Universal Studios, Orlando

Our decision to do Universal was a bit of a dim moment on my part, as I somehow had it in my head that it would have more proper film stuff in it - I was of course thinking of Universal Studios Hollywood, not Orlando!  But still, we are happy that we did it.

There are two parts to the park here, and you can buy a ticket to cover either one or both. We opted to do both in one day. We started with the Islands of Adventure part, because they advised that the queues here were bigger later, and did the Universal Studios bit afterwards.

Now you may recall from a previous posting in Germany that I like roller coasters and other rides that generally throw you every which way all at the same time, but Nic doesn't. So here we were at a park that has a lot of rides. Nic had been building himself up to this and was steeling himself to go on at least some of them. We decided best to do those before we ate, just in case.

So we rolled up at the first rollercoaster, which was the Hulk. They don't allow bags on the rides, but they have a good system of free lockers available. They are self service lockers that are accessed via your fingerprint, and you get an allotted period of time that is enough to queue for and go on the ride, based on their current queue times. We found it worked very well.

Being off season and a weekday, the queues weren't bad, so we were soon at the roller coaster. Nic looked a bit anxious, but he got on and we were off. For ride fans, this wasn't the best one around, but it was OK.

Nic was quite happy with it not throwing you in too many different ways. He said afterwards that he found this easier than the waltzers, because the the cars on those spin as well as the ride going up and down and around. It appears he can cope with the speed of the ride as long as it is mostly going in just one direction at once.

Our next ride was a bit less hairy as it was a simulator 3D Spiderman ride. In this you only feel like you are being thrown everywhere. It was quite effective, especially the part where you are plummeting to the ground.

We passed through Toon Lagoon into Jurassic Park, where Nic was happy to have his photo taken with a model dinosaur and we had a slightly disappointing look at some dinosaur information and fossils.

Then we were into the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Have to say that this section looks fabulous, with it's recreation of Hogmeade (with I think a smattering of Diagon Alley) and Hogwarts.But even on a slow day like today, you couldn't move if you went into the wand shop, and the queue for the Harry Potter ride was ninety minutes - yes, that's right, an hour and a half! Sod that!

We did queue forty minutes for another roller coaster in this section, which was a very fast one.

This whole queuing thing is a bit mad really. I can't envisage standing there for that long to go on a three minute ride. I think if you are bothered about going on all the rides, and especially if you are there in the peak times, you would have to get the fast track pass that speeds you through the queues. But even then, that only sometimes gets you right to the front of the queue; other times you just bypass a large section of it and then still have to queue for a while.

We didn't find anything of interest in the Lost Continent or Seuss Landing areas, so headed out to City Walk, the between the parks area, for something to eat.

Of course that meant that when we went into the Universal Studios park, we had to skip the Rockit roller coaster, as we weren't sure Nic's stomach would cope with that immediately after a big meal.

We did the Shrek 4D 'ride', which was cinema style seating and just not nearly as effective as the Spiderman one earlier.  But it was OK.

We were a little disappointed with 'Twister' the tornado experience.  We had initially expected that it was going to include a ride but realised it didn't when we didn't have to drop off bags.  Then we thought that it would have a simulator. But in fact you just stood at a barrier and watched the scene unfurl in front of you with a bit of wind and rain effects thrown in.  It was OK, and we did rather like the flying cow, but they could do so much more with this one I think.

It was quite nice wandering though the USA street 'set' and listening to a bit of the live music, but it felt like there wasn't quite enough going on.  I wondered whether perhaps they don't have some entertainment or activities that might have been happening in peak season.  Or it could just be that the streets were empty without the summer hordes and that it what felt strange.

We passed the Back to the Future DeLorean and made our way to the thirty minute queue for the Men in Black ride.  The fast trackers on this did get pretty much straight on, so it was a bit frustrating watching them walk in and get on while we waited - another reason to get the pass in peak times. But we got on eventually and the ride wasn't bad.

