Universal Orlando 2017

@eeyorepoohfan I always fear worst case scenario now that it’s happened to me it was nice to see what the family suites were like and know that they would be great whenever we take trips with kids in the future. I am talking about these things in a way that assumes familiarity with them, sorry about that! So much is different from when you last went, you should totally go back if you get the chance – it’s amazing! So many great coasters and other great rides! Yes we were impressed with our accomplishment on the water rides, it didn’t look like it was going to happen! So much of the food at Universal is amazing! Overall though I would say Disney have the upper hand there. I would say about 50% of in park eateries are the typical, mediocre theme park fare: burgers, hot dogs, fries. But they do have good in-park table service and great options at CityWalk which are incredibly close. On the flip side, you don’t really need an ADR anywhere which is convenient. I would always suggest researching your options and not winging it so you don’t end up at an average burger joint! Yes, from my experience the lines are always super short at Universal in October, unlike Disney these days. Now that you mention it, I rarely saw a stroller or a scooter at Universal. They do have accommodations for those gets during security. The slow down at Disney is the manual searching and not having as many CMs at the checkpoints compared to Universal. I appreciate the need for a thorough check, they did that to me too, having me open things up, but they could see all of that much more quickly by just having a scanner instead of a person opening everything. And people kept cutting me at Disney, or one family would go one side while I was on one and my mom on the other, and they’d check all 5 people’s bags on the left side because they were one family before they got to me, ugh! The worst was one day at Epcot when we park hopped from somewhere else. It took 20 minutes!!! In that time we could have done at least one ride at Universal.

@roboz28 I love everything about Cabana Bay! The pool and lazy river are awesome as well as the beach area with free games. I even love the walk to Universal, it’s pretty and doesn’t take long at all!

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 18

For our last day at Universal Orlando I got up early to get another workout in at Jack LaLanne’s fitness studio. Afterwards I returned to my room, got showered and dressed, threw my last minute items in my suitcase and headed downstairs to check out from Cabana Bay Beach Resort my parents were downstairs waiting for us and loaded our bags into their car to take to Old Key West later to start the Disney leg of our trip. I met up with my brother who I hadn’t seen in 2 years he flew in the night before to join us we parked up and headed in to Universal Studios a little after park opening.

The first ride of the day was Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem, followed by Rip Ride Rockit. Next we did Jimmy Fallon again which I could have skipped, but my brother had never done it. This time we saw Hashtag the Panda while we were waiting, not the Ragtime Gals like the time before. Then we made our way into Diagon Alley to ride Escape from Gringotts. The wait time was showing 45 minutes, which is steep for rope drop in October, but we put our stuff in the lockers and joined the line anyway because my brother hadn’t been on this ride. Seeing how far we were from the loading station, I knew that was going to be more like a 60 minute wait so we decided to switch to the single rider line. As we did that they changed the wait time to 60 minutes. We basically walked on in the single rider line and once again the staff members were so incompetent that they put us all together in the same row of the same cart without even knowing we were a party of 5 it worked well for us but good grief! No wonder there was a 60 minute line at 8:30am!

We didn’t want Islands of Adventure to get equally crazy lines, so we took the Hogwarts Express over there next and made our way over to Skull Island: Reign of Kong. My brother rode for the first time and being an engineer proceeded to tell me how the ride works *eye roll* but he enjoyed it! We took a short shopping break after that because it was raining and we didn’t have ponchos or rain jackets. In true Florida style, the rain was short lived and we went back to Hogsmeade to ride Forbidden Journey. There was a lot of back and forth on this day, trying to zig when others were zagging in terms of wait times. After Forbidden Journey we went to Marvel Superhero Island to ride The Hulk and Spider-Man. Hubby and my brother stopped for a snack after that at the Captain America diner while I did some shopping with my mom. We regrouped and decided we were done and Islands of Adventure, so we took the Hogwarts Express back to Studios to ride the attractions we had missed earlier in the day.

If you haven’t experienced the Hogwarts Express (it does require a “park hopper” equivalent ticket) be sure to ride in both directions because the experience in different each way. After arriving back at Studios we rode The Mummy and Transformers, followed by E.T. and Men In Black. I think the longest we waited for anything all day at either park was 20-25 minutes. We were content with everything we’d accomplished, so at that point we left the park to grab a late lunch at Toothsome Chocolate Emporium. I had the quiche and soup and it was fantastic! I don’t remember what everyone else got.

