An Orlando Adventure: 2/21/13- 2/24/13

[violakat03]

It's been a very long time since I've posted a trip report here. In fact, it's been a long time since I've done a trip report at all. I usually post some or most of my pictures on Facebook (our California honeymoon still only has one day posted) but don't really do much more than that. I decided you guys could probably use some entertainment, and I'm bored, so .. here you are. I'll give you a fair warning that some of the pictures in this trip report are from our January trip, as I took more photos then than I did on this trip. Also, some of them are watermarked as they are more artistic than just documentary, so they've been uploaded to deviantart or my photography Facebook page.

My husband Nick (dare-to-fly) and I decided that we were going to use our last weekend before our season starts back (we both work at Dollywood) to celebrate his birthday. He's never gotten to ride a coaster on his birthday before, being that it's in February, so this sounded like an awesome idea. During our trip to Orlando in January, we had purchased Universal Studios annual passes, and already had Busch/SeaWorld passes so all we had to pay for was our hotel, gas and food.

Because it was Orlando's Food & Wine festival, as well as the weekend of the Disney Princess 1/2 Marathon, it was hard to find a hotel. A coworker of mine helped us find one on Orbitz for $45 a night, so we decided to just go with it as most places were charging $120+ or completely booked full. We headed out Thursday evening after Nick was done teaching for the long drive to Orlando. From our location in east Tennessee, Google Maps says it is 10 1/2 hours. We have yet to make it in less than 12 because we always manage to end up in a traffic mess somewhere. We finally pulled into our hotel around 5:00 am on Friday, to find that instead of the king-sized bed we'd reserved, we had a twin bed. That was the start of the hotel adventure.

After sleeping for a few hours, showering (we had ONE towel in the room) and getting dressed for the day, we headed to Universal Studios. When I discovered that preferred parking was only $5 more (making it the same price as normal Six Flags parking at $20), I went ahead and sprung for it, taking us several miles (or at least it seemed) closer to the entrance of the park. A few short moving-walkway rides later, we were in the Universal CityWalk area. It was not looking promising as far as crowd size, because CityWalk was packed. We headed straight for Islands of Adventure, because on our trip in January Dragon Challenge had been closed and we wanted our new credits.

Yeah, it was busy. In January, the entrance had been deserted. We were the only ones at the turnstiles. This time around, we had to wait in a line of 5-6 people at turnstiles, with every single one of them open. After seeing this, we were prepared for the worst.

When we got back to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, it was even more insane. I'm not even kidding that it was wall-to-wall people. I was glad I'd taken plenty of photos of Hogsmeade on our last trip because there was no way to get a clear shot of any of the buildings.

For those who haven't been there, WWoHP really is amazing. All of the features from the movies and books are there. The only thing I don't like is that the forced perspective, to me, is really obvious and so it doesn't quite give you that "just stepped into the movie" feeling that I got from Cars Land at Disney's California Adventure.

Inside Honeydukes, you can purchase all of the candy from the stories, including Chocolate Frogs, Exploding Snaps and, of course, Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans.

The Hogwarts Express is also present. On our first trip there, it wasn't really that exciting, but this trip they had a person in a conductor outfit that you could take photos with in front of the engine and it was producing steam in just the way a real steam engine would, which was very cool. I didn't take any photos of the steam because it was simply too crowded.

Just past the Hogwarts Express is the entrance to Dragon Challenge, formerly known as Dueling Dragons. Unfortunately, I never got to ride this marvel when it actually dueled, but having ridden it in non-dueling mode I can tell it would have been amazing.

After dropping my camera in a locker, we headed to the entrance, expecting to see a huge number for the wait time. Instead, we saw "20 minutes." Wait, what? How is it only 20 minutes with all these people here? Apparently, they were all just gawking instead of riding. The wait time was legitimately 20 minutes, and after making it through the highly-themed queue, we chose to go left at the split and ride the Chinese Fireball track (formerly just called Fire).

