Over the Christmas holiday we went to Tampa to visit my in laws. It had been a couple of years since we have been there. Since our last visit to Florida, Universal Studios has expanded and now has the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. My family is a huge fan of the books and movies so OF COURSE we had to make plans to check it out while there. Since our whole trip was only 5days, we decided to only stay at Universal for one day and try to squeeze the Islands of Adventure into 15 hours of fun.
We were allowed early access to the park because we were staying on property. My in laws got us a room at the Loew's Royal Pacific Hotel....it was AMAZING! So at 6:30am we were waiting at the gates in the dark to be let in. The clock struck 7am and the gates open and the trek to Harry Potter world begins. To get to it we had to go thru Dr. Seuss town....which is the cutest place I have ever been, but I will get to that later. We were on a mission. To get to Hogwarts. The picture above is what stood before us. Wow. So we choose to go thru the castle first. There are 3 rides in the Wizarding World but tons of experiences. As you wait in line for the Harry Potter ride it takes you thru Hogwarts. You get to see Dumbledore's office, the Defense against the Dark Arts class room, the hallways were full of portraits that speak to each other and you. The idea of this ride is you are following Harry on your broom around the grounds. It is was our favorite experience of the day. The other two rides are the flight of the Hippigriff, it is a fun little roller coaster and the Dragons Challenge is very fast and I have to admit I wasn't feeling the best when I got off it. Everywhere you looked was the village of Hogsmeade. It is like we were really there. They have all the shops, the train, the three broomsticks where you can go in and have some butterbeer. If there was one thing I would change it would be to make the shops larger. By mid day the crowds were so bad that there were lines to enter the shops as well as the rides. Once we got in we couldn't look around it was bun to bun. We enjoyed it the most early in the morning and then again at night after the sun went down (the people thinned out) otherwise it was too crowed to enjoy what a special place it is.
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| HoneyDukes |
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| Randy and his Pumpkin Juice |
Some other highlights of the day were the Spiderman ride it was 3D, and the Jurassic Park water ride it was really cool too. As I said earlier, I loved Dr. Seuss world. It was soo cute everything was off kilter. We rode the carousel and the train. We looked for the Grinch but couldn't find him.
Sierra wanted to stay in the park the whole 15 hours but at around 2 I couldn't take it any more. My feet were killing me. God only knows how much ground we covered. We went back to the hotel and rested until our reservations for dinner. We had reservations at Mythos.
It was a wonderful dinner, great atmosphere and our waiter was terrific. It started cooling off after dinner and that again made the crowds thin out....all the better for us. :)
The Hotel was beautiful and comfortable but we were definitely out of our league. Randy called down to the front desk to find out where the soda machine was located and they said they don't have soda machines on the premises but we could get a bottled water out of the wet bar for $7. Then we asked about breakfast. We figured that with a hotel this nice we would be getting a really wonderful breakfast. They said that they did have a breakfast buffet for $17.95 per person. Needless to say we stopped at Denny's on the way back to Tampa the next morning. Although we should have peeked in to see what they can possibly do to eggs and pancakes to make it worth $17.95.
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| Enterance to the hotel |
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| Christmas tree at the hotel |
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| The Fam (John, Sherry, Sierra and Randy) |
While we were in Tampa we also went to the Aquarium. It was pretty nice. They had alot of hands on activities. We got to touch rays, dogfish, starfish, and coral. We also saw a penguin show...too cute.
We had a great time but as with all vacations we were glad to go but glad to get back and we missed our puppies.
