My First Time At Universal

     I've lived in Florida for nearly a decade now, and in that time, I've never been to a theme park. Which is a wild thing to say, because Florida's whole thing is theme parks. Thousands of people from across the world flock here like birds in the winter just to visit the mouse's den, or his rival Universal Studios. But this changed when my sister and her friend took me to Universal Studios Orlando.

    We arrived at the park bright and early at 9:00 AM, eating a quick breakfast before beelining to the Transformers ride, which only had a 5-minute wait time. Now, I have not watched the source material for any of these rides, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. So, we met with the man himself, Optimus Prime, who told us to be his navigators while he fought some alien robots called the decepticons. Then some government official told us that we were "too inexperienced" and it was a "death mission", but we weren't about to miss out on those smooth wait times so we went ahead anyways. As I boarded the ride and put on my 3D glasses I was bracing myself, hoping that I wouldn't throw up all over my clothes. And it was.. surprisingly fun! 

    I had never understood the appeal of theme park rides before - having your insides jostled about like maraca beans didn't exactly sound like "fun". But while I got a bit dizzy from being thrown around, I loved the feeling of movement. It was also surprisingly immersive; there were sprinklers spritzing us with water and I even physically ducked when I saw debris flying at us from the holographic screens. At the end of the ride, Optimus Prime thanked us for our help despite us doing literally nothing and we rushed to the next attraction, the E.T. ride. 

    We had heard good things about it online and it only had a 15 minute wait time. Apparently, E.T. had gotten stranded on Earth and we needed to find his 3 wrinkly nightmares of friends so that he could save his home planet with his magical touch. As we were waiting in line, we overheard a little girl pointing to the smoke around the alien animatronic and saying "Look mommy! E.T.'s vaping!" which was probably the most entertaining thing we witnessed waiting in line. When we heard that it would be a flying ride, I was bracing myself for a bumpy time. But when we actually got on the ride, I felt kind of underwhelmed. In hindsight, I should have anticipated this, given it was a children's ride, but it was still disappointing that the highest thing we rode over was only a few feet off the ground. I'd imagine it'd be better if I actually watched E.T., but for me it just felt like a boring ride with some mildly creepy aliens dancing in the background.

    Next we would board Revenge of the Mummy - what would be the most intense ride of the day. At first it was fairly chill - there was a spooky atmosphere and fire which I could actually feel the heat from; but thing only TRULY ramped up once we got to what seemed like a dead end. We looked around, expecting  hidden entrance to appear - only to be propelled backward and onto a nightmare loop of death, as the mummy laughed maniacally the whole way through. I could feel my stomach twist with every rise and drop and I had to close my eyes so I wouldn't hurl - but I found it weirdly enjoyable by the end, oddly enough. I certainly couldn't handle a full itinerary of stuff that intense, but it was a nice thrill, which as non thrill-seeker, kind of surprised me.

    After that intense experience, we needed a bit of a break, so we decided to grab a quick bite to eat. We didn't get anything too extravagant or any special themed food - just some jacket potatoes, but it's hard to go wrong with potatoes, cheese, and bacon, so I thought it was pretty good, nonetheless. With our hunger satisfied, we then went to the Simpsons Ride. This ride had the longest wait time yet, but thankfully there were screens playing clips from the show to keep us entertained, a luxury we would soon miss - but that's for later. Unlike the previous rides, which were all coaster rides going on a set track, this ride took place entirely in one room, with a screen showing a track to simulate the feeling of movement. You'd expect this to be disappointing, but in actually the #D glasses we had on and the way the seat jostled about was still enough to make use feel immersed.

    Then came the Men In Black ride, which was unique from the others in that it had a shooting game tied to it - there were aliens which popped out throughout the ride and you and your squad had to shoot as many of them as you could to maximize your score. I was... extremely bad at this game, and part of this was because I have bad reaction time and the other is because... I might have shot the gun in the wrong direction for the entire beginning of the ride. For this ride, like the mummy ride, we had to put our belongings in a locker, and at first I was confused - there weren't any big hills or steep drops like the mummy ride, but soon I found out that there was more than one way to make my stomach churn because the carts we were on would spin around like frisbees at parts of the ride. it wasn't anything worse than the mummy, but it was still disorienting nonetheless. 

    So after being roasted by the announcer for our terrible shooting performance, and eating a quick meal at the Harry Potter restaurant, we made our way to the Jimmy Fallon ride. My sister had heard that this one was a bit underwhelming online, so we set our expectations fairly low, and entered what was probably the best-looking waiting room in the entire park. There was memorabilia of the previous hosts of the show, plenty of seats to sit down on, and of course, TVs playing clips from the show. But we weren't here for waiting rooms - we were here for rides, and what we ended up getting was sort of like the Simpsons Ride, but bigger. An entire queue of people were all seated on this one, massive, rotating disc, while a massive screen in the front and even little fans on the walls simulated the feeling of riding through New York. It was definitely less intense than the previous rides, but my sister actually found it was her favorite, ironically enough, keeping a nice balance between feeling both thrilling, and like you're not about to fly off the ride any second. 

     I'm going to skip over describing the Kang & Kodos ride - it was boring and the wait time was way longer than it said on the app, and go straight to what would soon become the biggest regret of the day - the Escape from Gringotts ride. We knew that the Harry Potter fans would be swarming this ride, we knew that the wait times would be on another level, but nothing could prepare us for how excruciating the wait was. We had waited for the wait times to die down the entire trip so we wouldn't be stuck waiting forever, but every time the wait times went down to something reasonable they immediately shot right back up 5 minutes later from the influx of superfans flocking to the ride. Near the end of the trip, the ride still had around a 2 hour wait time, and we were forced to decide whether to find something else to do - or just endure the long wait times. And as much as I hate waiting, I hate experiencing FOMO even more. I knew that I likely wouldn't be getting an opportunity to ride this again anytime soon, so I went on the ride anyways, naively assuming that we'd at least get to leave before closing. This was a locker ride, like the Mummy and Men In Black ride, so we didn't have our phone for entertainment - a fact which would become a grave mistake an hour into the line when we were bored out of our minds and the end of the line was nowhere in sight. Turns out the wait times are actually underestimations of how long the wit would actually tke, because thanks to all the people with fast passes, it took us around 3hours.

    So after all this waiting, the ride turned out to be... fine. It wasn't terribly bad or extremely good, it was just another ride. I probably should've anticipated this, but waiting for that long only for the ride just to be like ll the others e've been on was a bit underwhelming. I fyou're  big harry potter fan I guess I could see the appeal, but if you aren't familia rith the series like I am I wouldn't recommend it. Your time is better spent elsewhere.

    Despite the long wait times,  I had a lot of fun with this trip. Like I've said before, I don't get out much, and there's so many things I haven't done yet, so I'm glad to have checked another item off my bucket list. See you at the heat death of the universe!