Lousy Smarch Weather

[luckykaa]

Today's weather: Rain. Lots of rain. All the rain!

But that didn't deter us. We had tickets booked for Universal Studios and by golly we were going to go to Universal Studios! And we did. We even got to sit at the front of the carriage of the shuttle/bus/road-train thing which was a mistake because it doesn't have front windows and it was raining.

So, Universal Studios is a theme park next to the Universal studio complex. There are rides, including the studio tour! Since there was no wait time on that, and it was the one thing I really wanted to do, that's where we went first!

Our guide was Joy. My god was she enthusiastic! Our driver was Mark. Joy was extremely enthusiastic about Mark's driving skills. So we enthusiastically set off. Part of the tour was simply showing some of the town sets. These get re-used a lot apparently. There was a Wild West area, Mexico, and "Little Europe" - a set that can fit in for pretty much any European country just by changing the language used for road signs. It was also used for The Good Place. Wouldn't have recognised it if it wasn't pointed out although I might have recognised the station.

Some of the sets were just facades, but we had a whole crashed plane set that was used for War Of The Worlds.

We also had some set pieces. Amity Island, where Joy's "boyfriend" George was diving. But poor George got eaten by a mechanical shark. Poor Joy was heartbroken for several seconds. There were a few set pieces like that. The Mexico set they could make it rain. Since it was pouring with rain, that didn't make a lot of difference. But they also caused a flash flood! All very impressive.

The other aspect of the tour are two action rides. The "tram" (an open bus with several carriages) pulls into a studio building, and we get a 3D action sequence (3D glasses provided) with hydraulics to shake us all about! First one was Kong, where we were in the middle of a fight between King Kong and some dinosaurs. The other was a Fast And Furious ride - it even started with several women who didn't pack enough clothes. they were ushered away, we had a rather cheesy expositional sequence with Vin Diesel and other F&F cast, before we were launched into an exciting car chase!

So we finished the tour and looked at ride times. Because of the weather these were all pretty darn short. Jurassic World ride (which is mostly outside, and a "splash" ride)  had a 5 minute queue. Figured I was already wet so why not! Plot is a basic tour of the park goes wrong, so it's a pleasant cruise round the herbivore pens, then everything goes haywire and we get attacked by dinosaurs before, for reasons that don't need to make sense, we do a dive and splash into the water.

flickums  was happy waiting in the Jurassic Park cafe, and let me go on another ride that she's too wussy for. Revenge of The Mummy. A really good roller coaster that starts off in the dark, then goes backwards!!! Neither ride had a queue so I didn't feel too bad about having Flick wait for me.

We were already there so decided to have lunch at the Jurassic Cafe. Flick ordered a turkey leg platter, which, appropriately for the cafe, looked as big as a dinosaur leg!

I managed to persuade Flick to go on the Transformers 3D ride. There aren't any drops and this was confirmed by several sources. This didn't stop it from being a really intense ride! Riders are in cars that zip about and zoom around with a really solid impression of flying and racing around. Presumably it's mostly fairly stationary aside from the tilting and shaking, and we're just shuttled between screens but the illusion is absolutely incredible and really feels like we must have travelled miles at extreme speeds! Definitely the most exciting ride I've been on this holiday!

We then went for the less intense King Fu Panda ride. This was essentially a movie with tilting vibrating seats. Good fun though and quite nice to have a sit down.

We weren't intending Kung Fu Panda to be our final ride, but next we went for the Secret Life Of Pet. Unlike the others this seemed to have a really long queue. That spent long periods not moving at all. After a while we started questioning why we were even there. We hadn't seen the movie, and there wasn't any particular selling point. Decided to bail on that one.

At this point we were getting Flash Flood warnings on our phones (In America these are automated broadcast messages)

We were going to go to Waterworld - the water based stunt show and call it a day, but turned out it was cancelled, ironically because of the rain. Decided to call it a wash - in every sense of the word - and head back to the hotel.

Managed quite a haul in the shops. Flickums bought a "Bort" keyring. Sadly we didn't see any calendars with the month of  Smarch. I picked up a wallet for Flickums because it was half-price. Somehow it was even less than that. No idea what happened there. We also acquired socks (matching His And Hers Frankenstein/Bride Of Frankenstein socks), T-shirts and a cuddly Toothless, who I plan to train. That last one was a last minute impulse purchase I decided I wanted just after we left. I dashed back in (fortunately we had a re-entry hand stamp that we went for mainly out of a sense of irony), and bought it. Flickums had made good use of the time making her own purchase of a pancake. I was offered a bite. It was hot, and delicious!!!

So a few other notes; there's a "Springfield" area with a lot of shops and restaurants based on Simpsons shops. There's Moe's bar, a Krusty Burger, a Kwik-e-Mart (the gift shop) and others. There's also a Harry Potter area that we avoided because we're not that fond of JK Rowling right now.

At the time we left, despite it still being relatively early, very few people were still arriving. Quite a number were leaving.