It's been interesting, having gone to three distinct amusement/theme parks in the span of about 2 weeks, to note the differing approaches these parks take to satisfying their guests. At the end of May, we went to Michigan's Adventure, an amusement park with classic thrill rides. In early June, we went to both Walt Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando, two sets of parks that depend on theming to entertain the customers.
Michigan's Adventure has moderate thrill rides and almost no theming. Their marquee ride, Shivering Timbers, is a huge wooden rollercoaster that sort of fits in with the way the park sort of just appears in the middle of the forest. They have another ride, a whitewater raft experience called Grand Rapids, which of course is the name of a city in Michigan (President Gerald Ford was from there). Their one and only indoor, sit-down restaurant is called Coaster's. It's sort of themed like a 50's diner.
Then you go to Disney, and you get story and theming around every corner. I don't have to talk too much about it on this blog; anyone reading probably knows as much or more about what Disney has to offer than I do. There are thrills to be found here: Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Mission: Space, Rock'n'Roller Coaster, Twilight Zone Tower of Terror - all are moderate (at least) thrill rides. But all depend on theming to make them more than just a rollercoaster with inversions, than a drop-ride, than a log flume, than a dark coaster - to make them memorable and repeatable.
Going over to Universal Studios, we find a few more thrill rides like Hollywood Rip-Rocket, Revenge of the Mummy, and even The Simpsons Ride. Again, their rides depend on theming to make them memorable. Each delivers a fairly unique experience. Their theming uses a certain edginess, a certain hip-ness, that you don't find at Disney, and that a place like Michigan's Adventure doesn't even try to use. The jokes are different - often aimed at adults and older teens. There's a blog post in there, somewhere, comparing the "feel" of the Universal Studios Resort parks and the Disney parks. But I don't know if I'm ready to write it.
I for one don't connect to either Michigan's Adventure, or Universal Studios in the same way I do to Disney. I did feel that connection over at Islands of Adventure, but that was a year and a half ago, and I think much of it was due to the current-ness of the Harry Potter movies and the timeless feel of Dr. Seuss and some of the other properties they used there.
Our next trip will likely feature more visits to Universal and maybe even none to a Disney park. If it happens that way, it will be because of Disney's all-or-nothing pricing policy, where it doesn't make sense to buy a two or three day ticket instead of a 6 or 7 day pass. Orlando and central Florida have more to offer than Disney, but we have discovered very little of it. So I'll see if those parks seem to foster more of a connection in the future.
*****
Showing posts with label Universal's Islands Of Adventure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universal's Islands Of Adventure. Show all posts
Monday, June 25, 2012
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Other Parks: Islands of Adventure Day 2
On our second day we decided that, since the boys only got on two rides, we'd just return to Islands of Adventure again. This time we headed straight back to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. As was our habit on this trip, it was late morning by the time we got into the park, and it was crowded! They told us up front that they were bringing people in the other entrance to the land, closer to the Lost Continent.
So we went back there to queue up for entry into Potter World, and we were directed to a line where this day, unlike the previous day, we were given a timed ticket. We happily took our ticket, with the advice to return between 12:20 and 1:20 pm to get in. We went off to find somewhere to eat.
That "somewhere" ended up being in Seuss Landing. We went into Circus McGurkus Cafe Stoo-pendous, a "counter service" restaurant with fried chicken, pasta, pizza and burgers on the menu.
Now, we were used to Disney counter service restaurants; there are crowds and lines, but you seem to keep moving. At this restaurant, we got in line and stood for a long period of time, waiting to get our food cafeteria-style. This system is SLOW! You finally get to the front, then wait for them to assemble your burger and fries from a pan of burgers, most with cheese and some without. I think two of us ordered cheeseburgers except for my older son who prefers hamburgers without cheese. My wife ordered some kind of chicken sandwich. They take a pre-made basket with a bun and the fixin's, plop a chicken breast or a burger (with or without cheese) on it, then dole out some fries, and hand it to you.
It doesn't sound that hard, but for whatever reason, they are very slow at this. The cash register attendant was basically sitting there doing nothing half the time because after checking out one family, it would be a while before the next came.
The food was fine, and the restaurant was very cute. Very Dr. Seuss. I love the theming and the attention to detail in this area. But based on my two impressions of dining in this park, I'd have to say they have a ways to go before they approach Disney's level of efficiency.
Then it was back to Harry Potter land. It was almost 1 pm by the time we got back there, and there was a huge throng of people waiting to get in. They had barricades set up and were letting people through at two small entrance points. A couple of Universal employees were trying to keep the mass from blocking an aisle on the side where people could exit, with not too much success. One was getting pretty testy with the crowd. When one of the guys in the crowd told her to lighten up or mellow out, she told him something to the effect of "You don't want to mess with me, sir. I'm not in the mood for to take it." (That isn't exactly what she said, but it's close. Not very friendly.)
