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Last week was my mid-year vacation and, as is my wont on these types of occasions, I wrote a thing. This was my first trip ever to the Harry Potter attractions at Universal theme park.
NOTE: This post contains a lot of photos, especially of the park. I've embedded some, but anything I feel like people would think are "spoilery" (namely, pictures inside the Hogwarts castle and in the queue for the Hogwarts Express) I've linked, so that people don't have to see them if they don't want to.
Less than two weeks before I was to leave
On a whim, I checked my flight confirmation emails to see where I was laying over en route to Orlando. Good thing I did, because it turned out I had booked my flights departing from and returning to NASHVILLE, not New York. *facepalm* So I had to rebook and hope I could find flights that didn’t cost me an arm and a leg more (they ended up being about $80 more, which is better than I had any right to expect).
Tuesday, July 29 (which was, incidentally, my dad’s birthday)
Left work at 7am and caught a cab to LaGuardia (an airport I’m becoming less and less enamored of). I always enjoy the trip out there, though, because it usually involves a trip across the 59th Street (Queensboro) Bridge, which means I get to listen to Simon & Garfunkel’s "59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)" — a silly tradition of mine, but I don’t care. :P
The first leg of the trip was ridiculously smooth. I’d gotten a good spot in the boarding line, the line for the security checkpoint was short, and the flight wasn’t full so I had a row to myself. There was a small child who insisted on screaming and crying nonstop for about half the trip, but headphones made her easier to tolerate. I had a yummy sandwich at Chili’s during my layover in Milwaukee and spent the rest of the wait for the next flight watching an MST3K episode — The Thing That Couldn’t Die ("Theeeere’s a thick yellow stain on mah back brace!"). The pilot anticipated an early arrival in Orlando, but that was not to be.
About half an hour (I’ve been watching Farscape and I keep wanting to type "arn" instead of "hour") before our scheduled arrival, we were informed that there were thunderstorms in Orlando — pretty much an everyday occurrence, as I understand. But we couldn’t land in that weather, so we were going to hang around in the air space between Tampa and Orlando and try and wait the storm out. Well, that didn’t work so well, because the storm just got bigger. Soon we were running low on fuel, so we diverted to Tampa to get more (and hopefully let the storm pass so we could get to where we were supposed to be). Thank goodness for my iPod and the 1980s R&B Mix I’d made just before the trip, which allowed me to zone out while jamming to "Don’t Disturb This Groove" and the like.
Emily had already been waiting about an hour at the airport when I texted her and said I’d be ANOTHER hour, thanks to the Tampa diversion. Once I’d gotten there and gotten my bags, we took a taxi to the hotel — the Rosen Centre Hotel, which was very nice indeed (express elevators, hurray!). After settling in, we took a stroll to the Walgreens next door for breakfast supplies and on the way back spotted maybe the most hilarious sign I’ve ever seen on a hotel property.
Pic by Mark Oshiro, who appears to have stayed at the same hotel we did.
Having not had a meal since before noon and not suffering, as poor Emily was, from flight nausea, I went down to the hotel’s 24-hour NY-style deli and got some dinner. Not much else happened that evening, except that I watched the Star Trek episode “The Squire of Gothos” with Mark’s accompanying video. We had a big day coming, so it was best to get a good night’s sleep.
Wednesday, July 30
Woke up around 6:00 and got ready for a day at Universal. It took over an hour to get a taxi at the hotel, but we made it to the park a few minutes before it opened. As we passed the CityWalk movie theater, I idly thought that I’d probably have to wait to see Guardians of the Galaxy until Monday when I was back in NYC and rested. We decided to do Hogsmeade first, thinking that the insane line at the new Gringotts ride might be a *little* less intense after a few hours. So off we trekked into the Islands of Adventure park.
I was inordinately charmed by the Dr. Seuss themed area.
And we barely escaped the T-Rex.
And then we arrived at Hogsmeade, which was a little overwhelming, though I’d seen it in pictures already.
But once we caught sight of the castle, I almost cried. For realsies.
I remembered that the ride was supposed to be fairly weight-restrictive, so I tried the seat. The employee at the entrance didn’t seem to think I’d have trouble, though she said I’d have to stow my bag in a locker (which I already knew). It took about 40-50 minutes to get through the line on Forbidden Journey, but the time is not wasted by any means, as you get a little tour of the castle. I’ll link the pics, at least for the castle, in case anyone considers this stuff spoilers, but I couldn’t stop taking pics. At one point there is a video with the Trio and Harry tells Ron and Hermione to stop bickering (my heart!).
