Bonus Chapter 4: A Whole Lot of Nothin’
There are very few certainties in life, but there are a few characteristics of our shared experience that we can all take to the bank.
Death.
Taxes.
Disappointing politicians.
If there are multiple brothers in a family playing a professional sport, the Philadelphia Phillies will always get the less-talented one--see
Ken Brett (brother of Hall-of-Famer George) and
Mike Maddux (brother of Hall-of-Famer Greg).
If we leave on a long 8-hour road trip, one family member will need to use the restroom 20 minutes into the drive.
The automatic grocery scanner will fail to register the item I just scanned, then start an endless loop of “unexpected item in bagging area”/”item removed from bagging area” alerts until I have to get a store clerk to re-boot it. One day, I will add up the total hours of my life I have spent in that endless loop, and it will not be a pretty number.
The list goes on. One of the most incontrovertible Rules of Life is that when visiting theme parks (or anywhere, for that matter), Rope Drop always works. It’s basically an offshoot of the truism that The Early Bird Gets The Worm, only here a worm is upgraded to a ride on Test Track, which seems like a win to me.
Rope Drop has never failed me. We live by it as a family, and even my three teenage kids who want nothing more than to sleep in and lie around in their pajamas all day are believers in the power of Rope Drop.
On Sunday morning, following standard Rope Drop protocol, we got up early and ate a quick snack for breakfast in the room. Islands of Adventure was opening at 9 a.m., so we were on the bus by 8:15. We arrived at the hub building, ascended the stairs, and…huh. That security line sure seemed a lot longer than it did yesterday.
Still, it moved fairly well, and we were walking into CityWalk by 8:20 or so. We turned left and headed towards IOA, We crossed over the bridge and…huh. Definitely way more people than we’d seen at Rope Drop for Universal the day before. Hundreds more.
I’d hoped that the night of concerts would make most of the people staying onsite sleep in, but that was proving not to be the case. Our goal for the morning (along with 98% of the other people there) was to head straight for Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure. This was the newest ride at Universal, having opened in June of 2019, so it hadn’t even been operating for a year yet. Every review I’d read of the ride (whether official or from friends) had basically declared it The Greatest Theme Park Ride Of All Time. So naturally, we were eager to try it out.
We were prepared for a wait. As I’d mentioned the day before, we’d seen posted wait times as long as 4 hours, and that seemed fairly routine from everything I’d researched. So it was Rope Drop or bust. The hope was that we were there early enough so that our wait would be…maybe an hour at most. Hopefully less.
When the gates finally opened, we followed the crowd. Unlike Disney, where things are fairly controlled, there were several people/groups practically sprinting ahead to beat everyone else. We didn’t go that far, but we did carry Drew piggyback and settled for a fast walk. The path was relatively easy to follow and when we got closer to Hogsmeade there were Team Members with signs directing everyone on how to get into the line for the motorbikes. Once we were in the proper line, it moved in a fairly orderly fashion into Hogsmeade. After a couple of minutes of walking, we made it to the locker room, where Julie and I took a detour with our belongings while the kids marched on and held our place in line. Even though the ride was brand new, the locker room was still apparently designed to hold about 1.6% of the capacity of the actual ride. We were only able to exit by shoving several kids aside (Julie was by far more violent here).
We caught up with the kids, navigated a few turns and switchbacks in the queue, and then came to a stop in a back corner near the Flight of the Hippogriff ride. I had no idea what the normal wait from this point would be, but we were at least in the official ride queue. So there was that.
In a couple of locations, we were able to peek over the walls and see the ride itself. It looked amazing. Lots of twists and turns in the track, diving over and through old ruins straight out of the movie. I couldn’t wait to get on. Every couple of minutes, we’d hear a blast of motorcycle engines, and another ride train would go zooming past us.
They were silent, though. There was nobody in them.
A few minutes later, there was an announcement on the loudspeaker: “Attention, please. Hagrid’s Motorbike Adventure is currently down due to mechanical issues. We hope to have it running shortly. Thank you for your continued patience.”
