We walked through the "Port of Entry" first (lots of shops and restaurants).
From there, we headed to the Marvel Super Hero Island, where we watched some of the super heroes ride in, and then snapped a few photos with them.
Spider-Man was hamming it up for my picture.
Grant and Cory hopped on the Incredible Hulk Coaster. We also rode the Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man ride a few times during the day. Everyone liked that one!
After that, we moved into Toon Lagoon.
Cory and the kids rode Dudley Do-Right's Rip Saw Falls.
Next, we made our way into Jurassic Park.
We had to get past the T-Rex, first!
We all enjoyed the rides in this section of the park.
Next, we moved into the most anticipated section of the park, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It was amazing!
The castle behind us houses the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride (more on that below).
Aaw, Julia hatched a baby dragon with her magic wand. Wow!
This area of the park was set up to look like the village of Hogsmeade from the Harry Potter books.
As soon as we walked in, we each enjoyed a cup of butterbeer. It pretty much tasted like root beer, but a little more buttery.
They had a souvenir shop, a candy shop (with a lot of the interesting candy from the movies), and a toy store that you could go into. They had wands for sale for all the characters in the movie, and Grant decided that he just HAD to have one.
My favorite ride of the whole vacation was Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. It was an awesome ride! The girls weren't tall enough to ride this one, but it would have scared them anyway. Lucky for us the line for this ride was not extremely long, about 30 minutes (we couldn't use our express passes on this one), but they had set up the castle with all kinds of cool things to look at and holograms to watch as you walked through. There were some talking pictures, and a hologram/video of Harry, Ron and Hermione to watch, as well as one of Dumbledore. The girls did get to walk through the castle with us, and then waited in the "child swap" room with either Cory or I, while the other one got a chance to ride with Grant. They did have another little roller coaster the girls could ride, so we made sure we rode that a few times.
We stopped and had a fish and chips lunch at Three Broomsticks.
Once we had finished in Harry Potter Land, we moved into The Lost Continent section. We heard the only complaint about the Harry Potter section is that it is not big enough. We were told there are already plans to expand it, and remove this section of the park.
We will see!
Below is the famous talking fountain. They must have a camera in it, and someone watching, because it talks to the kids about what they are wearing, etc. Grant (and Julia) had a lot of fun talking to it. Johanna was a bit more wary of it, though she did warm up to it by the end.
Next, we went into Seuss Landing. They had a lot of fun rides here for the kids, and we got our pictures taken with some of the characters from the books.
This was the last section of the park, and we had about 45 minutes until the park closed, so we circled back around to the Harry Potter section, and rode the three rides they had in that area again. The girls and I finished riding the little roller coaster, while Grant and Cory were riding the Dragon Challenge roller coaster. The girls and I found a roofed seating area to wait for them. While we were waiting for them, it began to rain, and rain, and rain..... Cory said it started raining while they were on the roller coaster, and the rain was pelting them in the face. Hard! Since the park was closing, and we had waited for quite awhile, we decided to make a run for it, or really just a quick walk, for it. Unfortunately, the section we were in was in the back corner of the park. We made it up to the Port of Entry and went into one of the big souvenir shops. We were all soaked! It was still raining when we came out, but not as hard, and we made our way into The City Walk, which was an area of shops, restaurants and bars right outside the park. We decided to eat dinner at Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville. The rain had finally stopped by the time we were done with dinner, but we were still wet. We had bought some shirts for the kids, so when we got to the car, we changed them into the dry shirts. We headed back to our resort, put the kids to bed, and dreamed of our day in Disney's Magic Kingdom.
