The Great Dyal Vacation of 2004 Trip Journal Entry #5: July 6th
Well, here's where the real vacation starts. It's been my experience in the past at major themeparks that most people are really stupid. So, building on that experience, we thought we could take advantage of that and run the place the way we wanted. It worked pretty well too.
We arrived at the parking booths at about 7:00 AM. There was one guy in a silly Universal Studios uniform puttering around, telling us that they wouldn't open the parking until 8; the park itself wasn't scheduled to open until 9. However, Universal Studios lies to you about their opening times; they always open earlier than they say they will.
So, we rolled down the windows, found a radio station that we more or less both liked, busted out or books and waited, first in line for parking for about 45 minutes, before they let us in, I drove into the garage and got the very first spot. Then we literally sprinted through the opening area of the park (which is probably a good half mile or so) knocking over stray uniformed Universal Studios employees and smaller children in our mad dash (that's not exactly true; no children were out of bed yet, as near as I could tell.) We were first in line at the entrance.
Now here we had a bit of a complication; Julie had accidentally left our confirmation number to print our eTickets in the hotel room. I had her wait at the entrance line while I waited at the Guest Services line, and luckily they opened Guest Services just a few minutes before the park itself, so I was able to sort out our tickets (we had bought 5 day passes for the price of 2 day admission, although we actually only planned to spend three days there.) I came running up to the front of the line (which was actually quite long, and stretched from each of the thirty or so entranceways by now) to give Julie her ticket and get us in literally as the gates were opening and we walked in, the very first in the park at about 8:30.
Sounds smart so far, doesn't it? No? Well, check this out... We literally ran (some more) to Shrek 4-D (which was a horrible rip-off; we never once traveled in time, although the 3-D show was pretty good) and got in with no line, then ran to The Mummy and got in with about a 30 second line, then ran to Back to the Future and MIB, again with no line, and by that point had seen most of the big attractions before the crowds showed up at all. All of those lines, by 11:00 or so, by the way, had 90+ minute waits.
Mummy was pretty cool; a "psychological thrill ride" which really just means its an indoor rollercoaster where you occasionally stop and watch animatronic mummies and carefully controlled flames pop up in front of you. It was Julie's favorite attraction at the regular Universal park. Back to the Future, which once seemed really cool now came across as terribly dated.
We then went and did Jaws, with about a 10 minute wait. There was a relatively young family behind us that we talked to; they had three kids; two boys, one about 10 and the other maybe 12, and then a daughter maybe 7 or 8. They asked us where they should put her if she got scared of stuff easily (apparently she got scared and burst into tears doing the ET ride, which if you've ever done, you'll know is pretty sad.) We suggested maybe back in the car -- did they remember which zone they parked in? We saw them later, and confirmed that Jaws was terrifyingly traumatic for her.
Now the crowds were starting to get bigger, so we took advantage of another perk of the big-time themeparks; you can schedule to ride attractions at a certain time, print off a receipt showing your schedule, and then go through a much reduced second line that rarely takes more than ten minutes or so to do. So we used this to see Terminator 3-D (which is still my favorite attraction at the park, BTW), Twister, MIB again (Julie was so busy shooting aliens she didn't think to look at what she was passing in the ride) ET and Jimmy Newtron, which oddly enough was the only substantial line we were in all day. The Mummy apparently broke down at one point in the day and everyone was shooed away. We happened to be standing near the entrance gabbing on the cell phone with our kids later in the day when they reopened it, so I asserted myself as an alpha male bull elephant once again, cleared a path through the trampling crowd to a place at the front of the quickly forming line, and we rode it again without waiting.
And let's see; we saw a few shows; there was a jetski stunt show, a makeup artist show (that was nominally about Van Helsing, although it seemed like 95% of the show was exactly the same as it was 5 years ago when we were last here) and a pretty stupid Beetlejuice, Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, Bride of Frankenstein, and two random "horror bimbos" singing old rock music. We also saw a stunt show, and I got selected to "fall" about three stories. The reason, I found out later, was that the gal selecting "volunteers" (I had not, in fact, volunteered) was because I was wearing one of my Texas A&M shirts, and she was a native of Bryan, my old hometown. So, they really dropped a dummy, and then I had to walk out trying to act all hurt. Julie said the dummy looked really fake, as well as nothing like me (thick black hair and a moustache, for one thing) but that my performance was pretty convincing. A few boneheads after the show (when they were winding the dummy back up) actually expressed surprise to me that they hadn't dropped me, though.
The day was punishingly hot, but having done almost all the big rides early when it wasn't hot and there were no lines, we didn't have to stand around sweating, having heat exhaustion, or otherwising being really all that miserable. They had a backlot New York outdoor set with a fire hydrant that was blasting water all over the street. At one point, I walked up to it and stuck my head in the water. At the time, most of the adults kinda laughed like I was doing something really ridiculous, but a few hours later we came by again and every adult who passed was thoroughly soaking themselves in a vain attempt to allay the heat. We spent more money on drinks than we planned, and we spent a fair amount of the afternoon, by which point we were pretty footsore, just sitting around enjoying ourselves unhurriedly and laughing at all the folks that looked really miserable standing in lines.
We decided not to stay up for the fireworks; we were pretty hashed after driving all day the day before and then running around as early as we had, so we headed back around nine and turned in.
Tomorrow was the day we were really excited for; last time we had come to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure wasn't quite opened yet, so everything we did tomorrow was going to be brand-spanking new for us.