Ugh.
Of course, when you’re standing in line, you have no way of knowing if that means they’ll start loading in 5 minutes or 5 hours. And the park gives you no help in that regard. It’s just the same announcement over and over, every 10 minutes. You get a little hope when the line moves ahead a bit, but again, you have no way of knowing if that means it’s actually moving or if people are just bailing ahead of you.
It’s especially irritating when you can see the ride vehicles operating just fine on the ride. They kept coming, one after the other. Not knowing what’s wrong, it just makes you question why the ride is closed—it looks like it’s running just fine!
I think the worst part of that wait is the “what if” factor, or FOMO—Fear of Missing Out. That’s where being a Dad comes into play, because you start doing your value calculations—I spent X amount of $ on the tickets, and I’m currently getting zero value out of that investment. Is it better to bail now so I can actually ride something? Or, will they open the ride 5 minutes after I leave, meaning I’ll once again never be able to get on again today?
Everyone has their tipping point. I’d been checking the app for wait times, and for most of the early morning it seemed like Forbidden Journey and Flight of the Hippogriff were basically walk-ons. If we bailed, Julie could get her turn on Forbidden Journey and I could take Drew on the Hippogriff. Eventually, after about an hour of waiting for Hagrid with no sign of opening, we bailed on the ride.
We walked over to Forbidden Journey, starting to make arrangements on where to meet up afterwards, only to stop in our tracks.
The wait time was now 80 minutes.
Ok, time to be flexible. Maybe we can all ride Hippogriff just to cross off another Harry Potter attraction.
Nope—it was now at 60 minutes. Just looking at the ride, I knew it wasn’t worth 60 minutes. And that was even before the announcement that it was running at limited capacity—they only had one Hippogriff train operational. Only a complete idiot would wait an hour for that.
Here’s a photo of a ride we didn’t get on:
And here’s the Vomiting Man restaurant. Why would this make anyone want to eat there?
Now I was getting frustrated. It was well past 10:00 a.m. and we hadn’t done anything other than stand in line yet. We started walking counter-clockwise around IOA. The crowds were swelling and clearly we weren’t going to be able to do much in the Wizarding World right now. We walked over to the Jurassic Park river ride. And, wouldn’t you know it? It was closed. Mechanical issues. We watched an empty boat come down the ramp.
Frantically looking for something to do, we looked over at the Pteranodon Flyers—a kiddie ride, sure, but we were desperate.
No dice. An announcement played that they were temporarily out of service.
Welcome to Universal, where nothing works! Not even Rope Drop.
Continuing our circle, we walked past the King Kong ride, which somehow miraculously had a 20-minute wait. Sold! Because I’m gonna ride
something, goshdangit.
We made our way through the King Kong queue, which is really well done.
Maybe too well done. Drew started freaking out. There were a lot of loud chants, warnings of upsetting the gods, dark passages, and people shouting in foreign languages. They even have live actors jumping out of the wall in a couple places, for pete’s sake. So it wasn’t long before Drew wanted no part of this place. Dave volunteered to take him out and wait for us, so we appreciated him taking one for the team.
As it turned out, the queue was more impressive to me than the ride. For the ride itself, you climb onto a big truck similar to the ones on the Kilimanjaro Safari ride at AK. Then you drive outside and past some flaming torch gates into a spooky-looking mountain temple. And then mayhem ensues. The truck is basically surrounded by giant movie screens on each side, and people get attacked by monsters, and then Kong fights the monsters. It all looks good on the screen as the battle happens around you, but the actual experience ends up being some gentle bumping and jostling of the bus and a couple sprays of water. It felt like a lot of special-effects wizardry accomplishing not much in the end.
But hey, we got on a ride! So we had that going for us, which was nice. At that point, this was the sum total of our day:
We met up with Dave and Drew and kept walking, eventually reaching the Marvel Superheroes portion of the park, which is a bit strange considering Disney owns everything Marvel. Except, of course, theme park rights in Florida.
