Entering Hogsmead felt like Harry first showing up in town, not sure where to turn
We are both fans of the Harry Potter books and movies, so when coming to Florida, we had to stop by and see the new Harry Potter World. We bought a two day pass to let us go to Adventure World (where Harry resides) and Universal Studios.
Our first stop was the Harry Potter ride. The route to the ride itself went past the Sorting Hat, a hologram of Dumbledore, then another hologram of the three friends (Harry, Ron & Hermione) warning of a dreaded history teacher. The ride itself is a pretty darn good inside roller coaster that doesn’t really roller or coaster… (see here for how it works, though you can’t really see it when on the ride). On the ride, you pass by the expected animatronic monsters, one of which (the dragon) sneezes and you are covered with Dragon Snot! (OK, water vapor, but it came from a dragon!)
When the ride was over, we treated ourselves to a Butter Beer — kind of like root beer but with more of a buttery flavor. Definitely something I would have liked as a kid.
We continued onto a few other rides, including Spiderman 3D (above bottom shows what a 3D image looks like when photographed with a normal camera…). Our last attraction of the day was Sinbad — a throwback to a 1970’s bad-acting stunt show that was a full blown dud. We decided to put a better end to the day by going back to the Harry Potter ride again!
We came back today to check out Universal Studios. Unfortunately, that was one dud after another. We started with Twister, and left wondering when the show was going to start? Then The Mummy turned out to be a very short inside roller coaster (maybe 2 minutes or so) with cartoonish wanna-be-scary animatronics. Men In Black was a boring short ride with seats that turned ala the 1960’s Teakettle rides.
Terminator 2 3D was the only almost-decent show of the day. It was a cartoonish combination of live actors and a decent 3D extension of the original movie (Swartzenager and Conner go into the future.
After the theme park, we decided to go to the AMC IMAX 3D viewing of 300 Rise of Empire. To be honest, I didn’t expect a great movie, but there aren’t any IMAX theaters in Ecuador, so this was a last chance to see a Big Screen show for awhile. Lots of blood and gore, all in 3D, but otherwise a movie that will be easy to forget…
Basically, if anyone else wants to come here, our recommendation is to spend a few hours in Adventure Land, but skip Universal Studios entirely, unless you have very young children along that are easily entertained…