It was certainly a good coaster. I've never met a B&M invert that wasn't. However, it was just an invert to me, really. You could feel the missing duel elements. After riding Chinese Fireball, we got back in line (which was now down to 15 minutes) and this time turned right towards Hungarian Horntail (formerly Ice). I had a much different reaction to this side as it was a much faster paced, more intense ride than the other side. Again, you could really 'feel' the missing duel elements, but overall it was still a great invert. Probably my third favorite (behind Alpengeist and Afterburn).

We had a little altercation with the locker attendent at one point around this time, after which I went to guest services to complain about his outright rudeness. Guest services showed they know how to run things, took our complaint very seriously, offered us a refund of the locker price and a fistful of "Quick Queue" passes ... including one valid for Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit, which does not accept normal Quick Queue, so that was pretty amazing. Anyway, just wanted to throw that in there.

We also went up to ride Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. This is a dark ride inside the model of Hogwarts Castle.

You enter in front of the castle, and get to see the long covered walkway that makes several appearances in the movie (it's always been one of my favorite locations).

Once inside the castle, you have three options. Go straight to go through the stand-by line, turn left to take the single rider line (we chose this option) or go to the right to take the castle tour without riding. This is the only way you can get pictures of the inside of the castle if you have a camera that won't fit in your pocket. We took the castle tour to see what we were missing by not waiting in line and so I could carry my large camera inside. It is VERY dim inside, and using your flash washes out many of the special effects, so getting pictures inside is difficult.

By taking the castle tour, you get to take a sort of hidden stairway which is filled with moving portraits. Neither the stand-by or single rider lines use this stairway, so that was pretty cool to find out.

After this stairway, you enter Dumbledore's observatory.

Then proceed through the Gryffindor common room.

The ride works using a robotic arm and incredibly well-done theming which makes you feel like you are flying on a broomstick. You go through scenes involving Aragog and the Forbidden Forest, the Whomping Willow, and dementors and using domed video screens, you fly through the Quidditch pitch, around Hogwarts Castle, through the Forbidden Forest and several other scenes. It's very well done and is currently my favorite dark ride. However, it is VERY disorienting and includes some scenes that would be very scary for younger children. It has a fairly low height requirement, and I know at that age I would have been terrified.

Across from Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is Flight of the Hippogriff, a highly-themed Vekoma junior coaster which, even though it's a "kiddie coaster" is actually a pretty good ride ... and runs two trains!! We did not ride it on this trip as we rode it in January and didn't feel the desire to wait through a 20 minute line for it.

In between the queues for Flight of the Hippogriff and Dragon Challenge, is a recreation of Hagrid's hut. You can hear him talking to Fang inside.

Other neat fatures of WWoHP are a bathroom with Moaning Myrtle (which, according to my friend Curtis, is incredibly disturbing when you get motion sick on Forbidden Journey and then go into that bathroom to recover), Ollivander's Wand Shop (which always has a huge line to get in to), and various live entertainment such as a singing group of "students" along with their toads and owls and the random parade of students from Beauxbattons and Durmstrang.

4

And of course, no trip to Hogsmead is complete without a few drinks. In the Three Broomsticks, you can buy both pumpkin juice (which Nick chose) or butterbeer (which I chose). The pumpkin juice is interesting but I'm not a big pumpkin fan. The butterbeer is like a root beer made with butterscotch and is rather thick but delicious. Three Broomsticks itself, of course, looks like it came straight from the movie set.

After finishing up in the Harry Potter area, we headed off for the other park, Universal Studios. On our trip in January, we'd spend most of our time in Islands of Adventure and I felt like we hadn't given Studios enough time. This trip, we did things the other way around.

Continued in next post. I've lost a long trip report before by not splitting it up into several posts when something froze up, so a moderator can feel free to combine them once I'm done.

[violakat03]

I wanted to toss this picture in here too. On our first trip, we entered WWoHP from the opposite direction than we did the second time, entering by the castle rather than Dragon Challenge, which gave us this nice photo opportunity.