Greenhouse
Castle entrance
House mascots — I think the eagle must be on top of this guy's head and I’ve cut it out
House points
Entrance to Dumbledore’s office (password: sugar quills!)
The Fat Lady — Dawn French, not Elizabeth Spriggs
Sorting Hat
Everything you'd expect to be animated is animated, including portraits of the Founders (Godric looks quite Gimli-ish). When we got to the ride itself, another ride operator took me aside and had me try the seat again. I’m not sure what the girl at the entrance had been thinking when I tried the seat before, but perhaps she thought my bag was what was keeping the harness from coming as far down as it needed to. In any case, I was not allowed on the ride and stood at the side while Emily went on. This was not a great moment for me, and I have to admit that I cried a little — not just in disappointment in not getting to experience the ride (the walk through the castle was well worth the time spent in line, actually) but in embarrassment. I now wondered how many other rides I wouldn't be able to ride.
We did Flight of the Hippogriff next, and while it was a tight squeeze in the seat, I marveled that I was able to get on a ride designed fourteen years ago for kids and yet the much newer ride couldn’t accommodate me. I was to have bitter thoughts like this for most of the day.
After flying on the wings of impossible love (fandom in-joke, sorry), we decided to get on the Hogwarts Express and go to the new Diagon Alley extension in the other park. There was no line, but it took ten minutes just to get through the ridiculously long (but empty) queue. I’m tired just thinking about that thing. I can’t even tell you how awesome it is to be able to ride the train — which looks exactly (inside and out) like the train from the movie. I won’t say much about it, except that there are no real windows (only a movie screen that gives the illusion of a window) and that you *definitely* want to ride the train in both directions as the little movies are different each way.
Platform 9 3/4
Platform 9 3/4, with trunks
Platforms 9 and 10
Train — I tried waiting for this woman to move, but she took SEVERAL MINUTES trying to get the Perfect Selfie
A familiar billboard
Departures
The number 12 is so faded you can't even see it in this small a picture.
So Diagon Alley ... is amazing. Hogsmeade is great, but the detail in Diagon Alley is almost too much, down to the magic wall. It didn’t even matter that we didn’t get to the Gringotts ride, because the theming in the shops and restaurants is incredible.
Inside the Leaky Cauldron!
Fish n' chips, and pumpkin juice in a souvenir mug.
And we couldn’t resist having someone take our picture, since we’ve always had such a fondness for cracks. ;-)
And then our photographer, a server at the Cauldron, insisted on a selfie.
After looking around the shops and deciding that no, we didn’t want to wait upwards of four hours to get on the Gringotts ride, we took the train back to the other park to do some non-HP stuff. We did the Jurassic Park boat ride (which, for any Opryland vets, is similar to the Old Mill Scream, only instead of just going up and coming back down, goes through a whole bunch of theming — it also has a safety bar, which the OMS did not). We did the Spider-Man 3D ride, which was pretty cool — I especially loved the details in the Daily Bugle office part of the line and wondered if they regularly updated the calendars in all the cubicles. Then I guess we must have taken the train back to Universal, because the last thing we did before heading back to the hotel for a break was The Mummy ride, which was pretty great and my favorite non-HP ride, even if I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
My feet were dying and I groaned all the way back to the taxi area — which seemed ridiculously far away and I cursed how spread out EVERYTHING in Orlando is. I actually started getting a bit scared at how tired and in pain I was -- I mean, I know I'm older than I used to be, but I'm not THAT old. We made it back to the hotel and passed out for a couple of hours, then woke up to go pick up our LeakyCon badges and such at the registration area (and get our tickets to the event in the park that night). After stowing our bags and swag in the room, we headed back to the convention center, where everyone with a ticket to “Open at the Close” boarded buses to the park for the convention’s exclusive event.
Until the park closed at 10:00pm we were with all the other “Muggles” in the park, and Emily and I did an awful lot of sitting. We started at Diagon Alley — which, like Hogsmeade, is at the back of the park it’s in — but the crowd was ridiculous (thanks in part to the 1500 LeakyCon-ers who had just come into the park). Since the free food for the event wouldn’t be rolled out until 11:30, we grabbed some dinner at the Universal Monsters Cafe, which had cool theming and okay food. After the only real wait we had to endure for the Hogwarts Express (and amusing ourselves with reactions to the news about Orlando Bloom throwing a punch at Justin Bieber — and Beiber’s pathetic comeback attempt on Twitter), we headed back to Hogsmeade and grabbed some (amazingly delicious) frozen butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks and just sat for a while until the sun went down.