The problem was that they were creating this bottleneck. And most of the people waiting had tickets that were for later. (We were within our time window and couldn't really get through.) Some didn't have tickets at all. One couple next to me looked at the ticket in my hand as we tried to force our way to the gate, and asked what it was. When I told them that you needed a timed ticket to get into the land, they were disgusted and began working their way out of the line.
We finally pushed our way to the front. Our progress sped up as we got within hearing range of the guy calling out for times of 1 pm or earlier, and we waved our ticket and finally people moved out of the way enough that we could get in. Crazy.
Of course, once you're "in", you're not out of the crowds - you're just in a different mass of humanity. We headed to the queue for the Forbidden Journey ride, which showed 100 minutes, I think. There again, confusion abounded. It seems that there is a line for those with bags that need to be checked into lockers before tey go in, and if you don't have bags, they shunt you to the left and you bypass the locker line. We did the latter, but when we got in line, some cast member told us that we were in the single rider queue, and we'd need to go back and get in the regular queue. So we did, and then we were told that we were now in the queue for the castle tour (no ride), and where we were before was the correct queue. Annoyed, I told that employee about the other guy telling us to go there. Seemed like no one knew what was going on.
The line was almost two hours, but it does keep moving and it is interesting. So it didn't seem as bad. When we got out, my wife had some butterbeers, and we downed them and left the Wizarding World.
The boys proceeded to ride the Pteranodon Flyers and then we headed into Marvel Super Hero Island, where we all rode The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man. Had I ridden this before I rode the Forbidden Journey, I would have said that this was the coolest ride I'd ever been on. AS it is, it's just a hair below Forbidden Journey. We rode it twice; the waits were in the 30-45 minute range, and the queue is so cool that it goes by fast. The merging of 3D video effects with some sort of enhanced motion vehicle was incredibly effective.
We rode Doctor Doom's Fearfall after this; I rode it once and the boys went back a couple more times because it was a short (10 minute or so) wait. I'm not that much a fan of these sorts of rides; I didn't like Maliboomer in DCA, and Tower Of Terror is good but not one of my favorites. But my two sons loved it. Then they went on the Storm Force Accelatron, a Teacup-like ride that I had no desire to experience.
For some reason I thought that The Cat In The Hat attraction was a show, and didn't find out till later that it was a ride. I would have liked to do it but, too late now. The waits for it and The High In The Sky Seuss Trolley Train Ride were always pretty high.
We left the park and ate at Emeril's for the high point of our Orlando dining experiences. I absolutely love Emeril's restaurants; they are unmatched for taste and service, in my book. This was no exception for us. I wonder if you can get to it without having to pay the all-day parking fees, or if there is a validation or something you can do. I see they do it at the theaters for parking. Because if you can, it will probably be on our eating agenda every time we go to Orlando from here on out. And if we make it to Vegas anytime soon, his restaurants there will be on our itinerary also.
The positives of Day 2 far outweighed the negatives. I'd like to go back and experience the Studios park, but that's not in the near future for us Chicagoans.
Bye, Harry, Ron and Hermione...
*****
So we went back there to queue up for entry into Potter World, and we were directed to a line where this day, unlike the previous day, we were given a timed ticket. We happily took our ticket, with the advice to return between 12:20 and 1:20 pm to get in. We went off to find somewhere to eat.
That "somewhere" ended up being in Seuss Landing. We went into Circus McGurkus Cafe Stoo-pendous, a "counter service" restaurant with fried chicken, pasta, pizza and burgers on the menu.
Now, we were used to Disney counter service restaurants; there are crowds and lines, but you seem to keep moving. At this restaurant, we got in line and stood for a long period of time, waiting to get our food cafeteria-style. This system is SLOW! You finally get to the front, then wait for them to assemble your burger and fries from a pan of burgers, most with cheese and some without. I think two of us ordered cheeseburgers except for my older son who prefers hamburgers without cheese. My wife ordered some kind of chicken sandwich. They take a pre-made basket with a bun and the fixin's, plop a chicken breast or a burger (with or without cheese) on it, then dole out some fries, and hand it to you.
It doesn't sound that hard, but for whatever reason, they are very slow at this. The cash register attendant was basically sitting there doing nothing half the time because after checking out one family, it would be a while before the next came.
The food was fine, and the restaurant was very cute. Very Dr. Seuss. I love the theming and the attention to detail in this area. But based on my two impressions of dining in this park, I'd have to say they have a ways to go before they approach Disney's level of efficiency.
