Adventures in Orlando

Before I begin talking about the main subject of this post proper, let me take you all back in time a bit.

I’m old enough to remember the first time DVDs were released commercially. I remember going into our local Sainsbury’s branch with my mother and seeing a whole stack of blue boxes, each containing a silver DVD player and five accompanying DVDs. I can’t quite remember what all of them were, but I know for sure that two of them were The Full Monty of all things and a truly dire adaptation of James and the Giant Peach. Since when were giant mechanical sharks and underwater undead pirates part of the story?

Since my family and I had quite a lot of VHS tapes, the transition to DVDs was relatively slow at first, although the advantages were immediately apparent. For one, no longer was there a need to rewind after finishing watching a film. For another, DVD menus opened all sorts of benefits, such as scene selection and bonus features. Finally, there was the increased portability potential. Cars were being produced which had in-build DVD players and screens on the backs of seats, providing passengers new entertainment opportunities.

While my family never owned a car with an in-built player, we did own a portable DVD player which we strapped to the back of the driver’s seat for me to watch during long journeys on the way to various holiday destinations. With the number of times my family goes on holiday, it saw a lot of use prior to around 2014 or so when we stopped using it.

One of the films that we would take with us in the early days was The Lion King, which to this day is still my favourite animated film. I was the sort of person who liked plugging in not only the main disc but the disc containing bonus features as well, and in this instance the bonus features contained an entire section themed around the Animal Kingdom Park in Walt Disney World.

Young me was transfixed. Firstly, this thing looked like an entire country, not just one part of a theme park. Secondly, since the only Disney park I knew about at the time was the one in Paris, this was also the first time I realised that there were other Disney parks around the world. Granted, this did seem confusing at first; after all, if Disney was French, as I thought at the time, why would there be parks in America, let alone even bigger ones?

Retrospectively, I do find it amusing that my young mind had effectively normalised the concept of foreign language dubs for films due to this misunderstanding of Walt Disney’s nationality.

If this section on the DVD was designed to advertise Animal Kingdom Park, it did its job; the dream of visiting Walt Disney World had firmly planted itself in my mind. The issue, of course, was that it was very difficult to justify doing so for several years. Sure, there were things we could have found to do, but it’s a lot of money to just gamble on whether you can find things to do for a long enough time to make it worthwhile.

Things got kicked up a notch when it was announced that an entire section devoted to Star Wars, known as Galaxy’s Edge, would be opening within the Hollywood Studios Park. Suddenly, there wasn’t just Star Tours, which we had done a few times in Paris, but an entire array of specialist themed shops, eateries, experiences, and additional rides in the offing.

Time continued to pass on by, and around 2019 the idea to visit Orlando was floating around as a serious prospect. We even popped into a Virgin Holidays branch to pick up a brochure. Nothing came of that, however, and I’m very glad about that considering that the very next year the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Again, we waited, this time to be sure that nothing would emerge to interrupt potential plans again, and in late 2021 we begin formulating plans for 2022 with the help of the ever-reliable Trailfinders. Initially, we were looking at a December holiday due to the timings working out best for us around then, but it soon became apparent that for a first-time trip out there, December is one of the worst times to go. After some mulling around moving it to February half-term 2023, one of us suggested looking at October half-term 2022. We checked everything was a-okay with my parents’ workplaces, booked the hotel and one of two days out in wider Orlando, and we were sorted!

To begin with.

See, there are multiple layers to organising a holiday in Disney. You may be booked into a hotel, but that’s just step one. You then need to look at the website or download the My Disney Experience app, where you’ll have the options to reserve parks whenever you like (assuming there’s availability), and 60 days before you go you can start booking restaurants and certain special experiences. This is also where you can buy Genie+, the revised Fast Pass system, with options to start booking rides opening at 7:00am each day.

This is where things got a little bit confusing. My family and I are not exactly what you would call technologically adept. As the most adept member – and even then, that’s being generous – it was up to me to try my best to co-ordinate and link my parents’ accounts to the app so that we’d all see the same things, and that took a good amount of time due to quite confusing layouts and all sorts of hoops the app has you go through. It was all sorted in about thirty minutes, but it wasn’t a fun thirty minutes for any of us.

Additionally, for some reason people within the UK cannot use the app or the website to book experiences. I learnt from reading a forum thread of people griping about this that one way around this was to use a VPN to connect to somewhere in America, and that would allow you to book without phoning in. I can confirm that this does work, but since I’m paranoid I still ended up changing my Disney password upon doing this just in case the VPN wasn’t as secure as it claimed to be.