This wasn't a roller coaster.  It was styled as MiB training and was a 'shoot at the aliens' ride.  It was OK once you realised how the scoring worked.  My score wasn't bad compared to some, though the guy next to us was way ahead.  Nic, it appears, never really worked out what he was supposed to be doing and had a pitifully low score a the end.

We did plan to go back to the Rockit roller coaster at this stage, but it started to rain heavily so we gave it a miss.  I think Nic was secretly quite pleased actually.

So we enjoyed our day at Universal, though personally we don't quite get what all the hype is about, and just don't have the patience to queue for as long as you would have to to go on everything.

Seaworld Orlando

We weren't entirely sure about Orlando as a destination, but that was where we had booked our flight to, so we figured we'd spend a few days here and do a park or two.

After lots of consideration we had decided not to do Disneyland.  Shock, horror I know to be in Orlando and not do Disney, but we weren't convinced that it was really enough of our thing given the price of it.

We opted to do Universal Studios and Seaworld and as we had booked a place to stay that was quite close to the Seaworld park, that was the first place that we went to here.

We arrived just in time to catch the start of one of the dolphin shows, so dashed round there quickly.  The show was a mix of aerial acrobatics and dolphins, with a few brightly plumaged macaws added in at one stage.

It was good enough as a show, but personally I would have liked more focus on the dolphins.

The dolphins were obviously very good at their part.  They performed their leaps and flips with almost perfect timing synchronisation.  

There is always a slight doubt in my mind when going somewhere like this because I wonder about whether it is right for us to keep creatures like dolphins and whales and have them doing acrobatics for us.  In general I conclude that the answer probably depends on the park and how they treat them.

According to Seaworld, and as far as we can see there is no suggestion that they are not being honest, their parks are pretty good.  They have a good environment for the animals, which have largely been born in captivity rather than taken from the wild.

They do a lot of conservation and rescue work, releasing most rescues once they are rehabilitated and homing the few that can't be released.  They also have quite a lot of educational programmes, including snippets of information on environmental issues fed to visitors around the park.  I'm not sure that I thought that these would particularly change behaviour of anyone not already open to recycling and so forth, but it can't harm to try.

They also say that no animal is ever forced to perform.  They only use positive reinforcement in their training, and they get fed the same amount whether during the show or not.  They also mention that they train all of the animals regardless of whether they will perform, because it enables them to more easily care for them and treat them when they are unwell without stressing the animal more, as well as simply keeping them fit and active.

I know that it is easy to justify these things if you want to, but they do genuinely seem to treat the animals well and the success of their breeding programme supports that.

So anyway, we followed the dolphin show with a sealion and otter show.  This was like a pirate pantomime, with lots of naughtiness from the animal 'actors'.  It was OK, but definitely more for the children in the audience.

The woman in the show was better and coped well with the smaller audience meaning less participation in the jokes, but the main guy seemed a bit less adaptable.

One of the funniest parts though was the very miserable reaction of a dad who had been selected to participate.  He had sat in the front of the splash zone, but when his participation involved the sealion deliberately giving him a drenching he looked most unhappy.

The sealion was of course the star of the show.

After the show we went to see the rest of the sealions and found some to be very vocal about getting the fish from the visitors.

We wandered around the park for a while, around the various tanks.  There was a nice set of aquariums with smaller aquatic creatures, including a couple with some fabulous looking jelly fish.

The sharks were interesting in their variety, but just about everywhere has an underwater tunnel these days, so it has lost its gloss somehow.

I did rather like the fact that they had a light that you could turn on behind the shark's purse or egg sack, so that you could see the tiny sharks wriggling around inside.

The park was heavily advertising 'Antarctica', the new attraction that they were building.  It doesn't open for a while, but as readers will know, we have recently been to the real thing, so we weren't too disappointed at missing it.

We were more disappointed to miss the polar bears though.  It was probably the part that I was most looking forward to, and after failing to find it, we discovered that it had been closed over the Christmas period to fit in the Santa express.  Hmmm.  Not happy.

