After two cancellations due to COVID-related precautions, and with a lot of help from Robert and his vacation planner, we finally got to go on our Universal Studios trip. Yes, it was worth the wait.

This was a very nice weekend with Robert and Karen and their families - 12 of us. We spent three days at Universal Orlando while staying "on property" at the Royal Pacific resort, which meant that we all had Express Passes that allowed us to skip the lines. Essentially, this meant that we could experience at least twice the number of rides than those who did not have an Express Pass.

To make sure we were all able to be at the check-in desk at the resort very early on Friday, we all traveled to Orlando Thursday night and stayed at an offsite motel.

Universal, like most major theme parks, continually is adding new rides. Since our last visit Universal added a ride with a Harry Potter theme and it was called Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure, which was a very high speed roller coaster with sharp accelerations and ground speeds up to 50 mph. That may not seem to be fast, but it certainly is when you’re riding in the open on a relatively small “car“ with a number of hard twists and turns.

Universal also was honoring a Mardi Gras theme and it had a number of its floats parked around the Universal Studios park that we got to look at closely and even get a chance to catch some beads from persons manning the floats.

Each day we ate our lunch meal at the park; one day we had a dinner meal from Boston Garden brought to the resort via Door Dash; and two other nights we ate at City Walk.

On the second day we ended our park time early and enjoyed a swim at the resort pool. The new Harry Potter ride was certainly good, and the two older Harry Potter rides were still really fun. Favorites of the older kids were The Hulk and the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit^TM.

Favorite Rides
Skyler	The Rip Ride RockitTM and Hagrid's Motorbike AdventureTM
Braden
Daylin	The Rip Ride RockitTM
Benjamin	The Hulk and Hagrid's Motorbike AdventureTM
Everett	Hagrid's Motorbike AdventureTM and the other two Harry Potter rides
Charlie	Escape from GringottsTM
Luke	E.T. Adventure and The Flight of the HippogriffTM