But the Universal Marvel area can’t mention any of the current movie universe, so it primarily focuses on the comic books and pretends the movies don’t exist. Which is all fine. It’s just hard to turn your brain off when we’ve been inundated with the movies over the last decade.
Ok, fine. It’s hard for most people to turn their brains off. I can do it just fine. See?
ASRGERghjoiuh;paiafjeoh;alo…
(drool)
Ok, I’m back online. We walked over to the Spider-Man 3D ride. We were a bit concerned since it was a motion simulator and the last one we’d tried was the Simpsons, but I’d heard a lot of good things about Spider-Man. Also, we needed to ride something. Anything.
The wait time was posted as 45 minutes. Whatever, we’re getting in line.
For once, the wait time was accurate. We kept moving most of the time, so it didn’t feel horrible. I was a bit worried about motion-simulations combined with 3-D glasses, but we were committed at this point.
And as it turned out, there was nothing to be worried about. The ride was a ton of fun. We had a great time with this one. Thank goodness!
After a grand total of two (2) rides, it was now time for lunch. Seeing nothing in IOA that appealed to us, we decided to switch parks.
The Adventure Lives On, huh? Hopefully we’d get to experience it at some point.
Walking to Universal confirmed that the Hogwarts Express is a much better way to switch parks. It took a while to reach Springfield, but we’d worked up a good appetite at least.
We decided to try out Krusty Burgers. This was mostly due to being fans of the show. And it was…fine.
Time to attempt some rides again. We split up. Drew REALLY wanted to ride Men In Black again, so he went with Julie and Dave. Sarah, Scotty and I went off to conquer the Mummy coaster.
I wasn’t sure how this was going to go. The Mummy movies themselves are nothing special—fairly crappy Indiana Jones rip-offs that you forget as soon as you watch them. The ride is an indoor coaster where the Mummy has been released and you zoom around his tomb while he tries to capture your soul. Or eat bugs.
Or something. I can’t say it made much sense.
But who cares? As it turned out, the ride is a BLAST. Lots of pyrotechnic effects, and the coaster is pretty fast. I absolutely loved it. There’s even a fake ending which made me laugh, and is totally something I’d do if I was ever designing a theme park ride. As much as I liked Gringotts, I actually liked this ride better (because it’s more coaster than Gringotts). The Mummy was easily my favorite ride outside of the Wizarding World.
Speaking of the Wizarding World, we met up with the others in Diagon Alley. A quick check of the Gringotts wait time revealed that we wouldn’t be riding that today. So we explored Knockturn Alley a bit. We learned that it’s really dark in there.
We also enjoyed the dragon again.
Well, most of us did.
We took the Hogwarts Express back to IOA. Walking through Hogsmeade, we saw that Hagrid’s Motorbikes were now operational, and the wait was over 3 hours. Sigh.
Julie really wanted to experience the Forbidden Journey. And even though the wait time was still 70 minutes, we decided to bite the bullet and go for it, since the Harry Potter stuff was still the primary objective. That meant that I had Drew duty. And Drew really wanted to ride Flight of the Hippogriff.
Which was still only operating one train.
And still had a 60-minute wait.
The things we do for our kids. But hey, at least it was the hottest part of the day and there was no shade.
I tried my best to keep Drew company. This was pretty much turning out to be a lost day at the parks, so we just had to make the best of it. We slowly crawled through the line and sure enough, an hour later we were finally climbing onto the Hippogriff.
The ride is the Barnstormer. Like, literally. I think they actually have the exact same track layout. If not, it’s remarkably close. Like the Barnstormer, the ride lasts about 30 seconds.
Meanwhile, Julie enjoyed exploring the Forbidden Journey queue.
In the end, she had fun with the ride. And Drew really liked the Hippogriff. And that’s what matters.
We got another frozen butterbeer, because I felt like I needed some reward after an hour wait for a 30-second ride.