We were done with everything we could have wanted to be done with by the time September arrived. All we had to do was wait again until Thursday the 20^th of October.

~~~

How this post is going to work from this point forth is that I’ll be covering various things like hotels, park details, and dining basics before then launching into a day-by-day breakdown.

To begin with, though, a bit of background about me and my family.

We’re not exactly what you would call theme park or Disney aficionados. The last Disney film any of us saw in cinemas that wasn’t part of any pre-existing franchise was 2007’s Ratatouille, although that was only my mother and I. So apart from Toy Story 3, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean, all awareness of post-2007 films can be considered null and void.

For theme parks, we have previously visited the Disneyland in Paris – I want to say three times? – with the last visit again being 2007 as part of a trip organised by the school my mother works at and, even then, my father and I were just accompanying as family members. That’s not to say that we don’t find some enjoyment in theme parks; we have been known to visit the UK’s Legoland in Windsor several times, mostly due to my lifelong love for the construction toy.

As you’ll go on to discover in greater detail, we are not thrill ride enthusiasts, nor are we the type of people desperate to do every ride imaginable. If we can find something that we enjoy and get on and off in good time, we’re content.

Right, that’s the boring parts out the way, on with the Disney stuff!

~

The Hotel

We decided to stay within the Animal Kingdom Resort. There are two lodges within the resort, Jambo House and Kidani Village, and we chose to stay in Jambo House. We booked a savanna view room, as we acknowledged that if we had gone all that way and had a view of the pool or the parking lot due to instead securing a cheaper room when the room opposite might have seen a giraffe every day, then we would have instantly regretted it.

As one would have hoped for a resort of a five-star-rating, our room was top-notch. Plenty of space, the bed was comfortable, and the shower must have been simultaneously the most spacious and the best quality unit we have ever known. There is only one thing that would have made the room even better than it was, and that’s a physical copy of a list of animals we could have seen in our section of the savanna. There is a list online but, as you might have gathered above, I much prefer trying to detach technology from things as much as possible. Ah, well.

From our hotel balcony, we have seen Ankole-Watusi cattle, crowned cranes, Grant’s zebra, impala, and reticulated giraffe. Indeed, on our very first night we saw the four male giraffes on our section gathered just outside our room, which immediately made us feel that we had made the right call in going for this room.

The rest of the hotel itself is excellent. Jambo House has three restaurants, one giant pool, and a decently sized gift shop. The lobby, shop, and main entry / exit are all on the second / third floor, with dining options on the ground / first floor. Fortunately for us, our room wasn’t too far from the lobby at all, being but a floor and a corridor away as well as being relatively close to the stairs and elevators, so we had maybe a two-minute walk at most to get to places.

There was also mercifully very little by way of overt Disney stuff. Sure, the room had an engraved faux stone bearing a stylised scene representing the presentation of Simba and a picture of the famous sunrise from the start of The Lion King, but that was pretty much it outside of the gift shop and the restaurant we used for breakfast and a couple of other meals, The Mara, broadcasting a series of Disney cartoons (including a bizarre set of “safety smart” cartoons starring Timon and Pumbaa, focusing on things like safe tech use and washing your hands) from a television. At least it was silent and not blaring out for all to hear!

Unfortunately for my parents, having me in tow meant that any hope they might have had of visiting the two ‘big’ restaurants in the hotel, Boma and Jiko: The Cooking Place (hilariously mistyped as The Cookie Place in a special Disney World guidebook we had bought) were dashed. I’m not exactly an easy person to find suitable food for…

~

Dining

There are two types of restaurants located in both the hotels and the parks. The first is quick-service, which is basically fast-food. You place your order for cooked food at a counter, with the potential options to pick up pastry and yoghurts instantly depending on location, and then go and collect it when it’s ready. The second is table-service, which is a more traditional restaurant.

Quick-service restaurants cannot be pre-booked, so it’s entirely luck-of-the-draw if you can even find a seat if you’re in a park on a busy day. Fortunately, it’s possible, and even recommended by the staff, for you to find a table first and then use the My Disney Experience app to order food, so there is a way to potentially guarantee you can find a seat before placing your order. Cutlery and plates in all these locations are disposable, which can make it ‘fun’ depending on what you order and how hard it is to pierce and cut with plastic forks and knives.

While you are encouraged to book seats at table-service restaurants 60 days in advance, they are still happy to take people turning up – it’s again just luck-of-the-draw when you’ll be seated. Almost all our evening meals were within table-service restaurants, with the only exceptions beyond the day of our arrival being days when we were unable to guarantee what time we’d be back or had something organised in the evening at the lodge.

I’ll be covering each of the park restaurants during the day-by-day section, but I’ll take this opportunity to cover our hotel’s quick-service restaurant, The Mara. Cooked breakfasts weren’t always options, depending on which park we were doing (more on that in a minute), but the instant-serve options were more than decent. Indeed, my mother and I quickly agreed that their croissants were the best we have ever had outside of France.

We go to France an awful lot, by the way, so that’s quite some feat!

The lunch / dinner menu was alright. Not special by any means from my perspective, although my parents quite liked the braai chicken flatbread, but it filled a hole when it needed to so no complaints there.

The final things to mention are the reusable mugs offered for sale within the resort. For $21.99 (before tax), you can get a mug that can be refilled for free in any quick-service restaurant within any resort you were staying at (and any you visited at another resort), allowing you infinite access to soft drinks, water, and even hot drinks during your stay. Since an individual drink costs about $4 (again, before tax) you’d need to use them four or five times before they’ve paid for themselves, but if you’re only in a resort for a day or two at most it’s probably not worth the investment.

The mugs themselves are okay, although we found that the tops showed signs of weakening almost immediately. Fortunately, they haven’t cracked… yet.

~

The Parks

There are seven themed parks within the confines of Disney World: Animal Kingdom, Blizzard Beach, Epcot, ESPN’s Wide World of Sports, Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom, and Typhoon Lagoon. Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon take turns opening depending on the time of year, so effectively there are only six to consider. There’s also the non-theme park shopping village, Disney Springs, where we enjoyed most of our table-service evening meals.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone after the intro blurb that our main two targets of these parks were Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, and these were the only parks we made deliberate plans to visit more than once. We reserved Magic Kingdom for one day as well.

Our tickets allowed us the option to “park hop”. This is a system that allows guests to visit multiple parks in one day, with park-hoppers being able to enter their second park after 14:00, provided they have already visited their first reserved park (so you couldn’t, for example, choose to skip on Epcot in the morning and cheekily sneak to Hollywood Studios in the afternoon). We made provisional plans to park hop to Epcot after a half-day in Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom after the second half-day in Hollywood Studios.

As you’ll read later, we ended up changing plans somewhat.

As resort guests, we were able to enter parks half an hour before their official opening time. This varies from day-to-day, as each park has different opening times each day; some days, a park has its full opening at 8:00, other times at 9:00. This is why cooked breakfasts at The Mara weren’t an option on some days, since if we needed to be gone from the hotel before 7:30, when cooked breakfasts start being offered, that’s a non-starter immediately.

Our main plans for each of the days were as follows:

• Friday 21^st: Animal Kingdom
• Saturday 22^nd: Animal Kingdom
• Sunday 23^rd: Kennedy Space Centre
• Monday 24^th: Hollywood Studios
• Tuesday 25^th: Universal Studios
• Wednesday 26^th: Magic Kingdom
• Thursday 27^th: Hollywood Studios
• Friday 28^th: Animal Kingdom and departure

~

Transportation

If you don’t drive around Disney World, there are various options you can take. Taxi companies like Mear’s, Uber, and Lyft are available for hire (including the, in my opinion, brilliantly named “Minnie Vans” operated by Lyft in conjunction with Disney). Depending on which resort you’re staying at, you can use unique options like sky cars, boats, and monorails.

Otherwise, there are the buses, which are meant to be every 20 minutes. These apparently get something of a bad rap, presumably from people who like getting from A to B quickly and with as little delay as possible, but for our purposes they served us very well indeed. There was only one occasion when I would say it really let us down, but that was for an attempted park-hop and it proved a better decision to call it quits there and then anyway.

We made use of Mear’s a couple of times and a Lyft once whenever transport was required to get to another resort, Universal, and Florida airport. These were decent enough, and I’m quite pleased we were able to keep costs low by only doing them so often rather than relying on them each day.

I’d still have quite liked to have been in a Minnie Van just for the sake of it, but it’s a fair bit costlier so ultimately not worth it, probably.

~

Day 0: Thursday the 20^th

Our flight was booked for early afternoon UK time, which proved to be a useful time. Neither I nor my parents slept very well, so we were grateful to not have to be up at 4:00am to get on a taxi.

While we were held up by quite some time while waiting to check in at Gatwick due to several dozen groups being allowed through in front of us due to their flight departing imminently. I can understand one or two groups turning up so close, but several dozen?! Ugh. Happily, we were able to get a table at the Gatwick Nando’s immediately upon arrival there due to a reservation not turning up, so we were able to get a proper meal before take-off.

As I alluded to previously, I am a very picky eater. I like simple things with very few mixed textures, so I basically never touch meals offered aboard aircraft except for any accompanying cheese or biscuits if I know them to be to my liking. A good meal before take-off is something that I absolutely need to have as a result.

The flight was smooth and uneventful, although I was only able to get around an hour’s sleep, if that. Still, can’t complain too much. It got us there.

We arrived at the hotel around 8pm local time, which wasn’t too bad. We checked in, inspected the room briefly, and immediately headed down to The Mara so that I could get a bite to eat and so that we could buy the reusable mugs. After some confusion with the menu – there’s one outside but it isn’t as up to date as the one online is, and the ‘real’ menu is by the counter – I ordered a plate of chicken tenders. They were alright, albeit a little tough, but it filled a hole.