Makes me miss my pink hair. I had the last few inches of my hair dyed bright pink over the off-season but since I'm back at work it's all brown again. Moving on!

To get to Universal Studios from Islands of Adventure, you must travel most of the length of the CityWalk, which includes things like this gigantic Hard Rock Cafe.

At the entrance to Universal Studios is their gigantic globe, which I think is just kinda cool.

I also think their entrance plaza looks pretty cool.

One of the first things you see upon entering is the model of Gru's house from Despicable Me. This is the entrance point for Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem. This is a simulator ride where you sit in pods and watch a video on a giant screen. The premise of the ride is that Gru has invented a way to "minionize" humans. The girls are trying to give Gru a gift for his birthday and of course the minions try to help, so all sorts of chaos ensues. It's a fun ride, but we didn't wait for it this time around.

I adore the minions, so I love how much minion theming there is in this park.

We continued down the midway, heading for our favorite ride at Universal: Revenge of the Mummy.

This is an indoor Premier coaster, and like everything else at Universal is, it's highly themed. There's a short backwards section where you drop onto a turntable, then turn 180° to a launched lift hill, which has airtime as you crest the top. There's lots of headchoppers, unexpected turns and great effects. The only thing I don't like is how long the queue is!!! We used several of our Quick Queue passes to ride this multiple times even though the wait was very short (usually just a few trains), as the Quick Queue line was a very short walk.

One thing you notice about Universal is how long all of the queue lines are. You walk forever and ever, and pass miles of empty switchbacks. What's frightening to think about is that I'm sure during Halloween Horror Nights, those switchbacks are all full, which with how many each ride has I'm betting adds up to several hours worth of wait time. I'd love to experience HHN but certainly not on a Saturday. I get the feeling it would make the crowd on a Halloween Haunt Saturday at Kings Island look like child's play.

After Revenge of the Mummy several times, we stopped at the Classic Monster Cafe for food since Rockit was down. As it was last time, the food was great and really not all that expensive. By this time, Rockit was running again, so we put my camera in a locker and used our Quick Queue which got us past the 45 minute wait that had formed.

Rockit is a very cool coaster, but it's not one I'd wait an extremely long time for. The big 'draw' for this ride is the on-board audio. There is a small touch screen built into the restraint where you can select which song you want to listen to during the ride from a list broken down by category, and speakers are built into each seat. On my first ride in January, I chose Evanescence "Bring Me to Life" which is one of my favorite songs. This time I decided to try for one of the "bonus" songs. They're accessed through a hidden menu and you have to know the code number of the song you want to play. I'd looked up the number ahead of time for Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain." That made for an incredibly cool ride experience!!

I always find it funny when you're walking through the section of the park just past Twister:Ride it Out (which Rockit's track goes through part of the building for), you enter a very nice, scenic area designed to look like a downtown city street. And then there's this oddball coaster track through the middle of it. In my opinion, every city street should have a random coaster in the middle of it.

The signature element of the ride is the giant non-inverting loop. The track twists as it approaches the crest and again as it descends so that the car never actually goes upside down. It's a very different experience, and as someone who loves lateral air time, that was my favorite element.

Another cool feature is the lights on the cars. They are set to go along with the elements of the track so they will either rotate through colors, flash, or stay a solid color at certain points of the ride. It makes it a very wicked cool ride to watch at night. Next time I want to bring my tripod and get some night shots of it, as shooting hand-held I wasn't able to get quite the effect I was hoping for.

We also went to the back of the park to get some of the dark rides. I really enjoy Men in Black: Alien Attack, as Men in Black is one of my favorite movies. My mom and I have watched it together countless times, including the sequel, and I have a cat named Orion that looks like the one in the first movie.

