Our Travel Blog: Part 7 - Orlando (Universal Studios)

It was up nice and early on Tuesday morning to get a cab out to the airport for our flight to Orlando. We had booked this flight on points and we were flying first class! What was great about this was we got to access the lounge before our flight and for the first time on the internal flights on this trip we didn't have to battle with everyone else to get overhead space to store our carry on bags!

We arrived in Orlando just after lunch and went and picked up our hire car. This time Wade had ordered a Camaro, but seeing as he had already drive that in the early part of the trip, he got the V8 Mustang instead.

For the first part of our Orlando visit, we were going to Universal Studios, and staying at one of the on-site hotels. A few of the perks of staying on site is that you get transport to and from the parks (via boat) and you get unlimited express passes onto most rides (ie. you line up in a separate line to everyone else and usually wait no more than 5-10 minutes to get on a ride).

There are two parks here and our plan for our first afternoon/night was to go to the main Universal Theme park. We got through all the rides that we wanted to go on pretty quickly and then spent a bit of time wandering around the new Harry Potter section (Harry Mac - you would have loved this). It was very hot and humid here in Orlando, so after we had finished here, we headed back to our hotel to have a swim in the pool. However when we got to the pool, there was no one swimming! It turns out there were thunderstorms in the area so they had closed the pool temporarily! Wade took the opportunity to grab a drink at the pool bar and we waited it out until we were allowed to get in the pool. We then caught the boat back down to the CityWalk area, where we grabbed dinner at the NBC Sports Grill & Brew. By the time we had finished there, the parks were both closing, so after checking out some of the shops at the CityWalk section, we caught the boat back to our hotel.

The next day we hit the other park - Islands of Adventure. Again, we got through all the rides we wanted to pretty quickly, and just as Wade was about to get on the Hulk rollercoaster for a second time, we heard that the ride was closed as there were thunderstorms in the area (multiple daytime storms quickly became a theme for our time in Orlando - although we were really lucky with our timing of everything and it didn't really impact us that much)! Given that we were basically done with everything we wanted to do, we took the opportunity to go and grab an early lunch in the CityWalk area, and luckily got there just as the storm hit. After lunch we waited it out as long as possible and then decided to head back to our hotel. We went to jump on one of the boats - and then realised they weren't operating because of the storm! So walking back was the only option. After getting pretty wet, we made it to one of the sections where there was a bridge that we could stand under just as the worst of the storm hit - so we ended up having to sit there for a while until it had mostly passed! When it appeared to have eased up we made a run for it back to the hotel! That bought our time at Universal to an end, so we picked up our bags, changed out of our wet clothes and then headed over to Disney World, where we were staying for the next 5 nights.

Here are some pictures from our time at Universal (I'll post Disney World separately):

Universal Studios