Universal Studio & Harry Potter World–Part 1

Part of this whole adventure south was with a promise to Terry that we’d visit Harry Potter World at Universal Studios.  We did the Disney World thing in November when we were heading south.  Now that we’re heading north again, it was time to follow through with that promise.    It’s not a cheap thrill. Universal has two worlds of Harry Potter and in order to visit both of them, we needed to go more than once. A one day, one park pass starts at about $100 but since we needed a multi-day and multi-park pass we ended up with a 3-day park-to-park pass.  In addition to the price of the tickets, there’s an additional $20 per day parking fee.   Ouch!

New screening equipment has been installed at Universal.  I’m not sure they’ve worked out all the kinks yet.  The lines were long and the crowding bad.  Eventually, we made it through and were on our way to visit.  Crowds weren’t really bad through most of the park except for Harry’s World.  We felt Universal Studio definitely topped Disney’s Hollywood Studios.   It was Amazing!

Here we go!

But, there was more.

Most of the time was spent at Hogsmead in Harry Potter’s World.  This part of the park was packed!  The shops and lockers in Hogsmeade were small, crowded and dark.  This wasn’t so in other areas of the park.  We saw many Harry Potter’s walking around in the black cape.  There was also plenty of entertainment.  It was a fun, fun day.

There were quite a few rides in each themed area.  Some of them only had a 5 minute wait time but the rides in Hogsmeade were much longer.   The Forbidden Journey through the classrooms and corridors of Hogwarts was only accessible by standing in line for the ride.  That one was a 60 minute wait.  No loose items including purses were allowed.  Free lockers were provided with your fingerprint as the access code.  I really hated putting my purse in a locker.  I had all kinds of thoughts about that.  And, one came true.  The locker didn’t recognize my finger.  Thank goodness they had human monitors.

The ride?  Well, Terry loved it.  I hated it.  It was a deja vu thing with an “orange” ride we had taken at Epcot.  I'm not fond of almost being upside down and I guess the motion sickness warning on the sign is true.  With my eyes closed most of the time I did survive the ride. 

We’re not ready to say been there, done that.  We have two more days left on our tickets and have yet to visit park number two where the second Harry Potter World exists.  That will probably be Tuesday.  This is a holiday weekend and the last thing we want is to get in an even larger crowd.  Even though the line was long and crowds huge at the entrance, it was definitely worth visiting …. otherwise we wouldn’t be going back!

‘Tis life on the road.