And then we walked out of the park. Well, almost. Sarah and Scotty REALLY wanted to ride the Incredible Hulk coaster. Dave also wanted to ride, but was still working himself up to the task. And, like everything else, it had been down earlier in the day. We had another dinner ADR at Disney to get to, but with a 30-minute wait it seemed do-able.
So, Sarah and Scott went to conquer the Hulk while the rest of us went to CityWalk and explored the shops. I hemmed and hawed over the coaster, but in the end I chickened out. The experience on the Simpsons was still fresh in my mind, and I remembered
@pkondz saying he really enjoyed the Hulk, but a second ride had messed with his head a bit. And I didn’t want to chance that.
They came back later, and were gushing about the coaster. So I was glad they had a great time with it.
So, after an entire day in two theme parks and a grand total of 4 rides, we left to go get dinner. I was feeling pretty frustrated about how the day had gone, so I think it was actually a good thing that we drove to Disney Springs. I could at least look forward to spending some time in the Disney bubble.
The parking lot wasn’t too crowded, which was a relief. We wandered around and just enjoyed a bit of Disney (even if it is just a glorified shopping mall). Being a huge Indiana Jones fan, I ducked my head into the Jock Lindsey Hangar Bar, which I’ve long wanted to check out and hadn’t actually seen up until then. I still didn’t get the chance to order anything, but I did confirm that a) it looks really cool, and b) I do want to hang out there sometime.
We went to our usual favorite shops (the Art of Disney, Marketplace Co-Op, and World of Disney). Truth be told, we probably bought more souvenirs here than we did at Universal. Is that wrong?
We had a special treat for Dave that evening. A few years ago, one of his best friends from school moved to Florida (the Tampa area). Julie had texted Dave’s friend’s parents and they were actually willing to make the drive up from Tampa just to get Dave and his buddy together for a little while. It was really nice of them to do that, and I think Dave was really grateful to get the chance to talk to his friend again. When I mentioned to the dad that I was impressed they were willing to make the drive, he said, “It’s Disney World. We’re always looking for excuses to come up here.” I get it, man. I get it.
We ate dinner at a place that was new to us: Maria & Enzo’s.
Supposedly there’s a backstory involving this restaurant that involves an old airline terminal being repurposed and turned into a restaurant. I was too lazy to look it up. Anyway, it was enough for me to walk in and see the theming, which is all sorts of art-deco styling and vintage travel posters. This is right up my alley. I loved the look of this place.
The menu is Italian, which always suits us as well. I ordered my standard chicken parmesan, which was a huge slab of meat that I almost couldn’t finish.
Similarly, Dave ordered a piece of lasagna that no human on earth could ever finish.
The food itself was pretty good. Not the best, not the worst. We really enjoyed the atmosphere and our server, a young woman from Italy who was very sweet and willing to spend time in conversation about her home and anything else we asked. There was also a violinist walking around and visiting every table. He would tell us to choose a song, any song, and he would be able to play it for us. We kind of blanked for a second, so he played the Harry Potter theme, inspired by the kids’ sweatshirts.
Later on, he came back and Sarah was ready for him. She asked him to play the theme from Doctor Who. The guy confessed that he didn’t know that one off the top of his head. So he asked for 5 minutes. We saw him walk off to the corner and pull out his phone, and then hold it up to his ear. Then he returned to the table and said, “Ok, this is a different one. There are a lot of…space noises? In that one. Very different from what I’m used to. This is my favorite request of the night. I’ll do my best!”
And with that, he did a flawless rendition, complete with amusing facial expressions for the “space noises”. He earned his tip.
Sarah and Drew also got special desserts with their birthdays being so close.
So, kind of a crappy day at Universal. But our Disney time at the end of the day helped to put us in a better mood. I was glad we’d gotten the third day free in the parks, because I felt like we were going to need it. Maybe a Monday in January would be less crowded. We could only hope.
We also hoped we could get the kids out of bed in the morning.
Coming Up Next: Can Rope Drop be redeemed?
Just watched it recently with DD23. She really liked it. 
Was this about when Independence Day came out? I'm not as big on movie culture as you are....