This is a target shooter game, however the cars are on spinning axis (you'll hit random points in the ride and do 360° spins which are FUN!) and it is a dual track where you can always see the car you are "competing" with. You start off going through the scene from the movie where Agent J is supposed to be shooting the cardboard aliens and instead shoots the cardboard cut-out of a little girl carrying physics books. Then Zed interrupts to inform you that a bug has crashed into the surface and we need to go take care of it and you move into a scene of a city street with aliens popping out of everywhere. The aliens themselves don't have targets on them, but I discovered if you can get the eyeballs (there's a laser "sight" so you can see what you're hitting), it will rack up tons of points. There's also a point where Zed says the bugs have infiltrated the agency and to take them out. At this point you turn to face the other car and each time you hit the target above the car, it sends them into a spin and gives you 16,000 points. Then as you reach the end of the ride, you hear Agent K say "remember the red button I told you not to push? Push the little red button." Most of my car didn't figure out that if you hit the red button on the stand for your gun, you get 100,000 bonus points, but I did! I ended up the ride with something like 935,000 points. It was pretty absurd. Everyone else in the car was in the 100,000-200,000 range.

After Men in Black: Alien Attack, we headed to the Simpsons Ride, which is a motion simulator ride where each pod of 6 people has an individual room and screen.

My brother is a HUGE Simpsons fan, so I took a ton of photos of the area and some of the merchandise in the gift shop on my phone and sent them to him.

I have to admit, I was kind of disappointed the Kwik-E-Mart didn't have a Squishee machine.

After the Simpsons, we went back to Revenge of the Mummy for a few more rides and then as we were ready to head out of the park, we got caught up by this huge character parade. It has some pretty awesome floats, plus lots of dancing characters.

Despicable Me and the minions started it off.

They had people dressed as minions dancing. On our last visit, I got a picture with one of them.

And of course, Gru and the girls.

Followed by my favorite Spongebob character, Patrick.

And some roller skating fish.

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

And everyone's favorite grumpy octopus, Squidward.

They also had characters from Hop and Dora the Explorer. Anyone who saw me taking their picture made a funny face at me or blew kisses to me, but I don't want to fill this entire post just with pictures from the parade. Even though it was the best amusement parade I've seen outside of Disney's Electrical parade.

After getting clear of the parade, we finally headed out of Universal Studios and made our way back to Islands of Adventure to grab some rides on the Incredible Hulk.

This unique B&M sit-down (not floorless) coaster features a launched lift hill through a tunnel, at the top of which you go through a zero-g roll above the midway, then drop down across the lagoon and up into a cobra roll followed by a giant loop. This thing seems to have inversion after inversion and keeps very solid pacing throughout. It features a splashdown effect before the cobra roll, mist effects and tunnels.

We finished off our evening by riding the Hungarian Horntail side of Dragon Challenge as many times as we could before close (I think we got four rides in a row by getting off and going through the child swap door) and then finally heading out.

Some friends of ours that are Castmembers at Walt Disney World had asked us to join them for dinner at Downtown Disney where we ended up parking over a mile away and didn't know about the ferry boats! Either way, our tired feet carried us to dinner, where we had a lot of fun, then one of the CMs told us about the boats to get back to our cars and we finally headed back to our hotel. Our friend Lon, who is an Imagineer and character artist, wanted to visit Busch Gardens with us the next day and we made the necessary arrangements.

Instead of ending this on a "happily ever after" note, when we got back to our hotel, where they hadn't moved us to a room with a bigger bed, we discovered that they'd taken our dirty towel and not left us any new ones! It just kept getting better and better!

Once again, to be continued in next post, which will be tomorrow because it's almost 5:00 am and I need to go to bed!!

[Jr for Birdy]

Thanks for the trip report,brought back great memories! My wife and I also love Revenge of the Mummy! The first time I was in line to ride it the guy walking on stilts leaned over into my face walking through a doorway and scared the living heck out of me! I screamed and jumped like a little girl! My wife and oldest kid still make fun of me whenever we look at our pictures.I cant wait to go back someday.

