Universally Enjoyed
After “Hogwarts” we walked through to the Simpsons land. We took a pretty bumpy virtual ride through the cartoon world but we all really enjoyed it. I am WAY less scared of virtual rides than I am of riding on actual roller coasters. You can always just close your eyes and it all disappears…ha ha.
The Universal Studio Lot tour was really fun too. We got to see all different ‘backlots’ from old fashioned streets from the 30’s to Cowboy towns. We also saw the actual cars used in movies like “Back To The Future” and “Jurassic Park”.
Speaking of Jurassic Park, we actually took a roller coaster type ride through the park. It wasn’t as scary as I thought but we sure got wet! We were also given 3D glasses in a couple of tunnels for some wild Jurassic meets Godzilla action!
We saw “Jaws” in action, the set from “War of the Worlds”, and I actually managed to catch “Norman Bates” on his front porch as he pulled out a knife!
We had recently seen the new movie, “Nope”, and we rode through the set of the amusement area there and I caught a photo of the horse statue in the car windshield.
We also took an indoor roller coaster ride called “The Mummy” and it was fun but extremely fast and then….it did it all over again backwards (the whole time in the dark!).
A person in a ‘Transformer” costume was hilarious with his comments to families or individuals who came forward to have their picture taken with him. Very clever humour and we watched him for several minutes because he was so funny.
On the way out of the park , which closes at 6 pm, we were just in time to catch one last event and boy, was it great! It was called “Animal Actors”.
I never could have imagined that you could train cats, chickens, rats, birds, and so many more animals to do the things we saw in that show.
It was a super interesting, funny, and really quite an amazing show of what professional Hollywood animal trainers can get any kind of animal to perform. We saw how they can make a hawk, for example, fly in the movies by using a wind machine and a green screen. We saw incredible things like chickens running across the stage and changing the ‘restaurant menu’ sign in the set to ‘ham dinner’ instead of chicken, shortly followed by a warthog that would change the same sign to ‘vegetarian’ , etc. It was sort of controlled kaos at some points and at others there were perfectly trained parrots and dogs. Loved it.
We found dinner outside the park at a ‘restaurant row’ on Universal Street and all enjoyed our Mexican meals.
The only part of the day I really didn’t like was the looooooong drive home in the dark with crazy drivers on very fast highway speeds.
But, thanks be to God, 3 hours later we had safely dropped off Pam at her friend, Diane’s, and we were showered and tucked in for the night in our Courtyard Marriot Hotel.