But we got over our disappointment and had a drink whilst watching the oyster fishers 'diving' for the oysters in the tank so that customers could select their oyster and take it to be opened to find out their pearl inside.  

Despite having six potential colours there, we never saw anyone get a pink, peach or gold one, let alone the elusive black one.  But then realistically I am sure no one was expecting anything else.

There were of course a number of 'lovely settings' that you could also purchase to show off your invariably small white or cream pearl, which I am not sure all of the parents had banked on when deciding at the price of getting your own pearl wasn't too bad.

Our last show of the day was definitely the best.  The orka, or killer whale show features the much advertised star Shamu, who was born in the park.  We decided to go for the very back of the splash zone, where we hoped we would avoid getting very wet, but still get great views.  It was a good choice.

Those sitting at the front did get very wet; even if the general show doesn't achieve that, one of the tricks is for the Orkas to swim around flicking the water out with their tails, so that does get you!

We certainly enjoyed watching the Orkas.  They seemed to enjoy themselves and clearly loved the attention that they got from their trainers when they did their stuff.

We spent a while at the ray pool, where Nic made a few new fishy friends. A couple in particular seemed very keen to come over when he put his hand in the water; I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that they know that some people feed them.

From there we went and watched people hand feeding the dolphins.  We didn't feed them, and just watched from one end, but we still got a great view of them and I had one swim close enough to give it a quick stroke.  That was allowed, I wasn't being naughty.

And of course being Florida we had to go and see the manatees.  These huge endangered creatures, which are the somewhat less fairytale but supposedly 'real' mermaids, are strange looking things.  They sort of drift around their pool, often on their backs.

Overall we quite enjoyed our day at Seaworld.  The Orkas were definitely the highlight though.

Back in the air - or are we?

After all of our false starts, amended and extra flights, cancelled and repurchased insurance policies and just the general sadness of our reasons for having been back in the UK, we were looking forward to getting back on the move and enjoying some time in North America.

Given our luck so far this travel year, we decided that rather than risk a problem with traffic, breakdowns, snow or ice stopping us making it to the airport in the morning, we would get to Gatwick the night before so had   booked up a Premier Inn for £19.

So there we were, at the airport in good time for our flight to the States.  We hadn't got a visa for the US, as we hadn't been able to risk not getting our passports back in time for our trip to Germany in the summer, so we were travelling under the visa waiver scheme.

Our plan was to be in the States for the permitted 90 days allowed under the scheme, then to leave the States and cross over to Canada by bus for the six months we can have there.   So we had our return flight booked from Montreal in the autumn.  As far as we could see, this is all within the rules.

When we were at the gate, the guys checking our papers (they have to check pre departure because if USA don't let you in they get fined £2000 and have to take you back) said they thought that we would have a problem because our flight back was not within the 90 days.  They referred it to someone else, who phone someone else and checked, and they said it was fine, but the USA might make us book a flight from States to Canada within the 90 days.  We were OK with that.  So we got on the flight.

But just as they were ready to take off, we had to get off the plane.  Someone had spoken to Homeland Security and they had said we had to change our flight home to the UK to within the 90 days of the US visa waiver scheme,  even though by that time we would have been in Canada not the USA.  They won't let us in for the 90 days unless we are due to leave the whole area, not just the States, at the end of it.  Crazy.

But anyway, BA were helpful and changed our flights for free so that we were able to get back on.  We had delayed the flight by 45 minutes, but I think because they announced that it was an issue with homeland security, most people were sympathetic rather than annoyed. Either that or they thought we might be dangerous criminals so were scared of us!

Of course when we arrived in Orlando they didn't even ask us about our return flight, they just made sure we knew we had to be or within the ninety days.  Whether this was all just the airlines being over cautious due to past problems I don't know, but they did speak to homeland security apparently, so I suspect that it was someone a bit over zealous there.

Since then, Canadian officials have confirmed that we can have ninety days there, so whilst we haven't dared change our flights again yet, we expect that we will be able to have our time as planned.

Anyway, we are here now, and enjoying some Florida sunshine.