After lunch, my parents headed out and hubby, my brother and I went back to Universal Studios in preparation for Halloween Horror Nights. We did a little shopping at the Christmas store then figured out which holding pen we needed to be in. We checked in there around 4pm or so. We picked the Finnegan’s holding pen in New York which gave us early access to the soundstage houses which in 2017 were The Shining, American Horror Story, The Fallen and Dead Waters. We got talking to a couple from Alabama and that helped pass the time. Around 5:45pm they let us out of the pen and into the houses. I’m getting nervous again just thinking about it! the event officially starts at 6:30pm so you truly benefit from waiting in that holding pen.

Our first house was American Horror Story which had scenes from seasons 2, 3, and 6 (Asylum, Coven and Roanoke). It was decent, there were some good scares and memorable moments from the show, but 2016’s house was far better. Then again seasons 2 and 6 are definitely two of the weakest so they didn’t have as much to work with. The next house was The Shining which was absolutely incredible! I can’t say enough good things about that house! It may have been my favorite. It had everything you expect would be in there, as well as some things that I wasn’t anticipating but they were still great and worked well. We moved on to the next two soundstage houses which were Universal’s own creation. Dead Waters was first, this was a voodoo themed house set in the bayou of Louisiana. So many amazing effects and scenery in that house! Then we did The Fallen which was really good although I don’t really know what the theme was. It was very gothic themed but the impressive part was they had gargoyle looking scare actors on wires who would fly and swoop down at you. So amazing!

By this time we had accomplished 4 of the 9 houses in an hour and all before the park was officially open to external ticket holders we looked at the wait times and everything was starting to pick up except for the houses at the back of the park. We headed over there, exploring some of the scare zones as we went. We saw a little of The Purge which I loved, Altars of Horror which was really fun, and Festival of the Deadliest which was just strange. We made it to our 5th house of the night: Ash vs. the Evil Dead. We waited maybe 10 minutes for that house. I had seen the movie but not the Starz tv show upon which this house was based. Therefore some of it was lost on me but I understood the general concept and it was done very well. Comedic but still scary, it was a lot of fun. My brother said that was his favorite house so far.

After Ash vs. the Evil Dead we stopped to see the Academy of Villains’ show, passing through the Trick ‘R Treat scare zone which I absolutely loved! It was so good! Unfortunately due to Irma, their stage and props sustained damage and they could no longer perform their original show. They had to create a whole new show that could not involve their original stage or any props. Kudos to them for figuring that out on the fly and coming up with an alternative, but unfortunately that show paled in comparison to their incredible 2016 show that I can’t stop watching in YouTube! Still I’m glad we saw it.

We decided to hit one last house and then call it a night. The Horrors of Blumhouse was showing a 25 minute wait so we joined the line for that. The line moved quickly and didn’t look long at all, but we soon realized it was much longer than it seemed as it snaked all the way around the line we could see, then back up again. On top of that they would let everyone in the Express line through (Universal’s equivalent of FastPass) until there was no one left in the Express line before they would let anyone in the standby line through. Ugh! It took forever! And when asked to do a survey on my experience that night, I let them know that was ridiculous. It got to us waiting for 25 minutes and we were only about halfway there, but at that point we’d already invested 25 minutes so we stayed in line. After waiting a total of 50 minutes we finally got inside the house. There’s a good chance I will wait 50 minutes for something but I want to know it’s going to be that long. It can be hard to judge wait times, granted, I’ll let you be 5-10 minutes off, no harm done, but to keep me waiting for twice the posted wait time is not cool. The posted wait time would have been accurate if not for the way they handled the Express line

The Horrors of Blumhouse was decent, but not worth the wait. It was enjoyable even though I hadn’t seen any of the Insidious movies. I also hoped there would be more scenes from The Purge since they said it would be themed to The Purge, Insidious and Sinister but there was only one short Purge scene. We decided to leave for the night and made our way through a few scare zones as we did so. We saw Invasion for the first time, then The Purge and Altars of Horror again. We met my parents in CityWalk and they drove us back to Old Key West. Thanks to online check in, I was able to stroll right up to my room with my bags at 10:30pm we unpacked a little and went to bed ready for Epcot the next morning. Our Universal trip had come to an end, although we did stop by two more times for more Horror Nights action.