Day 01 –
Since we couldn’t go to Disneyland we’ve decided to go to another theme park. So today, we’re going to Universal Studios!!! Universal’s amusement park. You know, the company with the Earth logo rotating at the beginning of the movies with the music: pom pom pom pooooooom! Pom pom pom pom pom! POM, POM…. The park is divided into different “worlds”: Harry Potter, Jurassic Park, Nintendo, New York, the Minions, Snoopy, etc… It’s impossible to cover everything in one day, but we’ve already preselected the rides we wanted to do on the website and we’re sure we’re going to have a blast!
Obviously, the first thing we do is going straight to the world of Harry Potter. Doo is a huge fan and we want to ride the most popular attractions when there aren’t too many people yet. As we enter the wizarding world, through the forbidden forest, we instantly feel the magic of the Harry Potter universe. We are greeted by the famous Ford Anglia (the Weasley’s flying car) and we arrive at King’s Cross station, in front of the Hogwarts Express and the platform 9 and 3/4. We then walk through Hogsmeade where they’ve recreated Zonko’s joke shop, Honeydukes sweetshop, Dervish and Banges and the post office (they’ve also added Olivanders wand shop from Diagon Alley). At the far end of the village there’s a lake and behind it… Hogwart’s castle with Hagrid’s house by its side. It feels like we’re really there! It’s beautiful! And to add to the atmosphere, lots of wizards are roaming the street (many people are dressing as Hogwarts students).
First thing we do is going to the castle. There’s a ride there taking you on a broom into the magical grounds. The ride is really great. It really feels like we’re flying through the films of the saga. Julia loves it! Côme gets a bit scared though. There are dementors, giant tarantulas… It’s a bit too much for a 5 year old. But he will love the second ride: the flight of the hypogryph, above Hagrid’s house. It’s a fast paced roller coaster.
After these two rides, we go to Jurassic Park. The attraction is a boat “ride” through the park. We get lucky because we are seated in the very front of the boat. We all get excited as we enter the impressive gates of Jurassic Park and discover the beautiful dinosaur species the IGN scientists have brought back to life. But quickly, the ride becomes dangerous… The velociraptors have escaped and destroyed parts of the control tower. We don’t feel secure anymore. The building is partially destroyed and there’s a gigantic fall right ahead… As we approach the dreaded fall, a giant T-Rex comes out of nowhere and open its huge mouth to eat us. From that moment on, it’s all screams on the boat. The fall is terrible!!! You remember us telling you we were lucky to be in front of the boat right? Well… we weren’t that lucky afterall… We end up completely soaked! Not just a little hey?! Completely drenched!!! From head to toe, as if we’ve just taken a fully clothed bath. The other two people on our row are in shock. We all look at each other wondering how it’s possible nobody warned us before getting on the ride. It’s winter out here!!!
Anyway, the ride was great! We loved it!! The T-Rex was just awesome and the drop incredible! But you know, we have to dry off now. So we try to ask the staff if they have towels or heaters we could use, but apart from telling us to wait, we don’t really get any help from them… so we spend some time in the shop trying to dry off and putting on dinosaur headbands.
After a while, we head to the world of the Minions. You know those little yellow funny and clumsy “monsters” who love mean people? The main ride is great!! We get transformed into Minions and undergo intensive training to become real Minions… It’s a 3D dynamic IMAX theatre. We love it so much we’ll go back several times during the day.
The rest of the day is going to fly by… We’ll have a lot of fun. We’ll take a ride with Spider-Man in New York, enjoy several trips to space in a roller coaster similar to Disney’s Crush Coaster (this will be Côme’s favorite ride). We’ll go to Snoopy’s world, cross path with many Marios, Luigis and Harry Potters. Here, tons of people dress up or wear memorabilia from their favorite universe (shop shelves are even emptied by the end of the day), so we’re going to give into the craziness and buy some cumbersome souvenirs for Côme too. Now, Côme is going to have to go through customs at the airport with a dino headband on his head ’cause we definitely can’t close our bags with all of this stuff now!!
As we return home, tired but super happy, we’ll only have one regret: missing on the snack we really wanted to try (Snoopy’s Crazy Cookie Hot Chocolate). Here, each world has its own pastries and the sweets are tempting everywhere. You can bite into Mario’s strawberry/whipped cream cap or into the chocolate head of a Minion for example… But the problem is that all these sweets are only available at cafes that close at 4:30 p.m (go figure…), so they were closed by the time we wanted to have a bite. Time was just flying… We also didn’t even have time to go to Nintendo World but we couldn’t have dreamed of a better way to spend the first day of December. Today is December 1st. Christmas is coming and there’s a letter from Ruf, our Christmas elf, waiting for us under our small wooden Christmas tree.
Today, we all loved everything!!!