~

Day 1: Friday the 21^st

This was the first day we had arranged to be in Animal Kingdom, and it just so happened that this was also the day when Animal Kingdom’s early access was open at 7:30am. We didn’t plan on buying Genie+ to access the lightning lanes, instead opting to just use this day as an orientation.

Upon entry, the first thing we did was head straight for the Africa section and the Kilimanjaro Safari. This is a short (around 20 minutes) miniature safari, where you board a safari truck and are taken around the park’s savanna and some enclosures which can only be accessed in this manner. The savanna hosts animals such as eland, giraffe, waterbuck, and zebra, with multiple other grazing species as well, while the enclosures house hippos, nile crocodiles, rhinos, and lions. Basically, anything that’s safe to let wander among the trucks is out mingling on the plains while anything that’s dangerous is sensibly kept away from everything and everyone else.

We ended up queuing for about 45 or so minutes, which proved to be the longest amount of time we would spend in a queue all holiday. Ultimately, I would say that this queue time was just about worth the wait, although I wouldn’t want to be queuing for much longer (truth be told, I personally don’t think anything’s worth queuing for 60 minutes, even if you know what you’re about to experience). Fortunately, this queue is also well-shaded so if you are left queuing for long at least you’re kept mostly out of the scorching Florida sun.

Once off the trucks, we entered the nearby Gorilla Falls walk. After passing some colobus monkeys and a building containing insects that we weren’t much interested in, we entered a glorious walk-through aviary. We have a static caravan on a campsite in France which is barely a five-minute drive away from one of the best zoos in Europe, Bioparc de Doué la Fontaine, which has some superb walk-through aviaries. The little aviary in Gorilla Falls wasn’t anywhere near as spectacular as some of theirs (Doué does have the biggest walk-through aviary in Europe, after all) but it was easily one of the better ones we’ve been in.

As the name suggests, Gorilla Falls features gorillas as its main feature. They were alright, I guess, but any potential repeat visits would mainly be to see the aviary again.

We then headed to a bird display called Feathered Friends in Flight. It was decent enough for what it was, but again given our history with seeing phenomenal flight displays “decent” wasn’t entirely satisfactory for us. They did at least bring out a harpy eagle at the end, which we had never seen before, and there was some decent humour among all the stuff that clearly indicated it was done with kids in mind, but not an experience we would look to repeat. Shame.

Another disappointment was the Maharajah Jungle Trek, which featured tigers and another walk-through aviary. Compared to the one in Gorilla Falls, this aviary was rather drab, so while it was nice to see a decently sized tiger enclosure, ultimately this would not be something we would look to repeat.

After this, we tried and failed to secure seating at a quick-service restaurant called Pizzafari, so we elected to retreat to Jambo House and have lunch at The Mara. Having discovered just how good their croissants were at breakfast, I elected to have a couple more instead of anything warm. Then it was back to the hotel room for an afternoon doze.

For tea we were off to Springs for the first time, so we took the opportunity to arrive early and just look around. I had a couple of things on my “looking-to-buy” list, including some form of hat (since my head is too big for most hat sizes sold in the UK) and a Nala plush, while my mother had agreed to buy a pair of Minnie ears for her line manager’s daughter. We couldn’t find anything satisfactory on this outing, but it was still interesting to see what was being sold.

After a quick hop into an outpost selling merchandise from Galaxy’s Edge (mostly curiosity, but I was also keen to see if a certain item was being sold after being announced earlier this year…) we passed by Springs’ LEGO store, and I quickly noted that the Chewbacca statue standing outside it in a group alongside Kylo, Phasma, Rey, and a Sith Trooper looked very unimpressed.

Then it was off to find the Raglan Road pub. This was an establishment taking design and food inspiration from an Irish pub. While I cannot verify its veracity in attempting to mimic an Irish pub specifically design-wise, the interior was very comfortable and looked very authentic as an old-fashioned pub that you certainly could find within the islands of Britain and Ireland.

The food was top-notch. I had a spectacular plate of fish and chips, my mother a plate of bangers and mash, and my father a chicken pie. We all agreed immediately upon finishing that Raglan Road had set the gold standard immediately. Venue was fantastic, food excellent, service commendable, and it even had the added benefit of the entertainers who were treating us to Irish dancing and music being genuine Northern Irish folks rather than American actors.

I would happily revisit Raglan Road again should I return to Orlando, provided it’s still operational of course.

~

Day 2: Saturday the 22^nd

For our second day in Animal Kingdom, we elected to buy Genie+ to access the lightning lanes for the first time. It was a Saturday, so of course the American schoolkids were out and about today, and thus things were busier than they were the day before.

I’ve touched on Genie+ a bit above, but now that we’re into the days when we were starting to use it, it’s time to delve into it a bit. Genie+, as mentioned above, is the retooled Fast Pass system. You purchase it, you select your ride, and it gives you the nearest available slot with an hour’s window to arrive in. You can only select one ride at a time, and most (if not all?) rides you can only use a lane for once, but once you’ve clocked into that ride with your ticket, you can immediately select the next. Of course, depending on which ride you’re trying to book and how popular it is, you could be completely paralysed waiting until the evening and unable to use any other lightning lane.

At that point it just becomes easier to queue normally, doesn’t it?

Alongside the Genie+ lightning lanes are individual lightning lanes, which are separate from Genie+. These are for specific “big” rides that you can pay fast pass access for independently, so you can stack up both kinds of lightning lanes if you wanted. Unlike the regular lightning lanes, these do offer you specific time slots you can roughly aim for, although depending on the popularity of said ride you can find your time changing (including completely selling out) between selecting the closest window and going to the checkout.

We were able to secure an 8:25am – 9:25am window for Kilimanjaro Safari, so we went and did that quickly. Compared to the first safari, this one was much better – not that the first could be termed “bad”, but our guide on the second gave new and more information about the animals we were seeing, and they also got closer to our truck than they did the day before. There was also a moment where a giraffe chose to stand next to a roadside cliff in a spot that was a few yards away from the cattle grids, so we had to wait about 15 minutes for it to decide to move on, during which time one of the other passengers noticed a wild hawk sitting on a log and pointed it out.

I’ll use that as an excuse to say that one thing I had really been looking forward to was seeing what sort of wild birdlife we might be able to see out in Florida. I was open to seeing anything, of course, but I really hoped we’d get to see a bluejay and a cardinal. I think I saw a cardinal briefly on the 21^st, but I’m not too sure. It was certainly a small red bird, but it didn’t stay still long enough for us to see it clearly!

Apart from the hawk and cardinal, other wild birds we saw out here throughout our holiday were egrets, herons, ibis, turkey vultures, a black vulture, bald eagles, and even a couple of flying flamingos! Yay!

After the safari concluded, we booked ourselves into the Kali River Rapids ride, which was short but also very wet. Fortunately, we had brought some decent waterproof ponchos out with us, so while the other guests in our boat got rather soaked, we managed to stay relatively dry all things considered.

We then booked into something called the Animation Experience which was offered at a conversation-based section of the park accessible only by train. This was a short 30-minute session where an official Disney animator would guide you through the process of drawing an iconic animated animal character, although they do provide you with a starting outline. Each session offers a different character, and the character in our session was Shere Khan.

Would I have preferred a character from The Lion King? Absolutely, but Shere Khan’s still a character I like and, crucially, is one that all three of us could identify if asked. Considering just how many characters that there are in the Disney library, it could have been very easy to get more obscure (from our perspective) characters like Louis, Flotsam, that pig from Moana, etc. etc.

This done, we made a second (and this time successful) attempt to eat at Pizzafari. Since the small pizzas must come with a side like a small salad or a mandarin, my parents ordered one larger salad between them, bolstering it with my side salad, while I had a pepperoni pizza. It was pleasant, and easily the best meal at a quick-service restaurant I had throughout the holiday.

We then booked into a show called Festival of the Lion King, which was a live re-enactment of songs from the film dressed up as celebrating the story of Simba. It boasted some phenomenal singers and dancers, while the few animatronics that featured were very impressive. Simba was fantastic!

Afterwards, we tried to park-hop to Epcot, but a delayed bus combined with aching feet caused us to decide to just retreat to the hotel and see if we could do Epcot another day. As is the way of things, a bus to Epcot turned up three minutes after we left the queue, with a second one not two minutes behind that one.

Oh well. It was the right decision to head back to the hotel, I feel.

For tea, we were actually heading back to the park we had left earlier. Rainforest Café is represented by two different establishments in Walt Disney World; there’s one in Disney Springs, and another (the largest in the world, apparently) is just by the entrance to Animal Kingdom.

Rainforest Café is one of two restaurants within Disney that my family and I have eaten at before, in Paris, although I cannot remember much about that other than I had a yellow t-shirt bearing the image of Nile the crocodile from its store. The experience was… bizarre.

Aesthetically, Rainforest Café lives up to its name. Its interior is done up to look like a ‘proper’ rainforest, complete with vines, trees, and flowers everywhere, and dotted throughout the restaurant are animatronic chimpanzees, elephants, gorillas, leopards, snakes, and tigers. We were seated next to an artificial waterfall, which was loud. Additionally, every 30 minutes the ceiling lights flash and a ‘thunderstorm’ happens, so it’s not the place to eat if you want a quiet, civilised dining experience.

Even the staff get in on the action. Whenever someone orders an item on the menu known as the Sparkling Volcano, its service is announced by the waiter shouting “VOLLL-CAAAANOOO!” at least twice, sometimes accompanied by others in their wake, applauding the dish’s journey. I counted twelve volcanos being delivered in our section of the restaurant, so that was a lot of “VOLLL-CAAAANOOO!” shouts.

I had a lovely burger, although the chips weren’t exactly great, as did my mother (hers was with BBQ sauce, an option I briefly considered before electing to keep it safer), and my father had some fish and chips. We left just as the third thunderstorm began, not quite sure what to make of the entire ordeal.

