Universal & Disney!

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Today’s post is a bit out of the ordinary but I wanted to share it anyway! We went to Orlando last week! My boyfriend’s friend won tickets off of the radio (yes, apparently that still happens!) which covered our flight and rental car and we found a sweet Air Bnb for a couple of nights! This was a short trip but full of fun! I really wanted to bring my DSLR but I’m so glad I didn’t. It would have been such a hassle to have to lock it up for every ride so my cell phone worked for it’s purpose!

We flew in Tuesday and go situated at the condo, and then headed to Universal Studios! Of course just a couple of weeks before Christmas it was pretty busy, but we definitely got in the spirit. I looooved the 3-D rides, some of them were better than others but I definitely tried to be in the moment, kept the 3-D glasses on and really enjoyed all of the illustrations, games, and everything else the ride had to offer.

I did a little bit of research the night before the trip, and the morning of (yes, I’m quite the procrastinator) so I did read about the rides worth riding and how to navigate the parks. One of the first rides was the Mummy ride. I couldn’t really remember much of this movie, but the ride was so fun!

We then went to Harry Potter World. One of the people in our group was sooo excited about going here, and although I’ve never read the books or watched any of the movies, we had a great time looking around in the “town” and trying not to get sprayed by children with their magical wands controlling the water fountain. The dragon in the town would blow fire which was pretty neat! We ended up getting food in one of the restaurants which wasn’t really the best, but again- we weren’t super prepared for this trip so we didn’t have many snacks. The food shall do because we have to control the hanger!

We made a stop to Springfield to see all of the Simpsons rides. They also had a Simpsons food court which was quite the experience! When in Rome, right?

I was still full from our last meal at Harry Potter World but I’m almost always never (makes sense to say it in my head) too full to eat dessert. I ordered one of my favorite desserts- MILKSHAKE! This tasted more like a Wendy’s frosty but it was sooo good. Eating dessert on vacation is like, totally necessary.

Duh.

The gang was super excited to drink Duff beer which ended up being a local Florida beer and was really tasty!

One of my favorite rides was the Jimmy Fallon ride. It was a Race Through New York ride, a simulated 3-D ride where you essentially race against him, drive and crash through the town, fly in the sky, go to the moon, you know – normal things like that.

I LOVE JIMMY FALLON! I actually passed this ride a couple times and couldn’t resist going. It was totally worth the wait. Again, if you don’t care about him you might not really care about the ride but I could ride it over and over again haha!

Towards the end of the day when the families were leaving, the lines got much shorter and we were able to ride many more rides. We were really tired by the end of the night because of traveling same day, but it was totally worth it.

We went home and got a good night’s rest because we had to get ready for DISNEYWORLD!

This was my first time at Disneyworld. I had only been to Disney in California and boy was today an adventure! You can even get these special buttons and you know I couldn’t resist, I wore it the entire day!

We picked the Magical Kingdom so see the traditional rides and to get that experience. We really only had two days to tour, so one day for Universal Orlando and one day Magical Kingdom. We purposely waited a while before heading to the park because we learned from experience from Universal that the lines were so much longer earlier in the day.

We got to the park around 2 and had to get familiar with the park before finally finding a ride. We spent a good amount of time at Disney and towards the end when everyone was wanting to see the parades and the Goodnight Kiss at the Castle, we decided it would be a good time to head for more rides!

I love the rides where they take your photo and I didn’t want to ever forget about this one. This was at Splash Mountain, isn’t it great? Both the ride and the photo!

The boys went on a hard search for turkey legs and they were so happy to find some! This was one of the last things we did at the park while we were taking a rest from standing and also waiting until 9:20 to use our Fast Pass to get into Space Mountain.

Can’t forget about the Alice in Wonderland spinning tea cups!

We had so much fun. There were so many more rides but I just wanted to give a highlight of some of the fun things we did.

If I could do it all over again, here are some tips:

Book your fast pass tickets for rides MONTHS in advance. You can only have 3 fast passes going at once. Once you ride all 3 rides, you can re-use the 3. We booked our fast passes the morning of, so the times were around 4:00, 7:00, and 9:00. Didn’t leave much time to be able to use them again. I would book them for the first available times in the morning so that you don’t have to spent as much time waiting in line!

Bring snacks and water bottles! The food isn’t the best thing ever, but I would highly recommend having enough to get you through a couple hours. Water is $3 a bottle, and having water bottles was definitely a good choice!

Bring a great pair of walking shoes! Years ago I used to be able to walk all day in flip flops and crappy shoes but I’m go glad that we were all prepared with great walking shoes because that’s a sure fire way to make it through the day!