Existing'sTricky: 31 Things: Visit the Harry Potter Theme Park

Thursday, November 3, 2011

31 Things: Visit the Harry Potter Theme Park

This past week I went with my Dad to Orlando, Florida. He had a business trip, and then we took an extra few days to visit Universal Studios. We basically had two days travel, I had two days to myself while he was in conference and we spent the weekend at Universal. Overall I'm glad we got to go on this trip, but it definitely had it's ups and downs. The downs included GPS issues, arriving at addresses that didn't exist, wasting time on my two days and barely getting anything done, rain on our first morning at the amusement park, lack of decent food choices, which all created a bit of crankiness on my part. On the bright side, I visited a really cool (and expensive!!) raw vegan restaurant called Cafe 118. I had a fabulous Tropical smoothie of pineapple, banana and coconut. I also ordered the raw lasagna, and a few desserts to go. Very friendly atmosphere, tasty food, but prepared to break the bank. And....of course there was the HARRY POTTER THEME PARK!!! Sadly it was raining for a bit that morning, but by the time we got the the Harry Potter section the rain had mostly stopped. They really did a great job recreating the town and Harry's school, etc. It all seemed very real. Most of the stores were just gimmicky, but we saw a demo at Olivander's wand shop, which was a lot of fun, toured the castle in a full action ride, and just had a really good time. The other positive was due to my health, my Dad had to wheel me around in a wheelchair (that's not the positive) and because of this, we got to cut through so many lines. They had regular and express lanes, express lanes were something people paid extra for, but often times they saw the wheelchair and the employees ushered us through the express lane. We rarely waited for rides or shows. Overall it was a pretty good trip. Here are some photos.