At least we didn’t try to visit all 19 establishments across the US and Canada in 21 days…

~

Day 3: Sunday the 23^rd

This was the first of two days which would take us outside of Disney World, as we were going to Kennedy Space Centre. You can’t exactly go all that way and not do it, after all, how many other places can you visit that are actively involved in going to space?!

This was our earliest start, as we were required to be at another Disney resort (the Swan & Dolphin) by 7:10am for a pickup. Of course, the coach didn’t get there until almost half-past. After picking up several other tourists, off we went. Our tour guide, and some other passengers, pointed out the odd few gators that were on the side of the road as we neared Kennedy, but it was during this trip that my mother and I saw the flying flamingos. Had we been at a different angle, or on the other side of the bus, we would never have seen them.

Alligators cannot compare to that!

Since guided tours are no longer allowed there, our tour guide had come up with an advised schedule of places to visit, but my family and I all took one look at it and disregarded it instantly. I stated earlier that we’re not ‘big’ on finding rides to do. That’s not to say that we don’t enjoy rides, but we’re not people who will happily do a ride just for the sake of it.

This is relevant to Kennedy because they’ve recently opened a big building called Gateway which houses three simulators. It wasn’t made entirely clear to us whether there were more things in there that weren’t simulator-based, but we weren’t too keen to gamble in finding out. Instead, we bypassed that building and headed to the Atlantis Space Shuttle building.

Fun fact! Did you know that a “space shuttle” is not just the white rocket-cum-glider that gets propelled into space atop the giant orange fuel pod? We didn’t! We’d just always been led to believe that the rocket-glider, which is known as the orbiter, was the shuttle, but that’s really the name of the entire thing, fuel pod and booster rockets included.

There, that’s some education if you didn’t know that fact already!

The Atlantis exhibition was incredible, and it was great to be able to get up close to the orbiter. We were able to hop onto the back of a guided tour, which did admittedly start two minutes early, which was fascinating – did you know that the black sections are mainly made up of 124,000 little black foam panels, each of them injected by hand with water-repellent? Fascinating stuff!

Since it was part of the wider exhibition and not just by itself, we also checked out the “Shuttle Launch Experience” simulator, which was quite fun. The simulator really rotates 90-degrees vertically, so you can experience the take-off like you would while in an orbiter, and it was very impressive. These simulators are phenomenal at emulating momentum!

It was in the Atlantis gift shop that I finally found a cap that could extend big enough to fit my head, so I now have a NASA hat. Yay.

We then boarded a bus to go and see the Apollo / Saturn V building, as well as have some lunch, and it was great to see both a flight control room and an actual Saturn V rocket, split into its various stages. Lunch was alright, although signage could have been improved: there are two counters, one for a custom-made sandwich, and the other for quick pick-ups like chicken strips, hot dogs, and burgers, and you would be forgiven for thinking that you had to go via the sandwich counter to access the other.

Oh, and the sandwich counter was really slow at serving customers as well. Joy!

Back at the main complex, we paid a quick stop to the rocket garden before heading to buy some ice creams while waiting for a talk by a former astronaut named Mark Lee. His talk was fascinating, and I can only imagine what it must be like to be someone who has been to space four times.

After all that, it was time to head home. The tour guide had brought some DVDs in the form of a Shrek boxset for the kids to enjoy while on the journey, so for the first time in well over a decade we watched the first Shrek film. No iconic “Somebody once told me” moment, though, as the guide evidently forgot or didn’t realise that if you leave a DVD menu idle for long enough, the film starts playing, and it was on mute until about twenty minutes in.

Ah, well. There are worse ways to pass the time.

Back at Jambo House and The Mara, I just had a couple of croissants again. My father had a braai chicken flatbread, and my mother had a Caesar salad if I recall correctly. It filled a hole.

~

Day 4: Monday the 24^th

The time had come to visit Hollywood Studios and Galaxy’s Edge. We bought Genie+ and secured a Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run slot between 10:50am and 11:50am, and I had attempted to secure an individual lightning lane option for the big ride, Rise of the Resistance, only for the opportunity to be snatched away almost instantaneously. It had booked that fast.

Still, we headed in just a short while after early access opened at 8:30am, early enough that Star Tours only had a 5-minute standby queue. Against advice from my mother, who was keener that we get to Galaxy’s Edge, we hopped in and got to experience the updated Star Tours experience for the first time.

If, like me, your only experience with Star Tours was in the past, here’s what they’ve changed, at least in the Orlando version. RX-24, the pilot in the original version, has been retired, his place taken by AC-pilot droids such as AC-38. Of course, shenanigans occur so AC-38 isn’t the actual pilot – that job befalls an unfortunate C-3PO, who was onboard performing maintenance when the take-off systems engaged.

The experience takes you across journeys inspired by the most recent films, so you visit Jakku during the Millennium Falcon chase, can encounter Kylo Ren, help the Resistance out on Crait or Exegol, etc. etc. Upon exiting the ride for the first time, I remarked that they had missed a trick; the ride seemingly always stopped in Batuu, the planet Galaxy’s Edge is themed around, and Star Tours is still located outside of it. Of course, they couldn’t relocate the exit to the new park, that’s just obscene given the distance, but a later ride also revealed that there was another ending which lands you back in the same spaceport the ride began from so, ultimately, I can entirely forgive that aspect of things.

It's not like it was purposely built to be the way it is and still miss out on delivering a ‘proper’ entry to the main park or anything. Who’d do something like that, eh?

We then entered Galaxy’s Edge and were confronted with the prospect of a 90-minute queue for Rise. If you can recall the first queue time I mentioned for the Kilimanjaro Safaris, you’ll realise that this never came to pass; we were in and out within 50 minutes, and the ride’s a good 10 – 12 minutes!

Rise of the Resistance is easily my favourite ride from any park I’ve ever been in. To break down the series of events:

The ride-goers play the parts of Resistance recruits, en-route to a secret base helmed by General Leia Organa. After getting a briefing from Rey (Daisy Ridley’s image brilliantly being projected to look like a very convincing hologram!) and being introduced to Lieutenant Bek and fan-favourite pilot Nien Nunb, you board a transport piloted by animatronics of the latter two characters. You’re escorted off-planet by a replacement Black One (since the original was destroyed in The Last Jedi) and a couple of other T-70s, with Oscar Isaac reprising his role as Poe Dameron.

Your transport encounters First Order TIEs, which destroy the red shirts accompanying Poe, and you’re caught in a tractor beam that drags you back into a hangar. The transport doors open, and rather than the opposite doors to the side you enter opening to make it appear that you’ve moved when you really haven’t, the doors you just entered through open again and you really have moved. You’re now in a First Order hangar, complete with dozens of animatronics dressed up as stormtroopers and cast members representing harsh First Order officers barking orders at you, their prisoners.

This must be the best ride to be a cast member on. You get to be rude and obnoxious entirely within character, so if ever you get frustrated at someone you can’t break any “happy smiley Disney employee” façade in griping at them. They take you to a cell, and after a projection of General Hux and Kylo Ren plays (Domnhall Gleeson returns as Hux, but I don’t know for sure who portrayed Ren – he’s in his Force Awakens look the entire time despite having ditched it by the time this is set) where they announce they will get the location of the base from you, the cell wall is “cut away” and you’re freed by cast members representing Resistance members.

They direct you to two carts, each piloted by an R5 droid, and John Boyega's Finn, undercover as a stormtrooper, contacts you to announce the strategy from here on out. Your droids will take you to elevators that lead to escape pods, and then you’ll head back down to Batuu. Of course, things don’t go exactly to plan…

I won’t go into too much detail of what happens after this point (seriously, go experience it) but it’s really good fun. It’s fast-paced but doesn’t feel too fast, and there’s an excellent moment towards the end once you do get aboard the escape pod.

We left Rise of the Resistance having thoroughly enjoyed the experience. We did acknowledge there and then that we were fortunate, and I overheard one chap telling his family that he had been queuing for it for 90 minutes once, and it had been a “long” 90 minutes. To be in and out within 50 was, comparatively, phenomenal.

We had some time to kill between getting off Rise and heading to the Falcon ride, so we walked through the bazaar before coming across the to-scale replica of the Millennium Falcon herself that takes pride-of-place in the main part of the park. She was beautiful to behold, and this was also the first opportunity we had to take advantage of our ticket having Memory Maker built-in – this meant that we could sidle up to an official Disney photographer and, using one of our tickets, link the photos they take to our account so that we could access and download them later. So, we now have photographs of ourselves in front of the Falcon, which is brilliant.

Although time was coming up to check into the Falcon ride, I insisted that we stop off via Dok-Ondar’s Den of Antiquities, which is one of several shops in the area. This is where you can get things like holocrons (the Jedi one has Obi-Wan’s message from Rebels playing), some costume pieces, and other miscellaneous items from, but there was one thing I had eyes for.

See, this shop sells something known as “legacy lightsabers”. These are lightsabers which are based on the films and TV series, even paying enough attention to the concept art for Asajj Ventress’ planned return in The Clone Wars, from which her lightsaber was repurposed into the second half of Maul’s lightsaber in series 7, to sell two versions of the same saber, one with a red crystal, the other with a yellow crystal.

When planning our visit initially, I had no intentions of buying anything significant in this store. After all, I already had an Obi-Wan Force FX saber from a few years ago, so no reason to invest in another version of it, and while I love Leia’s saber from The Rise of Skywalker, I don’t think I love it that much. So, no, no lightsabers for—waitaminute they’re adding Plo Koon’s lightsaber to the line-up, and in time for our visit?!

Even if this saber weren’t Master Plo’s, this design has always been one of my favourite hilts from the prequel era. I remember fondly a toy Hasbro saber from the Attack of the Clones range that was meant to be Mace Windu’s, but it was either put into production before the design for his lightsaber was finalised or that design was too hard to replicate, as the hilt was instead based on the design worn by Samuel L. Jackson during The Phantom Menace, that being the same basic design as Plo Koon’s.

