Roaring Down The Highway
The Plan was simple – crank down the Freeway to Orlanda and get Harry to Universal Studios to the Harry Potter Theme Park at opening time.
The highway was a lot busier than I expected with heaps of cars but we were still travelling at 65 miles per hour.
It was a very large freeway with heaps of Billboards on the sides of the road which were all advertising theme parks.
It Was Warming Up
We began to notice how hot it was in all of our bike gear, we didn’t have thermals on anymore but even just the jacket made me sweat.
We reached Wildwood and saw huge signs directing us to take the left fork in the road and from there go to Orlando.
Once we reached this point we knew we only had 30 miles left until we would reach the centre of Orlando so we got out the GPS and set it to Universal Resort.
Universal Studios, Orlando
The first thing we noticed about the place was how incredibly huge it was with about 5 different multi-level car parks and huge sections of gardens that were pristinely maintained.
I let Harry off and we agreed to meet in that spot some at 6pm (8 and a half hours later).
Harry then went and had a wonderful day in the theme park.
At the Harry Potter Theme Park
Look out Haz, there's a train behind you!
From Harry’s Journal:
“I gradually realised that Florida wasn’t like the other places we had been which became clear when I had to change out of my thermals and take my jumper of in order to avoid collapsing.”
Picked Harry Up & Then It Turned To Crap
I picked up Harry at 6 pm and we headed back to the hotel, which was about 10 miles down the highway.
About 2 miles from the exit the battery of the GPS went flat. Ooooops.
We then got completely lost and headed down a busy highway that runs through Disneyland and eventually we ended up around 20 miles away from where we were aiming. We had no clue what general area we were heading, only that it was called something like ‘Magic Castle’ and it looked like a blue castle.
With this poor knowledge we headed to a shopping centre and found a tourist information booth in the centre of the carpark.
We interrupted the young lady’s dinner and used a receipt in dad’s pocket to find where we were staying (The lady made a joke about it being similar to ‘The Hangover’).
She Called Her Mom
She then called her mother who told her the directions to the place and then she set us on our way.
She scribbled directions down on a bit of paper that we followed with Harry tapping me on the right shoulder for right, left for left and middle for straight ahead.
Within a few minutes we were at the Magic Castle Inn & Suites (read my Trip Advisor review here).
We went to a nearby Denny’s for dinner where Harry raved about the great time he’d had at the Theme Park.
We rode back towards our hotel but swapped to the other side of the highway for a while to go into a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and have dessert! Gotta do it!
[Previous Day] [Next Day]