Day 28 - One last tourist trap

Today was an odd day in that it started with the sounds of an alarm clock - something I hadn’t heard in nearly a month.  Because we wanted to get into Universal Studios early and try to beat some of the crowds we knew would be there, we set the alarm to get us moving.  Hesitantly, we got out of bed and jumped into the car to cruise across the LA metro area.  Unfortunately, we encountered two things that LA is famous for - smog and traffic.  Ugh.

As was expected, especially since it’s Friday, we encountered a lot of people at Universal Studios.  The lines proved to be manageable though, with the exception of the Mario Kart ride which never went below 2.5 hours while we were there.  We decided that no ride could possibly be worth that kind of a wait so we just explored the area of Super Nintendo before we moved on.

One area that I was excited to see was the Harry Potter area.  Apparently, they had opened the Harry Potter area in Orlando first, but it was such a success that they did one in LA as well.  I’m glad they did because it was such a treat to walk down Diagon Alley and have the fictitious land become real for a while.  I only wish they made an entire theme park for it.  One thing they were doing was selling interactive wands.  While I would have liked to have done this, the $50 on top of a very expensive day just didn’t feel worth it since they would have only been interactive in this small section of the park.  

Instead of the interactive wands, we rode the two rides while in this section.  One was a true roller coaster that was the ride of the Hippogriff.  It didn’t have a “stomach drop” section, but was a smooth coaster that went around in circles.  The whole family enjoyed it, though it felt very short.  The other ride was a virtual coaster.  It highlighted many of the key moments of the series, but they included a lot of dementors which Sebastian really didn’t like.  The best part of the ride though might have been the line.  There were so many details and they kept you interested the whole time so waiting in line felt almost like a treat!  

After the Harry Potter area, we covered the animation sections of the park - specifically Springfield (Simpsons), Kung Fu Panda, Secret Life of Pets, and then Minions.  Each area had either a film or a virtual coaster and all of them were pretty fun.  Again though, the details of each of the lines made it so easy to stand in line - even for the Simpsons which was over a 45 minute wait.  The ideal weather also made line waiting pretty tolerable.

After the animation sections, we went down to the bottom level of the park.  We tried Super Nintendo world, but it was largely a bust for us.  They had but one ride and it was the 2.5 hour wait.  There was more interactive stuff, but it also came at an additional charge and we were started to run out of has.  Jurassic World, the Mummy, and Transformers were there as well, but they are not our jam so we skipped them and headed back up to the upper level.  I chose to take the stairs this time and there were over 450 of them!  They weren’t kidding when they said that there was a lower and upper level!

Once back up, we decided to do just a couple more rides.  Secret Life of Pets was our first choice, but it was closed to only reservations.  Instead we went back to Minions and then repeated Kung Fu Panda.  With our day done, we stopped at the gift store - both boys were anxious to spend their allotted dollars.  Robinson didn’t have much left so he chose lollipops.  Sebastian seemed a bit jealous of Robinson’s blanket so he picked his own with Minions all over it.

Overall, Universal Studios probably wasn’t something we need to repeat.   There were only a few rides (though they did have some excellent line waiting), but it’s just not a fit for us.  

Despite trying to leave at a reasonable hour, we ran into more LA traffic.  It’s perhaps not too surprising since it was Friday afternoon, but it was frustrating when we all just wanted to get back to camp.  We still got to camp at a reasonable hour, but apparently on the weekends our little hidden secret gets filled it.  It was CROWDED at Chino Hills - very different from what we experienced in the prior evenings.  While we made dinner, the boys chose to start watching  Rise of Gru.  The evening ended pretty noisily at camp, but we were all tired so the noise didn’t keep any of us up very long.

Total Mileage - 5,069

# States (Provinces) - 14