It's therefore great to be able to purchase a more realistically scaled, metal, and blue-bladed version of the hilt, and it being Plo Koon’s specific hilt (unique for having the blue bits around the emitter ring) is just the icing on the cake.

That done, we finally made our way to the Falcon ride, which is an interactive ride where ride-goers are hired by none other than Hondo Ohnaka to fly the Falcon on a mission. I don’t know if there are different ones, but the one we went on has you steal some coaxium from a shipment.

How it works is that there are six guests per ride: two pilots, two gunners, and two engineers. Each person has specific things to do, which basically amount to “hit button / pull switch” when prompted, although things will still happen even if you don’t do the things when prompted. Notably, we entered hyperspace despite the main pilot (unfortunately for her, my mother) not noticing the iconic lever lighting up.

I miiiiight have taken advantage of my position of co-pilot (seemingly as far as the ride was concerned, at any rate; according to the layout in the films, my position was main pilot) and pulled it the second time. C’mon, it’s like one of the most iconic things that you can do.

Ultimately, this was not a ride that we felt was worth a repeat. It’s the sort of thing where if you’re a larger family group you can guarantee that at least a couple of people will be doing something different by organising the order in which you queue beforehand, but in a smaller group where you’ll be paired with other people it’s much harder to predict how things will play out. The pilot job is easily the most desirable, so I can see some really hardcore fans wanting to do it until they land that role, but otherwise… yeah. Fun to do once, and that’s about it.

The Hondo animatronic was really good, though.

Having some time to kill, we booked into an immediate lightning lane slot for Star Tours, which mercifully was different from the previous one, and went and had some lunch. It was passable.

Then it was back into Galaxy’s Edge for the first of two experiences I had booked for myself: the Droid Depot. Here, attendees can build either a BB or an R-series astromech using a series of parts. I opted to build an R-series droid, having already done some research to find out what pieces were available in what colours. There was a purple R2 dome I liked, and since none of the black, blue, or red body parts would have worked well with it (in my view), I chose a simple white body and set of legs.

How all this works is that, once checked in, you are given a basket and told to stand by a conveyor belt where the main parts of all droids are going past. You may see several C-series, R-series, or BB-series parts go past before you find even your first piece. I was quite lucky in that I had everything but the middle leg sorted within a minute, and three minutes later three white middle legs showed up.

Always the way.

Then it was off to a build station, where you are guided in the process by a cast member. Here, you can also pick up side panels for the legs and the interface arms, although again you can only get white, red, and blue bits for free. Extra panels (including those which are included on the droid by default) in different colours can be bought for an additional fee, and since there sadly were no purple options, I chose metallic pink.

It works better than the blue and metallic green options, at least! Silver bits might have been interesting, but probably too close to the white…

Once this was done, we had a good hour to wait until the second experience. We just sat somewhere relatively shady and observed all that was going on. During this time, I overheard a group of people complaining about the staleness of the current films’ era (since Galaxy’s Edge is purely about the sequel trilogy, it’s not the sort of thing you can escape from if you aren’t a fan of the films, so this debate is probably on a lot of people’s minds) and opined that the story of The Old Republic was more interesting. One chap even name-dropped Vitiate, which was fun, although – it must be said – dangit, Vitiate, you’re dead, stop getting everywhere!

Time rolled around, as it does, and it was time for the second experience: Savi’s Workshop. This is where you build your very own lightsaber, and the experience couldn’t be more different than Droid Depot.

In Droid Depot, you may be left waiting in a long queue while people register and are taken to select parts for their droid(s) on an individual basis. It could easily be that building the droid is the shortest part of the whole thing.

With Savi’s Workshop, you go in as a group, so you’re waiting with others, not just for others, and the experience itself is kept quite tightly timed. There is very little world-building within Droid Depot, which makes sense as a droid is quite utilitarian, but with Savi they have this entire backstory for how the proprietors have been gathering bits and pieces of lightsabers to continue the legacy of the Jedi. Heck, they even allow you to select a red crystal (although the current canon lore suggests such things aren’t possible without bleeding the crystal first… yeah, it’s confusing) because, except for Kylo Ren, red crystals being synonymous with the dark side is considered history.

Back in 2005, I owned a “build-a-lightsaber” electronic toy. This basically amounted to a tube with batterys and a bulb that you slid various parts onto to create a hilt. It even came with different crystals, although these only impacted the sound, not the colour of the blade which was defined by one of three colour wheels you could rest on the light source. I was anticipating this experience to be similar, and it mostly was.

When checking into the experience, you are asked to look at a parts list. There are four ‘archetypes’ of saber you can choose from, each with enough parts to (in-theory) build two distinct lightsabers. They are Peace and Justice, Power and Control, Elemental Nature, and Protection and Defense (sic.). Since these parts are mostly all represented in Jedi: Fallen Order, I had had plenty of opportunity while playing that game to identify my favourite aesthetic, and I went with Elemental Nature.

Annoyingly, things don't align quite as perfectly as they should: after this photo was taken, I was at least able to get the majority of panels aligned, but it's still not centred to the switch... oh well!

When your chosen parts are delivered to you, the first thing you are allowed to do is select your crystal; blue, green, purple, or red. I chose blue. You slot this in, build the switch around it, and begin screwing handgrip sleeves around it, capping the relevant ends with pommel and emitter. Then your hilt gets inserted into a long tube resting by your workstation, you press the switch, and you see the blade that your hilt just got attached to ignite.

All this is very clever, and I love how they were able to come up with a way of making the crystal you choose define the colour of your blade (you can, of course, buy another if you don’t get the crystal you wanted or fancy an alternative). Is that RFID tech, or whatever it is? Regardless, it’s so cool to experience that moment in the flesh and I would encourage everyone reading this to at least look up a video of that moment if you haven’t already experienced it.

This done, we headed back to the hotel for an afternoon slump before we were off to Springs again. Sadly, my meal wasn’t quite as nice as I had been hoping; City Works Eatery & Pour House is a nice establishment, especially if you’re a fan of alcohol – they have 80 beers on tap! – and my parents thoroughly enjoyed their meals, but the burger I ordered sadly wasn’t quite as I like them. I don’t like onions within my beef, and maybe I missed that it had them, so… yeah. I won’t hold it against them, as I know how easy I am to put off.

Before I move on to Tuesday, I want to provide a little summary of my thoughts on Galaxy’s Edge.

Aesthetically, the park is glorious, of course it is. It’s so very alien compared to the rest of Hollywood Studios, and just seeing a T-70, RZ-2, TIE Echelon, and of course the Falcon parked up is incredible. You’ve also got various droids dotted around, particularly at the depot, as well as speeders. The themed food I’m sure is okay, but when I looked at the menu there was very little there that I thought I would be comfortable eating, so we gave that a pass.

It was quite fun to see Chewie, Rey, the unique Galaxy’s Edge character Vi Moradi, and a couple of stormtroopers patrolling around. No Kylo that I saw, though. Shame. Honestly, the weirdest thing about it to me was just the bizarre clash with the in-universe time frame that the whole thing has. The park itself takes clear inspiration from The Force Awakens given the Falcon has her rectangular radar dish and Kylo has his full shawled look, but Rey’s in her Last Jedi look (albeit with her Force Awakens hairstyle) and there is also as mentioned an RZ-2 A-wing.

Rise of the Resistance is the most bizarre by far. This is set between Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, as Rey, Finn, and Poe are all fully-fledged members of the Resistance, and yet Black One is still intact, as is Kylo’s helmet, and again Kylo’s in his TFA garb. I get that they must try and keep everything together and not have too many things out-of-place with each other (I can see some kids being confused why Kylo’s look changes between Rise and seeing him in the park, for example), but it is confusing when trying to put everything together in-universe.

I was asked by my guild to report back on whether I felt it was underwhelming and over-expensive as reports had indicated, and my feelings are as follows:

Underwhelming:

Now, here, I don’t feel I can provide a satisfactory answer to this report. I’ve concluded that the most likely candidates who have reported feeling this way are probably any of the following types of people:

• Anyone who visited before Rise, back when Smuggler’s Run was the only ride.
• Anyone who expects to be doing multiple rides in short order (i.e., 30-minute queues at most).
• Anyone who likes rollercoasters most of all rides.
• Anyone who wants the park to be focused on anything other than the Sequel Trilogy.
• Anybody who hopes that Galaxy’s Edge is a day-long enterprise or would almost certainly leave something to come back to.
• Anyone who doesn’t like an absolute onslaught of gift shops (seriously, there are so many).

If you are any of the above people, I can completely understand why you would find Galaxy’s Edge underwhelming. It’s not the sort of thing you’d be able to structure an entire holiday around, as even if you get into the longest queues for Rise and Smuggler’s Run, you’d still be done within three, four hours, not counting experiences or time spent shopping.

From our perspective, Galaxy’s Edge felt just about right. We never felt bored or uninterested, even during the times when we were just sitting down for a good while. There’s just so much to soak in, and if you’re the sort of person who is just content to get on something you enjoy in moderately good time the rides are perfectly okay. Rise is phenomenal, although again I wouldn’t want to be waiting for much longer than 45 minutes, and since we had another day booked into Hollywood Studios, we all agreed it was worth doing again when we returned.

Over-expensive:

Now, here, I do agree with the sentiment.

The thing to consider with taxes in America compared to the UK is that the final price of product you’re buying will only be calculated once you’re at the checkout. The price you see on websites, menus, and shelves is all pre-tax. So, a droid that costs $120 ends up costing almost $140, and so on.

Here’s how I would break down the value of the items I purchased, which came to about $650:

Plo Koon legacy hilt:

Excellent value. Post-tax, this came to $180, which (at the moment!) is around £154.99. For context, the currently available roster of Force FX lightsabers (which are basically the same thing) are all over £200 on uk.hasbropulse.com – the cheapest being a Darth Revan one for £249.99 (although one is listed as sold out for £215.99… confusing!) and the most expensive being Luke and Obi-Wan’s hilts both for £299.99.

Getting an exclusive hilt that has only ever been replicated by independent companies like Ultrasabers for almost £100 cheaper than even the cheapest Force FX saber seems like an absolute bargain to me. £300 for a lightsaber… yeesh.

Droid Depot:

My droid, R2-JN4, is adorable, but she was also easily the worst value purchase in my mind. It doesn’t help that there is nothing really to compare it to of a similar size and function, unlike the lightsabers, so maybe it’s not as bad as I feel it is.

To break it down, the droid herself was $140 post-tax, but I also purchased a bag and a (in retrospect unnecessary) personality chip, both of which brought the total cost of the droid herself to $207, or around £178. The bag was a useful purchase, to be sure, as it meant that R2 could travel back with me as hand-luggage, but I do feel it’s very cheeky to ask people to buy it. Savi’s Workshop provides carrycases for its sabers for no added cost!

The little accessory pack of panels for $13 was decent value for what it was, I feel, although again I’m still a bit disappointed they weren’t done in purple. At least they did the droid dome with purple parts!

Savi’s Workshop:

Considering how expensive some of the Force FX sabers were as listed above, getting a personalised (in as much as you can call a saber that likely dozens of people each week replicate in some form “personalised”) lightsaber for $247, or £212, doesn’t seem too bad. Even the additional crystals you can buy, retailing around $20, aren’t too bad considering they’re a neat bit of kit and even outside of the lightsaber can be an interesting conversation piece.

Additionally, unlike the Droid Depot, I would say that if the cost is inflated because of the experience, I would say that it’s worth it. It feels much more impressive and should end up being memorable for good reasons rather than because you had to wait 20 minutes for a 10 minute build and not much else.

Plus, the Elemental Nature hilt I chose has some aesthetic similarities to my favourite lightsaber hilt in SWTOR, so that’s an extra plus!

All-in-all, while I would agree that Galaxy’s Edge can be horrendously overpriced (I say, having spent almost $700 across just five receipts; imagine what an entire family could rack up, with meals, costume bits, all the kids getting droids…), I am not personally of the opinion that it is underwhelming. I can see why people say it is, and I would like there to be more added, but it seemed just about the right sort of size for us.

Universal Studios, on the other hand…

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Day 5: Tuesday the 25^th

…definitely hit the “underwhelming” button on us. Hard.

Okay, so, Harry Potter.

Growing up, HP was an on-and-off love of mine. I grew up loving the books, fell a bit out-of-favour with the franchise around the time the Goblet of Fire movie released, but found myself re-engrossed in it with all subsequent book and film releases.

Which, of course, makes it hard to really come to terms with how things have developed outside of the main books. A disappointing spin-off franchise that makes some very questionable decisions here, real-world issues surrounding the author there, and Potter has taken a severe nose-dive in recent years.

I will always love the main series of books and films for what they were to me growing up, but ultimately it is time to move on. I’m not going to make a grand spectacle of it, since after all I am but one person, but I think it is best for my peace of mind that I do just retreat from it and hope that eventually things die down.

At the same time, it also would have felt a bit of a shame to go all the way to Orlando and not at least see the Potter section of the park. As a behind-the-scenes geek for films and TV shows, the Warner Bros. studio tour is something that I absolutely loved (seriously, I love film exhibits – I’m not sure if Star Wars Identities is still going, but I heartily recommend everyone reading this to go to that if it is!), so I was keen to at least see how an ‘actual’ replication of Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade would compare to what I had already seen.

To begin with, the entire experience ticked me off because it really missed a trick. Remember how I said how disappointing it initially seemed that Star Tours ended on Batuu without spitting you out there, and how I could forgive that because it wasn’t purpose-built for that effect?

What’s the first thing any serious Potter fan will tell you about the brick wall that leads to Diagon Alley? It’s at the back of the Leaky Cauldron pub. How do you get to it in Universal? Just through a very badly indicated hole in a wall (seriously, you could walk past it and just mistake it as a nook with a fun exhibit or something inside) with any entrances to the Leaky Cauldron being inside Diagon Alley itself.

I get that they wouldn’t want thousands of people each day crowding through the eating area of the Leaky Cauldron, but why not dedicate a special large section purely for queuing that still had the authentic feel? Just feels like a massive missed opportunity there, as all this is purpose-built and otherwise tries its damnedest to seem authentic.

Diagon Alley itself is okay. It doesn’t compare at all to the studio tour, largely because it lacks the “wonder” factor about how they got all that from set to screen. This is purpose-built to be a spectacle, and for anyone who hasn’t done the tour I can 100% get the “wonder” factor existing for them, but it did absolutely nothing for me. We got ice creams at Florean Fortescue’s Ice Cream Parlour, which were decent, and again just sat and watched the world go by.

Unlike in Galaxy’s Edge, where you are strongly encouraged to pre-book for droids and lightsabers, I don’t know if it’s even possible to do so for Ollivander’s, which had long queues snaking out the door as people were waiting their turn. It’s something of a shame, as it would have been quite interesting to see inside, but it wouldn’t have been worth the queue just to turn around without buying anything and say “well, that was interesting, off we go!” as we certainly would have done.

At this juncture, I’ll talk about the rides which Universal offers. For the most part, Universal is a much more thrill-ridey place than Disney World, with multiple rollercoasters and other such thrill rides packed quite close together. There are a handful of non-rollercoasters, such as a Dr. Seuss themed rapids ride, but that’s pretty much it.

For Potter, there was only one thing that can be considered a “ride” which wasn’t thrill or rollercoaster-themed: the Hogwarts Express. You board it at a decent facsimile of King’s Cross, and on your journey your cabin window projects a video of you leaving the station (so surreal to see the London skyline in America…) and travelling across the country up to Hogwarts. Along the way, you pass iconic locations and a couple of characters even appear at points.

Robbie Coltrane’s passing not so long ago made any of Hagrid’s appearances harsher in retrospect, and I think his sudden appearance in the transit journey proved too much for the poor woman who was sharing our compartment with her family. I also believe that the high popularity of the Hagrid-themed rides Flight of the Hippogriff and Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure was due to people using them to say “goodbye” to Coltrane.

Hogsmeade was surreal. It’s themed around the singular scene in the Prisoner of Azkaban film, which means that you enter a village bedecked in snow. In FLORIDA, at 28-degrees Celsius. What the flip.

Since we weren’t actively interested in any non-Hogwarts-Express rides, there was only one non-stage-show option open to us; walking through the Hogwarts castle that had been constructed and then hopping off just before the ride proper. This was an alright experience, and I liked the mock-ups of Dumbledore’s Office and the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom, but… yeah. I’m pleased we weren’t queuing for more than 25 minutes for that experience.

We hopped back to Diagon Alley for lunch in the Leaky Cauldron, where my tolerance for apps invading everyday life finally reached its end. Much like we did in the Disney quick-service restaurants, we found a table and began ordering on the app. So far, so good.

Then my account refused to save our card details. Multiple times. Uh-oh. My mother was able to save the card to an account she had just created, which I signed into on my phone, and we were off again! Except that it took an age for the app to connect to the little “scan here!” thing on the table that denoted which number we were (82), with no direct option to input the number or scan the QR code, instead scanning by vicinity alone!

Indeed, it was only after cancelling our attempt to do this that the app finally provided a way to input the number directly, so at least it took pity on us. It then took 30 minutes for the food to arrive, which my parents described as “not-good-quality pub food”. My fish and chips were good, however, so I was content.

Now, remember that list of people who I said I can imagine finding Galaxy’s Edge disappointing? For the Harry Potter part of Universal, I’m invoking the inverse of the “anyone who likes rollercoasters most of all rides” category; if you loathe rollercoasters, even small ones, this is not the park for you.

And that, to me, is a shame, as Harry Potter lends itself quite nicely to other potential rides that aren’t coaster-based. How about a Knight Bus simulator like Star Tours? Or a nice slow dark ride where you’re taken around the interior of Newt Scamander’s suitcase?

The thing to consider with Harry Potter is that, while adults love it, it is first and foremost a children’s franchise. Based on what I’ve seen of the rides at Universal, I would say that very few of the rides are kid-friendly, especially young kids. If you have a young family of Potterheads, with the eldest being six or seven, good chance that three of the four main rides in Potter are out of your league. Maybe all of them, depending on whether your children like coasters in the first place!

Compare that to Galaxy’s Edge. Rise of the Resistance has a handful of scary moments for children, but nothing as potentially frightening as a rollercoaster. Smuggler’s Run is bound to be great fun for kids, with all the pushing of buttons and flicking of levers that they’d get to do! Star Tours’ humour is all-age-friendly, and again has some scary moments but not that many!

Point is with all these rides, if your children are okay with simulated momentum and shakes and judders, they are approachable by all sorts of people from many age groups. You wouldn’t see my mother dead on even a medium-sized coaster, and yet she absolutely loved both Star Tours and Rise.

To have a Potter themed park and to provide very few truly all-age-friendly options feels, to me, like a massive misstep. I know it’s Universal, and it’s what they like to do, but there absolutely needs to be more.

Oh, and the walking tour of Hogwarts needs improving. The fact that you must queue as if you’re getting on the ride and then bail feels clunky. Why not have a purpose-built line for non-riders just so they can walk around of their own accord? Keep them absolutely separate so that they can’t queue-jump, but you risk having to queue for upwards of an hour just for the sake of seeing a handful of rooms and that’s it.

I don’t know if the ride takes you through other places such as the Great Hall, but if it does, why not allow walkers to see bits of that as well? Sure, not as much, but just a little bit, y’know?

Not quite the farewell I would have wanted to give to the franchise, but it satisfied a curiosity that otherwise would have been left hanging.

