Labor Day Weekend 2014 – Back to Universal

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It’s Labor Day weekend which means it’s time for our annual mini family vacation over in Orlando. We haven’t been to Universal Studios in a few years so we’re looking forward to seeing all the new stuff (Diagon Alley, Minion Mayhem, Transformers, etc.). The weather might interfere with our plans, however, as there’s an 80% chance of rain both days. 🙁

The days of leaving town early to beat the traffic are over. We weren’t on the road until shortly after 5pm, so with the holiday rush hour traffic along the I-4 corridor and the rain, we weren’t checked into our room at the Portofino Bay Hotel until about 7:30pm.

For some inexplicable reason, even though our hotel had an on-site ticket center, we had to go to guest services over at the theme parks to get our park passes. The concierge said that guest services closed at 8:00pm. Wanting to avoid waiting in a long line tomorrow morning, we hopped the water taxi over to CityWalk in a light rain and made it to the ticket counter right before closing time to pick up our tickets. To get our Express passes, though, we had to go back to the hotel and use our theme park tickets in an automated kiosk to take our photo and print out the separate ticket. So now we each have to carry our hotel room key, theme park ticket, and Express pass. Why can’t this all be combined onto our room key? Universal should take a hint from Disney here … unless they’re just trying to sell lanyards to carry all of this stuff.

Since we were back at our hotel and hadn’t had dinner yet, we walked around the piazza checking out the dining options. We wanted to go to Mama Della’s but we didn’t have a reservation and they were booked  up so we ended up getting pizzas at Sal’s. The hotel had a brand new Starbucks as well so we grabbed some warm drinks for a nightcap on the way back to our room on the first floor of the east wing (with a nice view of the “Italian” seaside).

Tomorrow we get up early so we can get into Universal an hour early (along with everyone else staying in a resort hotel) and visit the new Harry Potter area, Diagon Alley.

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