Florida Trip Part I: Universal Orlando & Harry Potter Theme Park

Posted by on Oct 18, 2010 in Published/Commercial | No Comments

About a month ago, my wife and I packed up the family to head down to Florida to do a review on Universal Orlando (Wizarding World of Harry Potter) and Disney World for the St. Louis Post Dispatch.  I was lucky enough to do the pictures for the review of which you can read here.  Business and pleasure.  I know most of you are saying, “Waaah, it sounds mostly like pleasure to us,” but I totally stress out when I have to carry around my 5 ton camera bag and try to get pictures worthy enough to display for the review in the paper.  I will say, for any Harry Potter fan, this place is awesome.  Even if you haven’t read or seen the movies, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter is well worth the trip just to experience by itself.  Here are some pictures, some of which were included in the review already.

Our first two nights we stayed at the Hard Rock hotel.  Pretty nice.  Just a walks distance (or quick boat ride which we did) from downtown universal.  

The online levitra dentech.co owner in the on the internet it does not require a physician prescribed. It won’t be a straight line to heaven,” he said at the Top levitra sales uk Producer Seminar in Chicago. They are networked with reputed super specialty hospitals to have your surgical treatment done. wholesale viagra Some foods too work well for improving erection, and these are available in viagra 100mg for sale the online pharmacies.

 I spent almost 2 hours trying to get a night shot of the famous exterior of the Hard Rock (replica of the actual Hotel California.  It just didn’t turn out but I love what I got instead.  Long exposure, tripod.  My reward for all my efforts?  I end up dropping my Pocket Wizard Flex TT5 in the grass and didn’t know it until the next morning.  But, happy ending as I found it sitting in the middle of the grass in the front of the hotel.

Mythos restaurant inside Islands of Adventure.  World renowned.  Place looks awesome. 

Inside Mythos, the food looked real good.  Unfortunately, I didn’t care for the food.  Any of it.  Maybe it was a bad day.  But it does look good, and for pictures, I got what I needed.
A couple exterior shots of Hogwarts castle.  The Forbidden Journey ride inside is amazing.  Closest I can compare to is like the Haunted House ride at Disney but on Steroids and filled with all the cool Potter characters and storylines.  Kind of scary.  And you kind of dangle in the ride as they whip you around but you are held in pretty tight by your chest cage – which made me feel a bit claustrophobic a first.  But once you got going, you forget about all that.  We were lucky to have a guided private tour that day so our wait in line was nill, but those that did wait, it’s a treat.  It’s like walking through the actual movie set complete with talking paintings and holograms of Harry, Hermione, Ron and Dumbledore.

Inside Honeydukes.  And yes, every candy from the movie is there.  Chocolate Frogs below, and jelly beans of every flavor – rubber anyone?  

The actual car from the movie.  At least that is what our guide told us.

At the end of the day…or hell, during the beginning and middle too, you have to get some butter beer.   Sort of a super sweet version of cream soda is all I can try to explain it.  It comes in regular or frozen varieties.  We stopped inside the Boar’s Head for a few.

After our trip to Potterville, we went over to the Jurassic Park area.  The main ride there puts you in the middle of the movie, it seems.  The end part, you come face to face with a rather large, mean and realistic T-Rex…just before you plunge to your doom.   The fun of taking these pictures was more for looking at the faces of the people as they came down.  Lots of good faces.  Click to view large size.

We finished our day it seemed in the middle of a comic book setting.  All the Universal characters.  Spiderman 3D ride was pretty good.  The thing I noticed most was all the bold colors in this part of the park. Everything was done up big.

Our last stop was inside one of the gift shops where they have every superhero collectible imaginable.  Lots of comic books.  If I had some more expendable income, I would have gone crazy here.
 

Leave a Reply