Universal Experience

The final two full days of our Orlando trip were spent on back-to-back days at Universal Studios Orlando. But new rides have been built since my last trip, so there were plenty of new things to experience.

(Another thing that has changed is that J.K. Rowling has fully revealed herself to be cruel and transphobic in the time since my last trip, which certainly changed the way the Harry Potter areas at Universal hit. The debate of "art vs artist" is probably worthy of a whole blog post of its own sometime, but suffice it to say that I no longer wanted to buy any souvenirs that might put some additional royalty percentage in her bank account.)

We were parked in the garage at "Spiderman 451," which we jokingly noted was "the temperature at which Spiderman burns." And now I'll probably always remember where we happened to park on this one particular day.

We went directly to the new ride in the Hogsmeade section, Hagrid's Magical Creature Motorbike Adventure, figuring we'd knock off The Big New Thing first on the agenda. The wait was nearly two hours, including a 15 minute pause in line for new cars to be added to the track (where we happened to be stopped right next to a speaker that played the same safety notice -- which we memorized -- on a loop every 15 seconds). But the ride was fantastic. You sit astride a motorbike or in its side car, twisting and turning through different environments to see animatronics of magical creatures. The ride has multiple high-speed launches and a surprise best not spoiled if you're ever going to ride it. We all absolutely loved it.

We also road the newest Velocicoaster in the Jurassic Park area. It's a far more aggressive ride with incredible inversions, steep drops and climbs -- tons of high speed thrills. But the thing is, it's also remarkably smooth for such an intense coaster. (In sharp contrast, when we rode The Hulk later, lurching our brains around inside our heads as it wrenched our shoulders, every single one of us -- even the thrill-seeking kids -- agreed that we'd never want to ride that again.) Make no mistake: riding the Velocicoaster isn't a "sit back and relax" ride by any stretch. But afterward, you feel only the glow of a fun experience.

The rest of the day was spent mostly on rides I've written about before, and so in the interests of compressing the final two days of the trip into a single blog post, I'll just mention that we were around for an evening holiday parade (complete with fake snow that dazzled people in the crowd who apparently don't see the real thing much).

On day two, we tried a couple of new rides in the second Universal park. We went on Fast & Furious - Supercharged, thinking that regardless of the fact that none of us care much about that franchise, it would surely make a good thrill ride. Sadly, they very much found a way to mess it up. It's a low-thrill experience similar to the Skull Island: Reign of Kong ride, but inferior to Kong in every way. You sit for too long in front of woodenly-acted movie clips, the laughably thin plot is just stolen straight from Star Tours over at Disney (a now decades-old ride, mind you), and the actual chase at the culmination of the ride feels more like watching something than experiencing something. This ride sucks, and I like to think it's why hammy ride-attendants in the pre-show area have now added Jungle Cruise-style "I'm miserable too" banter to the experience.

The strangely themed Race Through New York with Jimmy Fallon isn't much of a ride either. It's another 3D movie with motion simulation experience. (But with the giant car built more like the audience stands of the Tonight Show set.) However, you don't expect much from a "Tonight Show ride," I dare say. So when you go on a kind of Mario Kart type of adventure for a few minutes -- you know, the kind of ride you might have expected Fast & Furious to be -- it's fine enough if you don't have to wait more than a few minutes for it.

But we wanted to end the day (and the trip) on rides we knew we'd really enjoy. And so we hopped back over to the other park to wait for Hagrid's Motorbikes again. A full-on ride breakdown for half an hour ballooned our wait to over two hours, but we stuck it out and enjoyed the ride yet again. Then we rode Velicocoaster twice, back-to-back -- a feat only possible for me thanks to the 45-minute line wait for each ride, giving me a buffer between the experiences.

I've talked a lot in these posts about my top 5 rides of the trip. The order shifts a lot, but the top 4 are definitely the Smuggler's Run, Rise of the Resistance, Hagrid's Motorbikes, and the Velocicoaster. Depending on my mood at a moment, that fifth slot might go (surprisingly) to the Ratatouille-themed ride at Epcot, or the new Guardians of the Galaxy coaster (also there).

But any way you slice it, we'd had our fill of fun that last night, as we also got our fill of food at a restaurant in Disney Springs. My feet felt anything but rested when I returned home, but overall I felt recharged and ready for the downhill sprint to the end-of-year holidays.