Universal Studios First Days

On Monday we moved hotels to Endless Summer which is a budget hotel on Universal grounds. We really loved it-it is brand new and they thought of everything! It was also so nice being a quick bus ride to the park vs the long drive to the Disney parks. Since we had 5 day passes we went into the parks in the afternoon to get the lay of the land and meet up with the Getz family.








Dr. Seuss ride. Couldn't resist!

Dave, Ike and Alec posing with the Hogwarts Express.

The boys really wanted to try out the interactive wands so we went to one of wand ceremonies hoping someone in our group would get picked for the demonstration. Dave got picked!

Ollivander's was so cool.

Dave getting measured for his wand. They put on a whole show of trying out wands and certain ones not working right. It was pretty funny.











After we walked around the Wizarding World a little we took the train over to the other park and went on the Simpson's ride.

With Homer and Bart.

Back to the hotel to swim!


































Tuesday we got up pretty early since we had early morning access to the Universal side. We wanted to hit the Harry Potter stuff on that side before it got too crowded. This was a great strategy so we continued with it the rest of the trip. We were usually done with the parks by around 1 every day doing this.









Outside King's Cross.

Gringotts dragon.

The line for the Gringotts ride was so cool.

We all loved this ride!

Ike and I loved the Mummy ride! We rode it so many times during our trip.















We rode most of the rides on the Universal side to headed over to the Islands of Adventure via the Hogwarts Express.

The castle from Hogsmeade.











We rode the Jurassic Park ride, Kong, and then since we were heading back to our hotel for a while we rode the log ride and proceeded to get drenched.

These ride pictures are pure gold.

We went back to the hotel and rested and swam for a bit. Then we headed back to the parks to meet up with the Getz family for dinner and viewing of the light show.

Dinner at the Three Broomsticks. Ike had to get a butterbeer!

Dave and Alec enjoying their feasts.













We rode the Forbidden Journey and the Flight of the Hippogriff before dinner and then went on another round of Forbidden Journey while my mom and Rich got us spots for the light show. They were the true champions of the day-we had a fantastic spot!

The Dark Arts light show was AMAZING.

We sure packed in a lot of stuff in 1.5 days! We still had two full days left at this point which was so great because we got to ride all of our favorite stuff again and really explore!