Then it was back to Harry Potter land. It was almost 1 pm by the time we got back there, and there was a huge throng of people waiting to get in. They had barricades set up and were letting people through at two small entrance points. A couple of Universal employees were trying to keep the mass from blocking an aisle on the side where people could exit, with not too much success. One was getting pretty testy with the crowd. When one of the guys in the crowd told her to lighten up or mellow out, she told him something to the effect of "You don't want to mess with me, sir. I'm not in the mood for to take it." (That isn't exactly what she said, but it's close. Not very friendly.)
The problem was that they were creating this bottleneck. And most of the people waiting had tickets that were for later. (We were within our time window and couldn't really get through.) Some didn't have tickets at all. One couple next to me looked at the ticket in my hand as we tried to force our way to the gate, and asked what it was. When I told them that you needed a timed ticket to get into the land, they were disgusted and began working their way out of the line.
We finally pushed our way to the front. Our progress sped up as we got within hearing range of the guy calling out for times of 1 pm or earlier, and we waved our ticket and finally people moved out of the way enough that we could get in. Crazy.
Of course, once you're "in", you're not out of the crowds - you're just in a different mass of humanity. We headed to the queue for the Forbidden Journey ride, which showed 100 minutes, I think. There again, confusion abounded. It seems that there is a line for those with bags that need to be checked into lockers before tey go in, and if you don't have bags, they shunt you to the left and you bypass the locker line. We did the latter, but when we got in line, some cast member told us that we were in the single rider queue, and we'd need to go back and get in the regular queue. So we did, and then we were told that we were now in the queue for the castle tour (no ride), and where we were before was the correct queue. Annoyed, I told that employee about the other guy telling us to go there. Seemed like no one knew what was going on.
The line was almost two hours, but it does keep moving and it is interesting. So it didn't seem as bad. When we got out, my wife had some butterbeers, and we downed them and left the Wizarding World.
The boys proceeded to ride the Pteranodon Flyers and then we headed into Marvel Super Hero Island, where we all rode The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man. Had I ridden this before I rode the Forbidden Journey, I would have said that this was the coolest ride I'd ever been on. AS it is, it's just a hair below Forbidden Journey. We rode it twice; the waits were in the 30-45 minute range, and the queue is so cool that it goes by fast. The merging of 3D video effects with some sort of enhanced motion vehicle was incredibly effective.
We rode Doctor Doom's Fearfall after this; I rode it once and the boys went back a couple more times because it was a short (10 minute or so) wait. I'm not that much a fan of these sorts of rides; I didn't like Maliboomer in DCA, and Tower Of Terror is good but not one of my favorites. But my two sons loved it. Then they went on the Storm Force Accelatron, a Teacup-like ride that I had no desire to experience.
For some reason I thought that The Cat In The Hat attraction was a show, and didn't find out till later that it was a ride. I would have liked to do it but, too late now. The waits for it and The High In The Sky Seuss Trolley Train Ride were always pretty high.
We left the park and ate at Emeril's for the high point of our Orlando dining experiences. I absolutely love Emeril's restaurants; they are unmatched for taste and service, in my book. This was no exception for us. I wonder if you can get to it without having to pay the all-day parking fees, or if there is a validation or something you can do. I see they do it at the theaters for parking. Because if you can, it will probably be on our eating agenda every time we go to Orlando from here on out. And if we make it to Vegas anytime soon, his restaurants there will be on our itinerary also.
The positives of Day 2 far outweighed the negatives. I'd like to go back and experience the Studios park, but that's not in the near future for us Chicagoans.
Bye, Harry, Ron and Hermione...
*****
Monday, December 13, 2010
Other Parks: Universal's Islands of Adventure - Day 1
We spent Monday and Tuesday at Universal's Islands of Adventure Theme Park. We had never been to these parks before, and our plan was to spend one day at IOA, and the other at Universal Studios. Well, the Studios will have to wait because we ended up hanging out at IOA both days.
The first day was sort of a wash-out. Literally. It poured rain in the afternoon (although the morning weather suggested that there was only a 10% chance of rain that day), and we were totally unprepared. We had brought umbrellas to Florida, but they were at the bottom of our luggage. So we got drenched. It is not very comfortable walking around in soaking wet clothing when there is very little sun, even when the temperature is in the 70's. (I'm not sure what the temperature actually was after the rain - it felt COLD to me in my soaking wet clothing.)
Most of this first day was spent in lines. We got there a bit later than we planned to, since we were still more or less on Chicago time, and of course Florida is an hour ahead of us. We had trouble waking up before 7:30 am their time (which of course would be 6:30 am at home), and once we got ready and drove there, it was probably somewhere between 10:30 am and 11 am their time.
