Then while we were there we also did the "flight of the hippogriff" ride, but that wasn't quite as exciting; it was targeted to a younger audience. It did take us by Hagrid's hut though which was cool. Then we walked through Hogsmeade and checked out all of the shops. We admired all of the candies and treats in Honeydukes and played with the gadgets in Zonko's jokeshop. We checked out the owls and "Dervish and Banges", and we window shopped the bookstores and the cool plants (we saw a mandrake scream from it's pot!). I took a zillion pictures. Then we tried the delicious butterbeer. It was even better than I expected! You could get it hot or cold; I got hot since it was chilly out. It was so sweet and yummy.
I could go on and on about the "Harry Potter" portion but I don't want to bore you. You can check out more pictures in the album (part 2!) linked at the right.
After leaving that area we checked out the Jaws themed area. We rode the one "ride" there, which was riding on a boat while a huge fake shark attacked us. It was kinda cool but I was glad we didn't have to wait much for that ride.
Then we moved on to Jurassic Park. I was really excited to ride "The Flying Dinosaur" but unfortunately it was down for maintenance today (of course). The other big ride there was "Jurassic Park- The ride" but we didn't ride that because it looked like it would get you really wet and we didn't want to be wet today. So we mostly just walked through this area without doing anything. The guys got some turkey legs and I had some popcorn.
We walked through the "San Francisco" area without really doing much and went straight to the "New York" zone where we did "The Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man" ride in 4K3D. It was similar to the Harry Potter one in that we got the 3D glasses and some of it was virtual. It was essentially Spider-Man saving us from all of the villains, but it was all in Japanese so I couldn't understand what anyone was saying. It was cool though.
Then we went to do the one remaining big rollercoaster in the park (since the Jurassic Park one was closed). It was in the "Hollywood" area and it was called "Hollywood Dream- the Ride". You could ride it normal or backwards. I really wanted to do it backwards but the line for that was always longer. So we did the normal way and it was a blast; I love roller coasters. We all rode separately though because we generally picked the 'singles line' when we could since you could usually get on the ride faster that way.
At this point we decided to leave the park for a quick break. The sun was going down and it was starting to get a little colder, so we hopped over to our hotel and changed into some warmer clothes. Then we grabbed a quick snack of rice balls and then went back into the park. Then we stood in our longest line of the day, which ended up being a little over an hour wait. It was for the "Evangelion XR Ride". This was part of the "Universal Cool Japan" section, so I believe this ride is specific to this park. I'm not familiar with the series it's associated with and I couldn't understand most of the pre-story that we listened to while we were in line since it was in Japanese, but the ride was super awesome. We had virtual reality headsets on and we were in a 2-seater pod. The story was that our pod went into a jet and we were flying trying to escape evil robots while a good robot tried to save us. At least that's what I got from it. The virtual reality thing was super cool. Kinda weird though since I couldn't see Matt sitting right next to me. At one point in the ride I really wanted to take off the VR headset and see what was actually going on around us. I think we were riding on an actual rollercoaster that timed with the flight of our virtual world. Anyway, worth the wait.
It was getting close to 6pm and I wanted to go back to Harry Potter world so that's where we went next. We jumped back in line for the big 4K3D ride again and this time we waited for about 5 minutes! It was incredible. Everyone says to go there first thing and beat the lines, but the end of the day is the time to go. We could've gone 5 times right in a row if we wanted to. But it made me a little dizzy so I couldn't do it more than once in a row. Anyway, pure awesome. We walked around Hogsmeade again and split another butterbeer. Then we went into Ollivander's wand shop, where they did a wand demonstration of pretending to pick a wand for someone in the crowd, similar to how they do it in Harry Potter. They have wand remakes of all the major characters there that you can buy. I really wanted to buy one. They also have the same wands but 'magic' versions, that actually light up. And the best part is if you have one of those and then walk around the Harry Potter park you can go to certain places and do the right spell and things will actually happen. We saw a kid with one of those wands wave it and say the levitation spell and one of the quidditch balls levitated out of the box. It was super cool and I really wanted to do it. I played with the wand in the store but I couldn't justify actually buying one.
So we said goodbye to Hogsmeade for the night and decided to catch one more ride on the "Hollywood Dream" ride on the way out. It was 40 minutes until the park closed and it said 40 min wait time so it was perfect. Shortly after we got in line they closed it off, so we ended up being some of the last riders.
We tried to find a place to eat but everywhere was packed since that's what everyone was trying to do, so we came up to the room and chilled here for a bit (I started writing my blog), before going back down. There were much less people then so we were able to get a table quickly at a ramen place. Matt said this was his favorite ramen so far! Mine remains to be the ramen we had near Shibuya station in Tokyo.
That was our magical day!!
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