Feb 6, 2011

The happiest place on Earth

Technically, that is Disney and Harry Potter is at Universal. But I don't care. Twas magical. I'm waiting on M to actually run so that I can. He is doing the taxes, so I can't really complain. Not sure how a former accountant managed to give the job of taxes to her MD husband, but I'm pretty proud of my accomplishment. Since he has like 6 W2s I think this is fair.

So I'm posting pictures to kill time. Enjoy! A bit of warning-these are really only interesting if you love Harry Potter. There are so many little details from the books/movies!


Hogwarts Castle! I'm in full on pushing and running mode at this point. Out of my way small children!


 

I'm pretty sure this is what Heaven looks like. At Honeydukes. There was so much glorious candy. I never wanted to leave.








Candy Stairway!









House points. These are all in line in the castle for the Forbidden Journey ride. It has so many little details and cool things. But it is super dark!
Several of the portraits are actually screens, so they are moving and talking just like in the books. It goes up quite high! Several were complaining about Dumbledore letting so many muggles into Hogwarts.






Dumbledore's pensieve 




His office. You can barely tell but there is another screen projecting from the balcony. Dumbledore talks to you! It actually looks 3D when you are there. The line is all twisty and you go into multiple different rooms. I literally gasped "DUMBLEDORE!" loudly as we walked in. I am such a nerd. 





In front of the castle. There is a nice little bridge where you can take pictures. 

This one is for you, Naomi!!!





We went through the castle twice. The line was super short, so we were moving quickly. If you are going, definitely go through the rides more than once. I saw so much more the second time. Like the dragon skeleton hanging from the ceiling.  Of course, the second time the ride broke while we were on it! We just sat there for about 30 mins until they just turned everything off and drove us out. It was pretty interesting to see all the behind the scenes stuff. The ride was broken for the rest of the day though, so we didn't get to do it again.










 Hogsmeade.














Enjoying a delicious butterbeer! They were like a butterscotch icee. Even M liked it and he doesn't like sweet things.

Ok, I have maybe 100 more, but I doubt anyone really wants to see all the minutia of Harry Potter World. It was great! Rather small though, unfortunately. Most of the shops of Hogsmeade you can't actually go into. So the entire park is basically the castle, a dueling dragons roller coaster which has a bunch of stuff from GoF, 3 Broomsticks, a gift shop/Ollivander's, Zonkos/Honeydukes. And the shops are small since that is how they were envisioned. I wanted it to be like a million times bigger. We were lucky and the crowds weren't bad at all. Helps to go on a Monday in late January!

1 comment:

omiegrace said...

hooray! i'm glad you loved it so much. i'm excited i'll be there in a month!