The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

Okay, okay, okay.  Finally it's the post you've all been waiting for.  THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER!  Seriously, it was wonderful and fantastic, and such an experience!  TWWoHP is located in Universal's Islands of Adventure (from my last post) but there was so much to cover just in TWWoHP that I had to make it its own post!

First of all, check out the view!  Here are Mike and Spencer with Hogwarts in the background.

Here's a back shot of Hogsmeade in the foreground and Hogwarts in the background.

I love this picture of Hogwarts.

Here's another view of Hogwarts.

 Here's the view down Hogsmeade.  Isn't it beautiful?!

Here we are with the Hogwarts Express.  :)

It was really fun to see all the shops in Hogsmeade.

 Here's Zonko's Joke Shop.  It was so fun to go in.  I really felt like I was in a Harry Potter book.  Everything is built pretty to scale in TWWoHP so it was really neat!

U-No-Poo!  :)  Hehe!  "The Constipation Sensation"

Extendable ears!

Sneakoscope.  :)

And Honeydukes Sweet Shop!  LOVE It!

Clippy's Cip Joint.  His hair keeps growing and the house elves cut it and sell it to eat.  (Black licorice ropes.)

Exploding Bon Bons!!

Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans!

Chocolate Frogs!

I LOVED this candy covered staircase in Honeydukes!  SO CUTE and colorful!

Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans in the dispensers.

I loved all the sings around the shop advertising different candies.  Fizzing Whizzbees!

Spencer loved looking in the windows of the shops, especially this one with all the Quidditch stuff!  :)

We got to see Hermione's ball gown in one of the shop windows.  So pretty!

I especially liked seeing the Owl Post.  I love those owls!

 

It's Hedwig!

If you've kept up on my posts you'll know this is really a picture I took at The Animal Kingdom, but it looked so Harry-Potterish I had to include it in this post!  I think even the building in the background looks Potterish.  I love it!  I really am so proud of myself for catching this picture! 

We saw this little guy in one of the shop windows.  At first we thought it was cute and fun.  We could hear his squeal through the glass.  The shop this Mandrake was in was close to the bathrooms.  At one point in time I was sitting on a wall outside the shop waiting for the boys to take a little bathroom break.  Well the guys ended up taking a REALLY long time and by the time they got out I honestly thought I was going to lose my mind from listening to this Mandrake scream!  AHH!

One of the neatest shops in Hogsmeade was Ollivander's Wand Shop.

You wait in line to go inside and then there's a little "production" type thing.  Ollivander picks one person from the small group of about 20 people you get to enter the shop with and that person gets to go up and act like they're buying a wand (as if they are Harry Potter himself).  All this crazy "magical" stuff happens with the different wands until he finds the right one and you just "know."  :)  It was pretty neat.

It was fun to see all the wands stacked in boxes all the way to the ceiling.

The Butterbeer stands were pretty cool.  But instead of buying some Butterbeer at one of these...

We went HERE to The Three Broomsticks.

The inside was pretty awesome with all these staircases going all over the place.  Every now and then you'd see the shadow of a house elf.

 

We each drank some butterbeer.  Mmmm!  :)  Like an extra-creamy cream soda with a little kick.  Here's Spencer trying to smile with a straw in his mouth.  :)

Mike and Spencer got frozen BB's but I got regular.  However, this picture is with a frozen one.

We also shared a lunch of authentic English fish and chips.  It was delicious!

Okay, you do need to check out Mike's shirt in the above picture.  I had it made for Mike for Father's Day last year.  It says:

When a 

BOGGART

Looks in the 

MIRROR

It sees ME!

If you're a TRUE Harry Potter fan, you'll get the joke.  If you're not, you won't.  At The Three Broomsticks this old woman working there walked up and wanted to read his shirt.  She read it and then said, in her cute English accent, "Oh...I learned about Muggle boys like you in witch school--so full of yourselves."  It was pretty cute--she obviously got the joke.  Unfortunately one of the girls (in a later picture) who was part of the Frog Choir didn't get it at all.  She read it and you could tell she didn't follow.  She just said something like, "I am afraid of Boggarts..." or something like that.

This "WANTED" sign was hanging outside The Three Broomsticks.  Unfortunately there is a random woman's reflection in the glass--but it was Sirius Black and it was just like the posters in the movie--where he's moving and cackling. 

We did stop at a roadside stand to buy a little of this:

It was oddly good.  A weird mixture but quite tasty.  Mike really liked it.  I like this picture of him with the Pumpkin Juice and Hogwarts Castle in the background.

There are three rides in Potter World.  

RIDE #1: "Flight of the Hippogriff"  (Photo courtesy of universalorlando.com)

This was a fun ride.  It's a roller coaster (as you can tell).  It is definitely a far step up from "children's" roller coasters" like Puff the Magic Dragon at Lagoon, but you could still tell it was a "children's roller coaster."  On this ride you get to "fly" past Hagrid's hut and other familiar Hogwarts landmarks.  It's very well done.

