Day One is here.

Day Two pics are here.

Up early with the dawn, we pass by Baloo to get to the big cafeteria style restaurant for a big old fatty breakfast with a big old fatty price tag. Tip: If you go to Disney, expect to pay nearly double to what you’re use to for moderately to small sized portions. Croissantwich with potato wedge style homefries came to just over $9US. Owch!

Our first full day was spent at Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure theme parks. Really no difference between the two, both dedicated to action movies. Rides of note:

The Hulk: Surprisingly no wet. High. Fast. Worth the wait for the front car.

The Mummy: a must do ride. I won’t spoil it but it’s all indoors, there’s fire, mist and shouty dead people. Much better than I expected. We rode it twice. The first time the sound got out of sync with the animatronics, which was actually side splittingly funny. Imagine a menacing mummy waving it’s flaky arms, boasting your death, suddenly stopping dead while staring lifelessly at your roller coaster car. It was almost Simpsons-esque.

Twister: still seemed fun to me, ten years after the fact. Cool demo (far too short) of a trailer park getting devastated. Expect to get wet.

ET, The Ride: so lame it’s funny. When asked, give your name as Gaiman. Trust me. Wet factor = fine mist.

Jaws: still fun after 32 years after the fact. Too bad the ride operator wasn’t so enthused. Expect to get really wet.

Terminator 2: 3D: Wet? Yup. Fun? Sort of. Too long a wait spoiled it.

Earthquake: Nice little fun preshow about how effects are made. Kind of dated, but the subway ride to the 8.5 Richter scale earthquake was …wet.

Shrek 4D: Some character sneezed. We got wet. Corny jokes as expected. Bitter ride operator at the beginning bad mouthed Disney. What’s the matter? Your application to Splash Mountain was turned down?

Spiderman: Rode it twice. The first time it kaked out half way through it and we were staring a blank screens while the audio of the villains getting vanquished played on. I lost my hat the first time around and luckily found it again after a second successful, glitch free run. Luuucky! Some watery bad guy gets punched and you get a blast of water in your face.

Dudley Do-Right’s Ripsaw Falls: Wet. Very wet. The only really Canadian representation in all the parks other than Epcot. Great animatronic of Dudley with his horse crammed up his ass.

Dueling Dragons. WE DID NOT GET WET. We did, however, go upside down a lot.

Popeye & Bluto’s Bilge-Rat Barges: Much like any big raft water ride. But wetter. Took me hours to get dry after that one.

Jurassic Park: Nice music. Wet ending. Lame animatronics.

Poseidon’s Fury: stay away! This ride had no real correlation to any pop culture event or movie. Long set up, ironically hardly any wet, considering it’s name. They changed the amazing special effect to a mildly interesting event half way through the ride, for some unknown reason. According to SharkBoy, you use to walk through a waterfall and not get wet! But now the waterfall is circling around you in a tunnel and you get a bit wet. Dumb storyline with awkward narration.

You can see a running theme here. Wet wet wet. I’m going out on a limb here but I think all the rides at Universal were designed by someone who wore a yellow hankie in their back left pocket.

Only one poster for Invader Zim. Absolutely no stock in the gift shops. What the hell? One of my favorite characters from their stable and no swag? But yet there’s gobs of Jimmy Neutron crap. Sheesh!

It was interesting to see that Universal took all of Disney’s innovations in marketing and crowd control and improved upon it. That is, except for their Disney-like “Fast Pass” option, called “Express Pass” which you had to pay for at Universal but got you priority pre-booked seating for rides. Which made for a lot of angry people because they would honour these people first, making wait times for standard riders unpredictable. And basically created an elitist attitude all round.

Back to the hotel way too tired to care about anything else. My feet cursed me to sleep.