Universal has those enormous parking decks, but they don't have the parking down like Disney does. I think there were four or five booths open, and then all of those cars were funnelling into basically one lane as we got to our parking level at the top of the deck. So that was sort of slow, after experiencing the parking at Disney, where everything just flows.
I was impressed with the system for moving guests from the decks to the CityWalk area. I thought their CityWalk (analogous to Downtown Disney) was very cool. Cool restaurants and stores and a really neat look. We located Emeril's and other restaurants, and headed toward the Islands of Adventure park. Entry was fairly easy; we had our tickets we had purchased at Costco, and everything went beautifully.
Once we got in, we were impressed by the level of theming in their version of "Main Street", which sets the tone beautifully for the rest of the park. I took a couple of photos with the iPhone, as you can see. Then we came to the end of the street, and had to choose right or left. A staffer was there pointing out where the lines for The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter started. Turns out that at this point in the day, one of the two entrances to the land is closed and you have to queue up to get into the land.
Anyway, we walked into Marvel Super Hero Island, thinking that maybe we could do a ride before lunch. The boys and I decided to do Doctor Doom's Fear Fall, which said it had a 20 minute wait. So we entered the queue (it was a well themed queue, sort of dark and interesting), and got to the end of the line. In about 20 minutes, we still had a long ways to go. I decided that we better not chance it because we might miss our lunch reservation at Mythos, so we left the line. I am not sure why we weren't moving; was the ride broken down, or were Express Pass people keeping this line from moving? Whatever, we left. I wasn't impressed with my first experience with a ride at IOA.
We decided to walk back into Toon Lagoon and Jurassic Park, where we figured we'd scope out the line for Harry Potter, and cross the bridge to the Lost Continent, where Mythos was located. Line number 2 was at this restaurant. Turns out that what we thought was a "reservation" was actually "priority seating", which means you get to wait a long time until you get seated. Our scheduled time was at 12:30 pm, but we weren't seated till close to 1:30 pm. The place is a really cool looking restaurant, and our service and food were both OK once we got seated. They were a little slow, offering as an excuse that the kitchen had gotten "slammed" by a couple of big parties at the same time.
After lunch we went to get in line for Harry Potter. First we got in a line to get a ticket to stand in the real line. Then we got into that rather long line and waited. And waited. I don't know what time we finally got in, but eventually we did make our way into the land. (We still have not gotten on a single ride!)
We got in line to go on Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. I'll be doing a post on this by itself later, I think. For now, let's just say that the queue is fantastic and the ride is even better. We didn't mind waiting the 45 minutes it took at that time.
When we got off, my wife had bought a butterbeer. Butterbeer is OUTSTANDING! Can I have more? I miss it, just thinking about it! Very tasty. She got in line to get more butterbeers and I was going to get the kids onto the Flight of the Hippogriff coaster. That's when the skies opened up. My kids got under an umbrella with a line attendant, but I got soaked, and so did my wife. There is no real shelter in Hogsmeade. So then we had to buy ponchos, and at least the ponchos kept us warm the rest of the day. The kids remained relatively dry at least. So then we drank our butterbeers and my wife got in line for Ollivander's Wand Shop, while I put the kids back on Flight of the Hippogriff. They said that they weren't all that impressed with this coaster. It was a very short ride and didn't have much to it, according to them. (I didn't ride it.)
We were silly enough to stand in line for Ollivander's for almost 2 hours. The first 1/3, my wife waited alone while I took the kids on the ride. Then we joined her. (Some might say we should not have done this, that it was sort of cheating, or cutting, but so many people did it that it didn't seem like cutting. You had to wait to get into every store in Potter Land. Crazy. Lines to get into stores!) Anyway, we almost decided to leave after about an hour and 20 minutes, but thought, hey we waited this long, let's see what's in here.
Honestly, it seemed to start moving faster as we got closer. What I think happened was that "Ollivander" started to rush through his show and move people in and out faster. We finally did get in, and it was a fun little show. My kids didn't get picked, but they enjoyed it anyway. And after waiting for almost 2 hours, you're darned right we bought the silly wands for them.
It was late, we were soaked still and the park was slowing down, so we decided to leave. We made our way out of the park through the Lost Continent and into Seuss Landing. My wife checked out the shops and we sat there, taking in the scenery.
What a cool looking land! Just like stepping into the pages of a Dr. Seuss book.
We exited the park, damp and tired, and stopped at Pastamore, having missed our reservation at Latin Quarter. Pastamore could seat us immediately, and so we had some Italian food there. Fun place, good food, nice kids' buffet!
That was Day One. All in all we went on 2 rides and saw the little wand show. The next day was better however. I'll try to get to a post summarizing that day later today or maybe tomorrow.
*****
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