Wednesday 15th December 2010

[11:00 EST]

TV news reports this morning are showing that last night was the lowest temperature in central Florida for many years. The official temperature was recorded as 31'F in central Orlando, beating the last record of 33'F recorded way back in 1968. All I can say is - it certainly felt like it!

Today we have tickets for the Blue Man Group show at Universal, so it's time to go and have a peek at Islands of Adventure and see what all the fuss is about in Harry Potter world.

[00:07 EST+1]

Universal was a lot quieter than usual which was nice. Oddly, of those that were here, many had the Harry Potter scarves on - it was almost as though there was a convention in town!

We went to Islands of Adventure and worked our way around our favourite rides.

Finally, we get to the new Harry Potter area. It was, basically, heaving with people. It didn't left that there seemed to be queues everywhere - often people were queueing for something not initially apparent.

It turns out that these were queues for the shops. Quite how you knew which shops you wanted to queue for I don't really know.

I decided to queue for the new Harry Potter ride. The expected wait was 40 minutes, but in reality, it was only a 20 minute queue. The inside waiting area was well designed with lots of stuff to look at - just a shame I don't really know the series so I didn't get all the references.

The ride itself was a sort of cross between the Spiderman ride and EPCOT's Soarin'. Actually, it made me a little queezy at times. I'd give it a 7/10.

We also tried some Butterbeer after the ride - it's a sort of fruit juice mixed with butterscotch. It tasted quite nice, was frothy like beer and was quite gassy too!

From there we went back over to Universal Studios and watched the the parade again.

After the parade, we went back over to City Walk to get something to eat. Now the sun was going down we were feeling the cold again. Linda borrowed my gloves to keep her hands warmer.

We went back over to the Blue Man theatre to watch their 8pm show. It was good fun as usual. We got covered in the last part of the show - not with paint, but with paper.

Walked back to the car, stopping off at Starbucks for a Sea Salt Caramel Hot Chocolate. Mmmm.