrudgingly lets us go. So we get to the platform, directed to our car, we both sit down, pull our bars down, the attendants looks over and says all good and moves onto the row behind. no tugging or pulling needed. One thing I have noticed is that the test seats have no relation at all to the ride seat, I have no idea what the tolerance level is set at but it must be fairly high for them to be on the safe side, but it would save an awful lot of worry if they were truthful with the seats and it was a correct representation of the ride.

Anyway the ride was amazing, so so so so so much more than I expected and a lot faster, I won’t go into detail for those not wanting to know, and there are a number of YouTube videos if you do want to know. Even with the hassle of the test seats we both come off and say it is our favorite ride, beating Expedition Everest.
We celebrate with lunch at the 3 broomsticks and have a chicken and ribs platter thing with a massive corn on the cob, the ribs were lovely and tender, and the chicken, was well chicken!

After lunch we go to get the train to London (if only it was that easy to hop to and from Florida!) and we again enjoy the ride back and the different story the train tells.

We take in diagonally for the final time and we both say after the troubles of getting on rides and that the Harry Potter sections are the only bits that we really like in the park we will give universal a miss next time. We have a final ice cream at Florean Fortescue's and watch the deathly hallows story on stage, which is really well put together. It is now around half 3 and we are done with Universal so we head out of the park, back to the boats and hop into the car. As we drive under the Walt Disney world sign we both apologize to Walt for leaving and vow to never again!

We get back to the Movies resort and up to our room, this is the first instance we have with the Lovebugs, there were everywhere all down the corridor inside the room squashed on the walls, so we call guest services and they send a guy up to vacuum them up and clear the room for us, he tells us they are on call 24/7 so if we need them again just to shout!

We decide this evening that we would like to head back to Epcot to try out some more of the food and wine offerings, we have never seen illuminations and given that it will be no more in a week or so we decide that is tonight's plan, there are no FP’s for illuminations so I keep refreshing and eventually one pops up so I jump on it. We chill in the room for a while and we crack open a box of massive goldfish that we got from Walmart on our earlier ventures. We make a move around half 7 and as we leave the room we see we are actually closer to the Music bus stop that the Movies so a quick walk over the car park we are in the bus stop and in a few minutes a bus pulls up and with just the 2 of us in line we are on the bus and have a private ride for the 2 of us!

The Epcot golf ball looks amazing lit up so we stop for a photopass, and these really are a mixed bag sometimes, I look at the results on my app and we are way over exposed and look like white blobs standing in front of this beautiful ball!

We work our way round the world this time heading clockwise, our first booth of the day is at Thailand and we have the peanut chicken, not bad, but not great either and we give this a 6/10.

India is our next booth and we take a Korma to go, very nice choice, and not a bad size either, and we rate it 8/10.

We continue round the world and I am tempted by Germany and Italy but the Queue is massive for both so one for next time. We are working our way round the world and all the spots are grabbed around the lake, so we are glad we have FP for Illuminations. Morocco is our next stop, and we have the chocolate baklava, another good choice, but it is a bit dryer than I expected, and we give it a 6/10.

Our next stop is a favourite and we have the Japanese steamed bun, again 10/10.

We head round to the FP area for 950, this is a nice relaxed area, plenty of room to go around and we get a spot by the front. Illuminations was lovely, but we did say it was a little slow in the middle when the projections were on the globe. but you could see the fireworks at Hollywood studios, so may have been timed like this. We leave Epcot with the rest of the park as all the booths are now closed as are the rides, the wait for the bus isn’t that bad and we are on a Music bus and are back in the hotel and in bed by 11.

Another lovely day, although a mixed one at Universal.

Day 8