What was overwhelming, however, was the sheer presence of Hallowe’en-themed stuff. Within the UK, Hallowe’en is mercifully rather small-scale (although it has been getting gradually bigger over the years…), but in the US it’s of course quite a big thing. We bought special Coca-Cola mugs that could be refilled for free at refill stations (they did a lovely infused-lemon variant of the Cola drinks!), and rather than the quite pleasant if uninteresting designs that are usually offered, we got quite naff ones with monsters plastered over it, promoting some Hallowe’en nonsense thing the park does.

The cups themselves aren’t half-bad, and they certainly seem far more robust than the Disney resort ones. I’m given to understand that Universal manages to one-up Disney in greed, though, by having two different refillable mugs that can’t be used interchangeably – one for the hotels, the other for the park. Sneaky bastards.

We were back at Jambo House for longer than we thought we’d be, so we decided to investigate the pool for the first (and only) time during our stay. It was lovely. Even though there were plenty of people there, it didn’t feel busy due to its size, and the temperature of the water was very welcoming. A thoroughly pleasant experience.

After tea at the Mara, we hopped on a shuttle to Kidani Village, the other lodge within the Animal Kingdom resort area, where we were due to board a night-time safari. This was another one of those special experiences you could pre-book, although unlike Droid Depot and Savi’s Workshop (where you paid when you arrived), this you had to pay for up-front.

We checked in, boarded the truck, were provided a night-vision scope, and we were off! The truck took us around two of the six savannas that could be seen from the Animal Kingdom lodges, including the one we could see from our room, so it was great to get another view of it. We got up close to the cattle, giraffe, wildebeest, and zebra, and it was a fascinating experience. My family has been on actual safaris in South Africa, in the Kariega reserve, but never had we done anything at night before, so this was an entirely new experience for us.

We would happily repeat the experience if the opportunity arose, I’m sure!

~

Day 6: Wednesday the 26^th

Magic Kingdom time. It had to be done, didn’t it?

This park had the biggest indication that Hallowe’en was right around the corner, with pumpkin decorations around the entrance and in the plaza near Cinderella’s castle, but it fortunately wasn’t too overwhelming.

Like Saturday and Monday, we purchased a lightning lane and made good use of it. The first ride we booked into was a long-time nemesis of mine from Paris: Pirates of the Caribbean.

Overall, I do remember the Pirates ride relatively fondly, as the animatronic parts were funny and it was quite well put-together with the mock-up ports etc., but there was one part I hated. As a child, I wasn’t massive on log flume rides on the few occasions I rode them. Pirates upped the ante considerably by having a slide… in the dark.

To say I loathed that bit would be an understatement. I was terrified by that ordeal, not helped by the fact that I swear the Paris ride had two of those slides, not just the one.

Roll on 2022, when I’m older, bigger, and still no less unnerved by log flumes, and it was time to confront the dark slide again. Ultimately, it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as I remembered, and at least the Florida version only had one such slide. How anticlimactic.

Then it was off to encounter another haunting presence from Paris, a ride which is easily one of Disney’s most famous and – depending on your point-of-view – cutesy or irritating rides ever produced.

It’s a Small World.

I’m pleased we lightning-laned that one, as having to queue for 20 minutes for It’s a Small World is not something I have any desire to do while I possess my adult mentality – somehow back in the 2007 Paris trip we managed to find an unoccupied lane next to everyone else queuing and get to the front of it, to which the chap at the gate could only comment “well played” (in French, of course).

So, we boarded the little boat, and off we went, the song taunting us as we got ever closer. My god what an earworm that song is. It’s still going in my head. Always… always…

Amusingly enough, the ride made absolutely zero effort to disguise the fact that it was clearly in a large warehouse once inside. Looking up to the roof, you could clearly see hundreds upon hundreds of black soundproof panelling lining the walls and ceiling, with no attempt to hide it all above a fake sky or whatever.

I guess they don’t expect that guests on the ride to be able to see much further than several feet ahead of them.

One thing I do remember fondly about the Paris It’s a Small World ride is that they have Slinky Dog about halfway through it. Looking up the dog in question nowadays, he’s terrifying, but I was still curious to see him for the first time in 15 years.

Much to my disappointment… he wasn’t there. Oh well. Disneyland Paris 2037 here we come, I guess…?

We then hopped over to Mad Tea Party, a teacup ride, where we found that the teacups were so narrow that our legs were basically interlocking together. We’re not small people by any means, and I really do have to wonder if there are restrictions against passengers of larger girth boarding the ride…

We then hopped to a Dumbo ride, which was pleasant enough. There’s a certain enjoyment one can get from just doing a simple, straightforward, ride. It was certainly more pleasurable than the lunch we had immediately afterward, which took an age to come and was lukewarm when it did.

Yet even that was more pleasurable than the Buzz Lightyear’s Ranger Spin ride we tried next. We lightning laned it, as we had all the rest, but we were still in a 20-minute queue. The ride’s car, which you could spin so you could fire its laser guns at targets, was hard to control, as mine didn’t seem to have a ‘stop’ to it so would constantly spin back on itself if it was on an incline. Additionally, they also kept stopping approximately every two minutes due to some error or other.

Blech.

At this point, my father separated off from us as something had come up at his work that he needed to fix (despite instructing people not to bother him during the week… always the way, huh?), so my mother and I finally park-hopped to Epcot. We booked into a lightning lane for Soarin’ Around the World, which I initially feared would be a more extreme version of Star Tours (and it certainly seemed like it would have had enough room to facilitate steep drops at times!) but ultimately it was okay.

The sea base aquarium at Epcot was decent, too, although they only had a handful of tanks. This was where Epcot kept its manatees and dolphins, among many large rays, turtles, and other fascinating marine life, so it was nice to see them again – although the manatees weren’t in a very wide tank at all…

After agreeing that Epcot was nice to see but ultimately not worth more time than we spent there, we went back to the hotel for an hour before we were off to Springs again. This time, we were dining at Splitsville Luxury Lanes, which, as its name suggests, was a bowling alley. My hopes to get a game of bowling in for the first time in years didn’t come to fruition, sadly, but I did have a very nice pepperoni pizza.

We followed this up with a stop at the Salt & Straw ice cream shop, which did all sorts of fascinating flavours, including a soon-to-disappear exclusive option called “Red Chili Curry & Makrut Lime Crispy Rice” that my father tried a sample of. We floated the idea around of maybe revisiting it the next day if we had room after our final evening meal of the holiday.

My mother was also finally able to snag a pair of Minnie ears that she deemed satisfactory during this visit to Springs, so that was one item off the shopping list ticked off. I hope that her line-manager’s daughter likes them!

~

Day 7: Thursday the 27^th

Our second visit to Hollywood Studios initially seemed like it was off to a bad start. Rise of the Resistance’s queue had looped around to the MuppetVision 3D just outside of Galaxy’s Edge, but that’s only because the ride itself hadn’t opened yet. The queue itself was only about ten or so minutes longer than the previous queue when all was said and done, so it still wasn’t too bad. Risking bordering the “not worth queuing for” queue-time, though.

I made one last visit to Dok-Ondar’s shop, bought a purple crystal for my lightsaber as an alternative, we said goodbye to the Falcon, went and did Star Tours again, and we were back to the hotel to start packing.

We were in the park for just about two hours, and we still feel like it was time well spent. Better to get back packing in good time than waste unnecessary time trying to find something to do for the sake of it.

For tea this night we were booked into the second of two restaurants we knew from Paris: Planet Hollywood. I can’t remember much about the Paris one, but the one in Florida definitely lived up to its name, as it had props and costumes from all sorts of films showcased in window-displays throughout the entire restaurant. Chewbacca costume here, part of the Death Star there, Jim Carrey’s Riddler costume over there, etc., etc.

There was also a large projection playing videos and the like, including the occasional sing-along. My parents were greatly amused by the song that many cricketers (and footballers, now they’ve pilfered it, the bastards) will recognise, Sweet Caroline popping up early on, followed not ten minutes later by Livin’ on a Prayer. A Taylor Swift song passed us all by, but we were also treated to YMCA and I Just Can’t Wait to be King before we left, which was nice.

Planet Hollywood impressed us instantly because it was one of only two restaurants in the entire Springs complex to seat us the moment that we arrived rather than making us wait (the other was Splitsville), and we arrived thirty minutes before our scheduled arrival time! So, we couldn’t be much happier about that, and the food was good too. I would rate it joint-second alongside Rainforest Café behind Raglan Road.

Disney Springs was… overwhelming, really. There was an absolute shedton of designer label stores, so if you wanted something “normal” you really weren’t going to find it there. It was… an experience, to be sure. Of the eateries, I would revisit Raglan and Planet Hollywood, maybe visit the Springs Rainforest instead of the Animal Kingdom one, but probably not stop by any of the others again.

~

Day 8: Friday the 28^th

Our final day! We packed up, left the luggage with the hotel, and went in a bit later than we usually would do to Animal Kingdom for one last visit. We went straight for the safari, in what was easily the least pleasant queuing experience we’ve had. It was still around 45 minutes, so no worse from the first timewise, but this time it was humid.

Uggggh.

Still, the safari itself was decent, placing in the middle of the three.

We did Pizzafari for lunch again, which still proved decent, then on the way back I hopped off the bus at Kidani Village to pick up a Nala at last. See, there were dozens, I mean dozens, of Simbas of various sizes available around Animal Kingdom and in Springs… but the only Nalas were small ones that were being sold in the lodges in the AK resort.

Shame, I would have quite liked a decently sized (not giant, of course!) one. There’s always Amazon. I would have regretted failing to pick something up, I’m sure!

After waiting for a couple of hours, we managed to barter entry onto a different Mear’s bus than the one we booked (the bus that arrived at the time we were expecting ‘our’ bus was really very late, so who knows how much later the other would have been?!), and we were off to the airport. Compared to Gatwick, it was super quiet, and unlike Gatwick they also had a special priority queue for our class of World Traveller Plus! Result!

The flight was uneventful, and unlike the previous one I managed to get a good amount of sleep throughout it.

Thus ended our Florida holiday.

