Tuesday 16th February 2016

We aim to visit Florida every three years, and alternate Disney parks with Universal Studios for

each trip. This visit it's Universal Studios' turn for our custom, and this was our first theme park day. The weather was perfect, and they've built a lot more Universal Studios since last time we were here, six years ago. There's a whole new Simpsons section which we rather enjoyed, the Indiana Jones boat has gone, and of course there's The Wizarding World of Harry Potter across the two parks. (We made the deliberate decision to devote an entire day to Harry Potter, and today wasn't it.)

I don't do roller coasters (too scary) so I was pleased to find that there are far fewer of those than I remembered, and plenty of other things for me to enjoy. We did Shrek 4-D and even though Grandma had never seen Shrek she enjoyed it. Neither had Grandma seen ET, or Men in Black, or Despicable Me, or any of the other films on which the entire theme park is based, but that didn't stop her having fun. We have decided to educate her on the joys of these films, by forcing her to watch one every Friday night after dinner at our house.

I had a pretzel and a churro from a stand for lunch (I can't get either of those at home, so it was great novelty value, if zero nutritional value) and then took Hari and Ceri to Krusty Burger where the queue took 20 minutes to get through, but the food was disappointingly excellent. Ceri bought a bar of bacon flavoured chocolate from the Quik-E-Mart.

The wait times for a couple of rides we wanted to do were rather too long, so we headed off to Islands of Adventure next door and ran into Suzy and Angie outside Starbucks. We enjoyed a few pleasant minutes basking in the sunshine with them, then headed to one of my favourite rides, Bluto's Bilge Rat Barges. We got completely soaked, and then did it again. On a hot day it was rather fun to be drenched, and it was quite late in the afternoon at that point, so we headed home to our warm and luxurious jacuzzi and fluffy towels.