RIDE #2: "Dragon Challenge" (photo courtesy of orlandominivacations.com)

Okay, this ride is soooo cool.  Unfortunately during this vacation we didn't get to ride it because Spencer is too short.  Apparently you have to be 54"!  That's like unheard of!  But oh well.  I rode this ride about 8 years ago when I was 17.  Harry Potter land didn't exist, but this ride was at Islands of Adventure under a different name.  It was called Dueling Dragons.  This really is the neatest roller coaster I've ever been on.  It was the world's first dueling inverted roller coaster(s).  First of all, you hang from the track (i.e. the track is above you so you cannot see it when you're going).  There are two different coasters (you choose which one you go on--back when I was there they were "Fire" and "Ice" but are now called the "Hungarian Horntail" and the "Chinese Fireball"--both names of Dragons in the Harry Potter books).  Anyway, the ride is pretty sweet but the best part is when both coasters come shooting towards eachother.  You think you're going to collide but right as you're about to hit one another, both coasters turn up and go upside down.  The ride features huge drops and three "near miss" moments where your feet come within 12" of the riders on the other coaster.  In the above image the coasters have just passed one of the parts where they look like they're going to collide and are now both going up the loop.  It really is a sweet ride, but you'll have to experience it for yourself!

We eventually made our way from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts Castle.  The highlight of the trip! 

Hogwarts was truly incredible.

You get in line at the entrance of Hogwarts Castle.  I have a few tips that truly MUST be heeded in order to have the most enjoyable experience possible (including the most important tip about this particular line), but I will save those for another post full of tips for your Florida trip.  Be sure to stay tuned for those.

In line you get to experience some of Hogwarts at its finest!  Unfortunately you have to have already stowed any belongings you had in a locker.  So, because we wanted some awesome pictures to remember our experience, we asked a Hogwarts Student (i.e. a worker) where to go for the "Castle Only Tour" which a friend of mine told me about, but it's not advertised anywhere.

I especially loved all the paintings.  They were SOOOO cool and a good portion of them would move and talk and they looked SOOOO real.  I mean I imagined they'd look like TV screens or something, but they REALLY didn't.  They looked like actual paintings but they were moving and talking and sometimes the people in the portraits would leave the picture all together.  It was sooo cool! 

My personal favorite was "The Fat Lady."  Unfortunately I couldn't get a good picture of her, so this blurry one will have to do.

THIS is Dumbledore's office.  I loved it and it was just how I'd imagine it.  Dumbledore comes into his office and speaks to you.  It's a sort of a hologram.  Unfortunately I couldn't ever get a good picture of him--he disappeared with the flash of my camera.

But luckily Spencer had Mike's little camera and DID manage to get a picture of Dumbledore.  :)  He was incredibly proud of this picture.

This was a neat little bulletin board in one of the hallways.  It had an issue of The Daily Prophet pinned up on it.  On the front page of The Daily Prophet was an article about Griffyndor defending their Quiddich title with a (moving) picture of Harry catching the snitch.  :)  It was pretty cool.

The last room you enter is the room where you board the ride.  I loved it because of all the floating candles just like in The Great Room in Harry Potter.  It was really awesome.  You need to enlarge the picture to get a better view.  I loved it.

Next you board the ride for the most amazing FORBIDDEN JOURNEY of your life!  :) 

This is RIDE #3:  Harry Potter's Forbidden Journey

This ride truly was incredible.  I heard some girls talking about it before I rode it--we were actually at Disney World at the time.  The one girl described it to the other as "Soarin' on steroids."  That was a pretty good interpretation, except, it's so much better than that (and I LOVE Soarin')!  It's a mixture of The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman--at Islands of Adventure (except not 3D), Soarin' Over California--at both California Adventure and Epcot Center, and Knights Tournament--at Legoland.

At any rate, I really cannot put into words how incredible this ride is.  Before I went to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, I read my friend Taren's blog post all about TWWoHP.  Taren has a SERIOUS way with words, and SO UNFORTUNATELY has since then deleted her blog (Free Flan).  But I was able to get her to forward me her post all about TWWoHP and got her permission to use parts of her post in my post.  HERE is her description of the ride--honestly, I cannot imagine a better description.  (The second paragraph of this description must be read at high speed with intensity!)

THIS RIDE WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.  I had no idea what to expect.  I've been on every sort of theme park attraction.  At first I thought maybe this would be somewhat like Disney's "Soarin' Over California", but I secretly hoped that it would be better.  And it was.  So much better.  

You're on a moving track, like a roller coaster, but you're moving sideways and you go forwards and backwards and this way and that.  There's dragons, and then there's Harry Potter, flying in front of you on a type of screen that you can't tell where it begins and where it ends, but then you're moving as well, and you're not always watching recorded action because sometimes a dragon is there.  Like, actually there in front of you, and then you're inside a castle with tangible walls and beams, a Whomping Willow is trying to whomp you, and everything that has ever gone wrong to Harry Potter goes wrong to you in a matter of 3 minutes and for a split second part of you way deep deep down shouts I'M A WIZARD! THIS IS REAL.

But it ends, and any hope you had of actually being a wizard ends with it.  This might be a bold statement, but for me that ride brought me closer to actually experiencing Potter's world then Potter World itself.   

Well there it is folks!  Our fabulous trip to THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER.  Remember not to eat right before riding The Forbidden Journey.  :)  It really is such a fun ride, but a good number of people get sick on it because it does SO MUCH and moves SO MUCH and is SO INCREDIBLY AWESOME!

Here are Mike and Spencer in front of Hogwarts after riding The Forbidden Journey.

And here we all are with Hogwarts Frog Choir.  (The red head girl next to Mike is the one who didn't get his shirt--she was the choir leader.)  

At any rate, this was such a fun trip and an awesome vacation.  I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone, especially those of you who are big Potter fans like us!