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Dad's Taxi's Biggest Fare - Part 4
Wednesday saw a great improvement in the weather, thank goodness. Today we were doing our re-scheduled trip to Universal’s Island of Adventure.
So yet another early morning, holidays aren’t supposed to require the setting of an alarm clock, surely? The coolbox is filled with bottles of frozen water and a selection of canned pop, and hauled into the bus, and off we go.
Once in the park, it’s a swift march to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. It’s impressive – very impressive.
We join the queue for The Forbidden Journey ride, which even this early is a 90 minute wait. The queue has very welcome fans which blow a fine mist over you, lovely. Then the designer seems to have made an odd decision – let’s make them all stand in a greenhouse for half an hour !! The greenhouse is supposedly the domain of Professor Sprout, the Herbology teacher, and is an annexe to the main castle. Smashing, all part of keeping to the story, but A GREENHOUSE ! It’s torturously hot in this section of the queue, and I can only assume the designer was confused about the climate whilst looking at artists’ impressions of the village
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Eventually the queue enters the castle, which has enchanted air-con or something, thank goodness. And here they got it wrong again. I don’t know how it had happened, but inside the castle there was hardly anyone queuing. So we’d stood outside in blistering heat for over an hour, and now we’re in the cool and can’t wait to enjoy the moving portraits, the sorting hat, and most of all the holographic scenes featuring Dumbledore, and our three heroes Harry, Ron and Hermione. But do we get to enjoy them? Do we bleep. The huge gaps in the queue need to be filled, and some upstart ‘prefect’ is bullying us all into rushing along to the entrance to the actual ride, where we arrive with no idea what the ride is about, and having missed the whole point to the story.
As to the ride itself, I was gob-smacked. My Engineer’s head kept asking how the hell have they done that? all the time I was on it. It is amazing, fast, frightening, hang on, I’ll grab my thesaurus, oh yes, nauseating ! On my list of ‘things to do soon’ is to do some research into how the heck that ride works. It’s not for the faint-hearted, there are some fairly scary creatures in there, and I could see why we passed so many warning signs about sudden changes of direction and motion sickness. It certainly made me wonder if I was about to be the first person to spray the place with breakfast at some point. Mrs Dad’s Taxi said she just closed her eyes eventually and waited for it to stop.
We have in our party some very keen Harry Potter fans, so they’re quite happy after the ride to explore the village, and partake in the local brew, butterbeer
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Which works out more expensive than enjoying a real beer in somewhere less touristy like, say, Paris.
The big star, in my opinion, is the Hogwarts Express
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The whole village is done really well. The girls love the sweetshop,
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but really it’s hard to pick out any part of the village which wasn’t done superbly. Even the ATM, which is an essential device when everything around you costs a fortune, is from Gringotts Wizarding Bank. And, as expected, those robbing Goblins charge you $3 to withdraw cash !
Eventually we drag ourselves away from Hogsmeade, and have a look at the rest of the park. Ripsaw Falls is, in my humble opinion, the best log flume there is, so that’s where we head next. I’m afraid the story of this ride continues to allude me. A combination of funny voices that aren’t quite comprehendible, and the fact that Dudley Do-Right is not a cartoon character I know apart from his featuring in this ride, mean that I only have a vague concept of baddies tying goodies to rail tracks, and somehow by us plunging at break-neck speed down a 75 foot ramp into an exploding pool the day is saved. And we get very wet.
Still, it’s a hot day, so not to worry. Where next? Might as well continue with the water. We go along to Popeye’s Bilge-Rat Barges, and I get a sudden recollection of getting very wet on this, last time we came to IOA around 2001. Mrs Dad’s Taxi does the sensible thing and holds everyone’s bags, cameras, hats, butterbeer mugs, and 10 of us board a raft. And we get WET. Not just wet, but totally, utterly soaked. My wallet is now full of papier-mache receipts, and very soggy $$$s. We are dripping, but the Sun dries us, eventually.
The rest of the day we wander around, I snap photos whilst the kids go on stupid rides like The Hulk and other things designed to make you throw up. Oh, and we carry all the bags.
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Eventually we’ve all had enough, so we head for the villa to shower and put clean clothes on. Despite the drying effect of the Sun, certain garments were still a bit soggy, if you get my drift.
Dinner tonight was at Ponderosa on the West end of the 192. It was Yummy. Another great day.