~~~

Conclusion

There are quite a few questions one needs to ask about a big holiday such as a Disney trip.

Was it worth it? Were there things you didn’t get to do that you’d have wanted to do? Was anything worth repeating? Would you ever want to go back?

Was it worth it? To us, yes. We got to see a different side of life, and it was fascinating just to see the sheer scale of it all. With Paris, once you’re in Disneyland, that’s it, it’s just Disneyland. With Disney World, you still must traverse parts of seemingly non-Disney-territory within Florida just to get from place to place, and the amount of territory that Disney owns is immense. Considering my history with always wanting to go there, I have to say that Animal Kingdom lived up to my expectations, as did Galaxy’s Edge within Hollywood Studios.

Were there things we didn’t get to do that we’d have wanted to do? Yes, Jungle Cruise. On the Wednesday, this was one such ride where lightning lanes extended into the late evening, and while we could have braved the (apparently) 55-minute standby queue, we also felt that doing so would eat too much into our lightning lane potential, so we just neatly moved on. Always the next time!

Was anything worth repeating? The fact that we did Kilimanjaro Safari and Star Tours thrice, Rise of the Resistance twice, and that I’ve commented on my fond appreciation for three of the restaurants should tell you that, yes, there are things that we did that I consider to be worth repeating. Whether or not I would do Magic Kingdom or Kennedy again… depends on if I’m by myself or traveling with someone next time. If I’m by myself, no. If I’m with someone who’s never been to either, or a special fan of them, then yes. Universal is where I would draw the line, however.

Would we ever want to go back? I don’t imagine my parents would, fun though they found parts of the holiday. I’d certainly be up for it, but not anytime in the immediate future – with Epcot, Universal, and most likely Magic Kingdom and Kennedy out of the running, that leaves a lot of time to potentially fill if nothing really major gets added to Galaxy’s Edge before I can find that opportunity. There are the everglades, , opportunities to swim with dolphins, and there is a Legoland out there…

Not SeaWorld, I can tell you that much!

Ultimately, with one or two exceptions, we very much enjoyed our time out in Orlando. Collectively, my parents and I are all agreed that the day in Kennedy was the most interesting due to just how unique it all was, although there was plenty of stuff across Animal Kingdom that we enjoyed a lot as well. Galaxy’s Edge was spectacular, and I very much look forward to seeing how they choose to develop things further there.

The thing that absolutely fascinates me about it all, though, is just… it’s so very different. We’d never get anything like this in the UK. You’re lucky if you can find one really good safari here in the UK and, even then, it’s still painfully obvious that it’s just taking you through fields with some effort to try and make something interesting out of it. Disney World has the space and the resources to put that effort in, and still do so much more, and then even more on top of that.

You really do need to see it to believe it.

Also, fun little tidbit before I end the post. While waiting at the departure gate at Gatwick, a family group turned up shortly after former prime minister Liz Truss resigned (fantastic timing, Liz), which we informed them about the moment they sat down. That same family ended up sitting next to us at the Orlando airport, with the mother hanging the lampshade on the whole ordeal by commenting that they were waiting for us to deliver another bombshell of news about another resignation.

It's a small, small, world indeed.