[flightoffear1996]

I love Universal and want to go back again. last time I went it was 1999

[jdawg1998]

Great trip report. I usually don't read through long ones like these, but I did this time!

[BB1]

Great pictures of the park and a well written report I must say! I haven't even got to go to Universal or Islands of Adventure in such a long time and the Harry Potter area looks very promising to see, so this just makes the anticipation grow! Thanks for taking time to post this!

[Voicetek]

Wow, the last time I was at Universal Studios was back in 1997! It looks like a whole different park! When I was there, they really didn't all that many rides. There was the King Kong ride, Jaws, the Back to the Future simulator ride, and maybe 1 or 2 others. This looks amazing though! I'm glad to see that they've added coasters as well as other types of rides that are relevant to today. I'll have to try to make it down there again soon!

Also, what kind of camera do you use? The pictures were very good!

[jdawg1998]

^Yet at the same time, they've gotten rid of many good rides. I'm very disappointed I never got to ride Jaws or King Kong. Those seemed like some pretty cool rides. Oh well.

[violakat03]

Wow, the last time I was at Universal Studios was back in 1997! It looks like a whole different park! When I was there, they really didn't all that many rides. There was the King Kong ride, Jaws, the Back to the Future simulator ride, and maybe 1 or 2 others. This looks amazing though! I'm glad to see that they've added coasters as well as other types of rides that are relevant to today. I'll have to try to make it down there again soon!

Also, what kind of camera do you use? The pictures were very good!

Every ride you mentioned is sadly gone! I never got to ride any of them either.

I usually shoot with a Nikon D7000, though I occasionally carry my Nikon D40 into the parks because it's lighter weight and is a less expensive camera if something happens to it. I'm a photography student and I've used a couple of my park photos (such as one you'll see in my next section, which is a sunset photo of Cheetah Hunt) in my portfolio.

[jzarley]

Great trip report...nice mix of pictures and narrative :-)

It's interesting that you said the parks were so busy for Februrary...I usually go to Universal the week of Valentine's Day and have usually found the crowds really small. However, I'd read some stuff from people who had been there this year during that week and it was very busy. I decided to go to SoCal this year and experience Cars Land at DLR instead and it was EXTREMELY busy as well. So, it sounds like so far 2013 is a pretty good attendance year for all parks.

[Voicetek]

Yeah I think it's sad that they removed some of the classic rides. King Kong was a really unique dark ride! To ride through the ride and see a full size animatronic King Kong was pretty amazing! I do wish that they would've left some of these classic rides and just added some new stuff! I didn't have any complaints with these rides when I was there in 1997, my only complaint was that there wasn't enough to do. Once you rode the 4 or 5 themed rides they had, there was really nothing left to do except walk around or see a show. I know parks think that they constantly need to improve their park by upgrading or replacing old rides, but sometimes you just need to leave the classics alone

[rcwizard13]

Your photos are fantastic! I don't think I've never seen such quality before.

[Creed Bratton]

Great trip report Kat!!! Thanks for sharing, looking forward to the next installment!

[jcgoble3]

Excellent report so far, can't wait to see the rest!

Oh, and mind telling me what hotel you were staying at? 'Cause I want to make sure not to stay there next time I go to Orlando.

[violakat03]

Oh, and mind telling me what hotel you were staying at? 'Cause I want to make sure not to stay there next time I go to Orlando.

Claremont Inn on Irlo Bronson Hwy. Avoid it like the plague! It might actually have the plague.

When we got up on the second day, Nick went to the front desk to ask for towels, because remember that they took our only one and didn't replace it. The front desk said they were out. So he found a housekeeper. She said she was out. So we said, forget it, we'll improvise. I used a pillowcase to towel off my hair and then spent forever with the hairdryer (probably would have been just as fast to air dry it). Nick went a step further by taking the sheets off the bed to use as a towel!! One thing we found entertaining was they couldn't seem to leave us towels, but I kidnapped the bottle of lotion daily and it was replaced with a new one every single day.

