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It’s Labor Day, which means the holiday weekend is over and it’s time to head back home.

This morning we slept in a little (no going to the theme parks today) and took the water taxi over to CityWalk. We had breakfast at the Starbucks there and then went to the Hollywood Drive-In mini-golf course to play a round of 18 holes. We chose to play The Haunting of Ghostly Greens side (although the Invaders From Planet Putt side looked fun too) and despite the early morning heat had a good time.

Then it was back onto the water taxi to Portofino Bay to check out of the hotel, retrieve the car, and hit the road. It wasn’t quite time to go home, yet, though. Since my in-laws were in town (we had met them for dinner on Saturday) we met them again for lunch at the Rainforest Cafe over at Downtown Disney. It felt a little weird going to a Disney property after spending all weekend at Universal. The Downtown Disney area is crazy right now, traffic-wise since they are still building a giant parking garage in the middle of the former parking lot on the West Side and there’s also construction going on for the future Disney Springs overhaul slated to open in 2016. We had to park across the street in the Casting lot and walk to the Marketplace which, come to think of it, was probably closer than when we usually get to park in one of the Downtown Disney lots.

After lunch and some light shopping we hit the road and took I-4 back home … no holiday traffic at all. By 5pm we had picked up the dog from the kennel, done a little grocery shopping for the week, and we back home unpacking, another Labor Day family vacation in the books.

Universal Recap

It’s hard not to compare Universal and Disney since we spend so many Labor Day weekends in Orlando. This time I think our Universal experience was overall positive, but there were still a few things that bugged me.

• Why the multiple tickets? It was such a pain carrying around our park ticket, our Express pass, and our hotel room key, needing to fish out each one when necessary. We purchased a vacation package directly from Universal, which included the (on-site) and park tickets. Why can’t everything be encoded onto a single plastic card like our room key, like Disney used to before they switched to the MagicBands?
• PhtotoConnect: I like that you can scan your PhotoConnect card and add photos to it (like at the end of a ride … Disney should definitely add that to PhotoPass). However, without paying for the Star Card ($70!) your card is only good for that day and you can only view your photos in the park (not on the web site back at your hotel). Seems like another money grab by Universal and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since the company behind PhotoConnect is Amazing Pictures, the same place that does the ride videos for the Rip, Ride, Rockit, Rip-Off.
• Universal definitely learned from their mistakes after opening the first Harry Potter park: the streets were narrow, the shops were incredibly tiny (and always packed), and Hogsmeade gets way too hot and sunny. Diagon Alley, by contrast, is much more open, the shops are easier to navigate, and most of it is covered and air conditioned (even the outdoor portions) which make it a much more pleasant experience overall. That being said, the introduction of the new “interactive” wands to control the spell emblems (in both parks) seems like another money grab (maybe that makes my daughter’s “dumb” wand a collector’s item? nah).  And yes, I realize I may be over-using “money grab” when in fact everything Universal and Disney does is specifically to separate the tourist from their money. 🙂
• The Hogwarts Express train between parks is actually very well designed. It’s actually a giant cable car (if you look down at the tracks you can see the constantly moving cable, like you’d see in San Francisco streets) and from what I could see there are actually two of them. One is at each park, they’re loaded with passengers, and then pulled to the other park (presumably passing in the middle). This means the ride is short (the parks aren’t that far apart like the Disney ones), and because there are two trains the wait on either side isn’t very long (because you’re not waiting for a single train to go there and back). Now, since there are only 8 people per compartment they don’t pack the train like you’d find on the Disney monorail (with people standing and strollers collapsed) which means less people on a given train, but the efficiency of how fast they load and move between parks seems to make up for that.