The Great Experiment

The next area on our circle was Jurassic Park.

I've got a bad feeling about this

A wonderfully grinchy balloon

There's a Jurassic Park boat ride which I initially thought might be a clone of the Jungle Cruise. It ... wasn't, but it was a lot of fun! I won't say any more.

FastPass

Next up: Toon Lagoon. It started out well enough...

Ya gotta love Bullwinkle

... but then it quickly began to get weird, as long-forgotten bit cartoon characters sprung up all around me in stores, on signs, as statues and walkarounds.

Beetle Bailey? As a walkaround?

Oh yeah, Hagar the Horrible is a real hit these days

Broomhilda, Gasoline Alley, Blondie, Mother Grimm... charaters from these and many other comic strips were emblazoned across the walls of the buildings. It was like a step into a parallel universe, where Mickey Mouse and Pokemon never accounted for much but kids flocked to read the latest adventures of the Wizard of Id.

Boris and Natasha chase an oversized Ewok

The final area on our loop, Marvel Super Hero Island, was similarly overblown. Giant portraits of super heroes in action poses adorned every building, and the parade consisted of several superheroes tooling through the streets on three-wheeler ATV's. Universal gets an A for effort, but a C for taste.

Gen made sure we rode the Spider-Man ride. Picture Disneyland's Indiana Jones ride or the Animal Kingdom's Dinosaur ride, but give everybody polarized 3-D glasses and scatter some huge screens showing 3-D animation throughout the ride. The result is that you're surrounded by New York city street props, and as you look forward, you see the buildings of New York City in 3-D as Spider-Man battles supervillains in front of you. The effect works great! It truly feels like you're in a vehicle being tossed around the streets of New York.

Universal tried to make the queue for this ride fancy. You enter the lobby of the Daily Bugle, and the queue line winds through a hallway and between the cubicles of the Daily Bugle staff. A coffee maker, coffee mugs, telephones, computer keyboards and mice, and typewriters are scattered around to set the mood... or at least they would be if they hadn't been within easy reach of park guests, who had long since stolen anything which could be ripped off its fastenings. Computer keyboards were missing half their keys, phones were missing their handsets, each plastic donut from a tray glued to a countertop had been carefully pried off. It make the ride look really shoddy. Disney would never have tolerated this.

This was the only ride we went on in this area. Other rides included a Dr. Doom 'whoa belly' ride (at least, that's what Rollercoaster Tycoon calls it -- a tower which shoots a ride vehicle up and lets it plummet back down to the ground), and The Hulk roller coaster, which looked big and terrifying.

Dr. Doom is taking over the world with ... AOL

The train is launched up this tube

"I get sick just looking at Incredible Hulk Coaster"

My final assessment of Islands Of Adventure is that it's a fun departure from the Disney parks, but it feels just a little bit more tacky. Maybe I'm just too much of a Disney fan to appreciate Universal's park properly.

Gen and I then departed the park and met up with her husband Scott, as well as Jordan Greywolf (an old friend of mine) and his wife Wendy, at a restaurant named Hop's. They're supposed to be famous for their root beer, but I'm not a root beer fan, so I had one of the other things they're famous for: their Jamaican steak, marinated in a sweet sauce that tasted of pineapples. It was somewhat exotic, but completely good!

On the way home, I encountered something I've never before had to face alone: a toll booth. We don't have those out in my part of California... and the toll booth wasn't staffed so late at night (around eleven), and I didn't have any change. So what could I do, but carefully and nervously drive past the red 'Pay' light?

It didn't bother me too much, until my car's navigation system had me get off at the next exit (another toll) to go under the overpass and get back on (another toll). I went through another non-staffed toll gate on the highway itself... so by now I had run through four toll booths without paying, and I saw a camera at each one which doubtless captured my license plate number. Would they contact Hertz? Would Hertz look me up and fine me? Would the State of Florida put me in jail for thirty days for not having fifty cents to throw into the basket, not once but four times?

The final tollbooth on Route 417 was staffed, hallelujah! As I paid the required seventy-five cents, I came clean to the poor guy about my criminal record. He brushed it off with a wave. "Don't worry about it," he said. "If you do this every day, we'll track you down. But just once, we'll let it go."

Whew! For a while there I was feeling like Jean Valjean.

[ Index | Day 18 ]