Ok, moving right along! Day two of our trip was Saturday, February 23 which happened to be my husband's 28th birthday. We'd made plans in advance with our friend Lon to go to Busch Gardens Tampa for the day.

After seeing the picture above, for some reason Photobucket is absolutely destroying the color balance in my photos. So they all look more washed out and blue overtoned than they should. No idea what's up with that.

We stopped outside the park in Tampa for lunch, and it was there that we discovered that the Tampa area was under a water boil advisory. Because of this, area restaurants were not serving fountain drinks and instead handed out cans, which was kind of interesting.

Thanks to our platinum passes, we enjoyed the complimentary preferred parking and headed to meet Lon inside the park. We started off with Gwazi, because, well, why not? It's pretty much the closest to the front of the park so it seemed like a natural starting point. Unfortunately everyone else apparently thought the same thing. We shrugged at the posted 20 minute wait and got in line anyway. For those that haven't heard, Gwazi is also no longer a dueling coaster as the Tiger side has been closed off until further notice. Lion is running with one train from each side.

The 20 minutes was a lie. After waiting an hour, we finally got into the back two rows and went for a spin. There's really nothing remarkable about this coaster to me. It feels like a tamed-down poorly maintained version of Kentucky Rumbler. It doesn't have as much airtime as most GCIs do, and since it's not exactly the smoothest wooden coaster I've ever ridden, I'm sort of glad it's running Millennium Flyers instead of PTCs. It's sad that Busch is, in my opinion, wasting what could be a fantastic ride.

After wasting an hour of our lives we'll never get back, we decided to head to SheiKra. It had been closed during our January visit to receive a new coat of paint. Now the trains were gliding along nice shiny red rails.

Having ridden Griffon before, I sort of knew what to expect. I really enjoyed Griffon but had heard mixed reviews as to which people thought was better. We waited an extra train to get front row (it was only a 15 minute wait overall), and by luck got the seats on the end. I really like hanging off the edge of the track, and this was Nick's first dive coaster so I figured he'd like it too.

SheiKra has more intense interactions with it's environment than I think Griffon does. I'm a big fan of headchoppers and "near miss" elements, so for me, I found SheiKra to be the more exciting ride. I especially loved the headchopper as it passed under the MCBR. Something I found interesting was during the train ride, the conductor told us the story behind SheiKra's name. It's named after a species of bird that dives straight at the ground in order to catch it's prey. Very fitting for a dive coaster!

Of course, SheiKra is known for it's splashdown. Unlike Diamondback, you cannot stick your arm in it and get wet. However, it does have a "splash zone" where it soaks the midway, and anyone standing in it, as the train passes. I took some "kamikaze" shots where I ran into the splash zone, shot for as long as I could and still get out safely, and ran for my life to keep my camera dry.

After SheiKra, we stopped for a snack (Nick and Lon's definition of a snack was dramatically different than mine) at the Zambia Steakhouse. They have a huge variety of offerings, from BBQ ribs to turkey wraps, salads, fresh fruit, bread pudding, turkey legs, and so many more I could never name them all. I got a giant cup of fresh strawberries, the guys both got full meals. At this point we discovered how Busch Gardens was handling the water boil advisory - instead of fountain drinks, they had a huge stock of 20 oz bottles and were pouring them into cups. Nick and I purchased a souvenir cup, and throughout the day when we purchased 99 cent refills we were just handed a 20 oz of our drink of choice. This really impressed me, as I'm sure many parks would just tell you that you had to buy a bottle instead. We made sure to stop by guest services on our way out to leave a compliment for the foods team!

Kumba was down for annual maintenance, which was very disappointing for us. I was blown away by the intensity of it in January and it climbed very high into my ranks. It is absolutely relentless, with no reduction in forces between elements. Like we noticed pretty much every coaster at Busch Gardens does, it goes on FOREVER. I swear, Busch coasters are twice the length of coasters at most parks. It's like they never end.

