This weekend was a ‘nothing but Universal’ weekend. That gave me the opportunity to get my coaster fix, but it cheated me out of my Shamu time! That’s entirely different story. I’m beginning to fall more and more in love with Universal as I spend more time there, especially with Potter-World coming along quite nicely.
Potter-World is coming along so quickly that soon I believe there will be nothing major to take pictures of in the future. Sadly, I think that day will be coming sooner than later as most of the outside work is almost completed. Since our visit last weekend, scaffolding has moved from Hogs Head/Three Broom Sticks to other buildings in Hogsmeade. More rock-work is going on at Hogwarts too. I was baffled when I noticed a construction worker throwing mud at the rock-work underneath Hogwarts. That’s going to be some beautiful rock! It also dawned on me, that no matter how massive Hogwarts looks, its not as big as it really looks when you get close to it. I’d say it’s probably not even 100 feet tall. I love forced perspective. Did I mention that security was swarming the Potter areas on Friday night? I’m not sure why, but they were all just kind of standing around like they were waiting for something to happen! Weird?
Check out the pictures from Friday.
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The view to ‘Flying Unicorn’ is much better. I don’t remember as much track being visible in the last year of my visits to Islands. I’m glad to know there’s more than I saw before. I was starting to get worried. Scaffolding in the Dragons queue is down as well. It looks like Potter-World is right on time for a spring opening! The Hogwarts Express looks awfully beautiful right now. Is it just me, or did they paint it.. or shine up the lettering? Last time I checked you couldn’t see it unless you peeked through fence holes, but it’s visible over the top of the fence now. I’ve noticed a little bit of green going on at the peaks of the towers on Hogwarts. That just shows how much detail is going into this project! The project is getting so close to being done that I’m getting goose-bumps!
Check out our pictures from Saturday and notice the difference.
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Besides Harry Potter, there’s a lot more going on in the park. Dudley Do-Right is down for an annual maintenance. There was no signage indicating when the ride will re-open, but I’ve heard that it goes down about this time of year for yearly maintenance. There are huge fences surrounding the ride making it quite difficult to see anything, but we did see a man working on the drop. Of course, the one day I decide to ride it, it’s closed! Hopefully it will re-open within the next week or so.
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In the last couple weeks we’ve noticed the pathway used for the old Trike Encounter attraction had been cleared out and cleaned up. This weekend we noticed stanchion poles in the area that had not been set up yet. What does this mean? They could bring Trike Encounter back, or possibly use the pathway for something else. With Mardi Gras just a few weeks away, my guess is Universal will be using it as an extended queue line for Dueling Dragons or possibly Jurassic Park River Adventure (I highly doubt it though). I’m leaning heavily towards Dragons as they don’t have much of a queue to rely on at the moment with the Potter construction and may need something for back up.
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Disaster is still down.. Who knows when we’ll see it back up and running again.
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A universal trip isn’t complete without random pictures thrown in! I unfortunatley don’t have a photo of it, however Rockit had two trains running on Friday night that did not have fully operational LEDs. One train didn’t have working LEDs at all, and only half the LEDs worked on the second train. It was kind of a sad sight. I was also pretty bummed that Rockit was down today as well (most likely due to wind).
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