Since Kumba was down and we really wanted to get to Cheetah Hunt, we decided to ride the Saranghetti Express, their train ride. It picked us up near SheiKra, carried us through the Saranghetti plains animal viewing area, and conveniently dropped us off on the other side of the park near Cheetah Hunt. On the way, we passed another coaster closed for annual maintenance, Scorpion, which is a Schwarzkopf looper.

This is a great, fun little ride, though it was only running one train and therefore had nearly an hour wait on our January trip. I've heard it pretty much always runs one train, even though they own two, and therefore always has a long line. Which is sad, because it's a fun ride, and it's a Schwarzkopf which are starting to become rare, but it's not one I'd wait a long time for.

You can get some fanastic animal views if you continue on around, between Cheetah Hunt and the third station near Kumba.

The giraffes crack me up. There is an upcharge tour where you can actually ride in the back of an all-terrain vehicle and feed the giraffes, so they LOVE people.

We got in line for Cheetah Hunt, which was posted at 35 minutes. Unlike Gwazi, this one was accurate for the most part. I believe we ended up waiting around 40 minutes. I really enjoy Cheetah Hunt so I didn't mind the wait as much. Plus it was fun to have lots of talk time with Lon, whom we don't get to see very often since he pretty much lives at work (remember he's a Disney Imagineer). We finally boarded the back row (where else?) of the train and off we went.

Cheetah Hunt is a fun little Intamin that ticks all my boxes. It's got multiple launch sections, lots of fun whippy turns, an incredibly unexpected heartline roll (the only inversion) and nice surroundings. It also has a cool back story, if you pay attention to the signs in the queue. The "tree" section that most people are familiar with as the most commonly photographed area of the ride, is a nice slow, lazy stroll through the structure after the first launch.

This represents the cheetah laying around in a tree while watching for prey. Suddenly, he sees something on the horizon, jumps from the tree and he's off!

There is a section where you do this cool left-right-left-right swerve while flying low across moving water, a near miss with a waterfall, tunnels, launches ... yeah, it's a pretty great ride!

Plus, they have two male cheetahs in a habitat right across from the entrance. I spent quite a bit of time watching the big kitties.

After Cheetah Hunt, we were feeling pretty much done with the park, because we had plans for dinner and another park afterwards in Orlando, so we headed back to Montu to grab our last rides of the evening.

Strangely, even though all the other rides had a moderate wait, Montu was a complete walk-on.

Montu was a bit of a strange experience to me. It had been built up by many other enthusiasts so I was expecting it to really blow away a lot of other rides. In January, I was certainly anticipointed. I think that worked out to my advantage on our second visit, because I was expected it to be a let down after Dragon Challenge the day before. Instead I had the reaction of "okay, that was a LOT better than I remember it being!"

Hey, it was a walk-on, so of course we rode it twice.

After that, it was time to grab a bag of cotton candy and head back to Orlando, where we were meeting our friend Dainan for dinner. We waved goodbye to the cheetahs and cheetah hunt, along with Lon who had to go back to work, stopped to giggle at the alligators, and away we went.

We met Dainan at Logan's Roadhouse for dinner and then piled in his car to head off to our next destination.

Yes, Dainan is a Castmember also. He's in attractions, and he wanted to show us his "home" in the Magic Kingdom. We parked at the Polynesian and rode the monorail over, then used our hour and a half of remaining park time before close to basically run around and grab all the credits, which was mildly complicated when Space Mountain was down.

We started at Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, previous my only Disney credit. We picked up Rock n Roller Coaster in January thanks to Lon in a similar few-hours-at-night trip to Hollywood Studios. Nick and I had ridden BTMRR at Disneyland, but I have to say, WDW's is much better! Especially riding it with a Castmember who knows the ride inside and out and was able to tell us all kinds of cool things about the scenes, blocks, and how to get the best experience out of the ride. Plus, it was a walk-on. How handy.

After the Mountain, we walked through the new Fantasyland (unfortunately we were rushing too much for me to grab any pictures of the castle from Beauty and The Beast, which is my favorite Disney movie) on our way to Goofy's Barnstormer, a Vekoma roller skater. Like IoA's kiddie coaster, Barnstormer runs two trains and they had insane fast dispatches. We waited 5 minutes to ride and it was, as most Disney rides are, significantly more fun than it's similar counterparts.

Finally, we made it to the last credits of the park: Space Mountain, sides A & B. It was down when we got there, but the Castmember at greeter informed us it would be back up within 20 minutes, so we decided to wait for it.

While standing in line, a family that was leaving the park offered us their fast passes that they weren't going to be able to use. We migrated over to the fast pass lane and were able to get on about 10 minutes after it reopened. By this time we were really pushing it on time, so we weren't sure we were going to be able to get both sides. We were directed to B side (the signage indicates it is "Omega") and loaded into the back car.

We had ridden Space Mountain at Disneyland, and it landed in both of our top ten steel rankings. Dainan had warned us that WDW's was quite a bit different and that we might not like it as much. Quite to the contrary, we both liked it more! WDW's has more airtime, more laterals, and more of that "going to fly off the track" feeling.

Thanks to some Disney magic, we were able to get right on to A-side ("Alpha") after our ride, thus completing our credit quest. We also got to see an evac of the People Mover, which was kind of entertaining considering it goes right through Space Mountain.

We took our time heading out, since I was snapping a million and a half pictures of Cinderella's castle. A Castmember offered to take a picture of the three of us together, which was definitely very handy!

We stayed on Main Street USA long enough that we got to see the "kiss goodnight" show on the castle. My last trip to the Magic Kingdom, I was 6 years old, and I don't remember the castle being used for displays, so that was really cool for me. I took a million more pictures of the castle (I won't bore you all with them, I basically just took pictures of it lit up in every single color) and then it was time to say farewell to our brief Disney magic.

After all, we had another day of coasters and a long ride home ready for the next day!!

[jdawg1998]

Sorry for not commenting on your recent post, but I just thought it was funny that the hotel you stayed at gets a 2/5 on Trip Advisor.

http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g34352-d84770-Reviews-Claremont_Kissimmee_Hotel-Kissimmee_Florida.html

[violakat03]

How did it end up even managing a two?!!

[The Interpreter]

What a truly wonderful trip report. Awesome!

Is Dainan from New Jersey?

Terp, who likes to ask questions.

[SonofBaconator]

Busch Gardens Tampa is hands down is my favorite place to go when I'm in Florida. Glad to see you had fun!

[violakat03]

Terpy - Why yes, he is. I wonder where you would know him from.

[westcoaster]

great trip reports!

[74Gibson]

Kat, you have always done such great trip reports! Thanks so much for your time and effort!

Your last photo of Cheetah Hunt is the best I've seen. NIce work!

[SupremoSteveo]

Well done trip report! I've never been to Universal studios, but now I kind of know what to expect. Keep up the good work!

[Original]

Wow, a lot of detail. Nice report. I love your pics, they're all so neat. And I think its really neat you have a cat named Orian from MIB. We're thinking of getting a pug named Frank.

[violakat03]

Thanks for all the comments guys! I'm going to try and get SeaWorld up here in a little bit to finish it out.

By the way Terpy - Dainan says no, he's from New York.

[The Interpreter]

Yep. That's him. That question always annoyed him. Something about gadvWOW!

It's a small world, after all!

[Creed Bratton]

Great addition to your PTR Cat!!!! Looking forward to the next one!

[TheCrypt]

Great trip report! I love all your photos, especially the last Cheetah Hunt picture. I anxiously await your Seaworld installment.

Do you know the reason why Gwazi Tiger is closed? It was closed when I visited last December, too.

[flightoffear1996]

Best trip report I have read in awhile.

[bkroz]

Loved it! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Nice to see Pharos Lighthouse as the introductory photo, too.