We did a lot of sitting that evening, actually, though we did walk around and explore the shops some more. We spotted some familiar faces from the Pemberley Digital series (though Emily saw more of them than I did — I just spotted Mary Kate and Max the once), and I saw from some Twitter pics that the Emma Approved people were there as well (minus Brent Bailey, who was working on a film and flew in just in time for the panels on Friday). When we went to Ollivander’s (the Hogsmeade branch), there was a little wand show and Emily got picked for the demonstration and have a wand choose her. She’d been waffling on whether to get a souvenir wand, but now she HAD to get one. :P I bought a Ginny Weasley wand and couldn’t get over how cool the merchandise bags for Ollivander’s were (though they don’t have much re-use value as they can pretty much only hold a wand box).
I got way too big a kick out of the "Public Conveniences."
Not part of the Gringotts ride, but a "Money Exchange" store, which mostly sold candy coins.
We headed back to Diagon Alley, hoping the crowd was less intense now that the park had closed, which thankfully it was.
It may be too small to see, but that's a Lockhart display in the window.
If you stand close, you can hear the bird chirping inside.
The constipation sensation that's gripping the nation!
We ended up going *back* to Hogsmeade to meet up with another Emily, one of Emily Prime’s LeakyNews cohorts. We went back into Honeydukes and I couldn’t resist the siren call of a Sugar Quill lollipop (Emily got one for herself, as well as one to give to SQ founder Arabella, who we knew we’d be seeing at some point).
I have no idea if I'll ever have the heart to eat this. Maybe for my birthday in a few weeks.
At 11:30, as promised, they started serving food. I wasn’t terribly hungry, as we’d had dinner a few hours before, but we still got some stew and bread. I also got a Scotch Egg (which was not awesome) and a bottle of pumpkin juice. We sat and ate in the Three Broomsticks and went out to get more drinks just before midnight. I know it was just before midnight, because when the clock struck midnight — on July 31 — everyone burst into a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” to Harry and JKR. Maybe my favorite moment of the whole trip.
After getting another round of frozen butterbeer for the road, we got on the Hogwarts Express again (the other Emily hadn’t been on it yet), and thankfully they’d blocked off most of the ridiculously long queue so we didn’t have to do that trek. Emily the Second stayed in the park while Emily Prime and I limped back to where the buses were and went back to the hotel to … basically die. We decided that, for the next day, we’d sleep in and use our second day in the park *just* to try and get on Gringotts.
I wish I’d been able to get a picture of the dragon breathing fire — which it does roughly every 15 minutes — but I never quite caught it in time. Bernie Su (of Pemberley Digital) apparently tried for an hour to get a selfie with the flames in the background.
Thursday, July 31
In retrospect, I think going back to the park on Thursday might have been a mistake. My feet and legs weren’t quite ready to forgive me for the previous day, and they only lasted a couple of hours. The line for Gringotts was “only” three hours, so we decided to brave it. Before getting in line, however, I tried the seat and here again was a ride I wouldn’t be able to get on because Universal hates fat people. I suspect part of my problem is that I’m not only fat but also short, so my flub is in exactly the wrong place for these safety bars/harnesses, but I’m just saying … I never had a single problem getting on a ride the last time I went to Disney.
SO, Emily was going to do single rider, but that would mean she missed the theming bit of the line, which if Forbidden Journey was anything to go by would be incredible. So we both got in the regular line — hey, if I couldn’t ride the ride, at least I could see the Gringotts lobby and Bill Weasley’s office. Well, that didn’t work out either. It was looking promising at first — the line was well-fanned (with fans that spritzed water at regular intervals — and it moved fairly quickly. Until about 90 minutes in. My feet and legs were already telling me to go f*** myself and then we hit a patch where we stood still for 20 minutes. Knowing that this ride had been shutting down for maintenance from time to time during regular park hours, we feared the worst and decided to leave the line. And at this point, Emily couldn't even do single rider because they'd closed the single rider line, so we ended up just leaving. Near exhaustion after just two hours, we had to stop periodically on our way out of the park to sit. We grabbed lunch at Panda Express in CityWalk — another excuse to sit down — and headed back to the hotel to rest up for the beginning of LeakyCon, thinking that after the past couple of days the convention was going to be a nice break.
The line to get into the Opening Ceremonies was insane. Emily and I decided to just snag a couple of comfy chairs in the corridor and follow the back of the line into the main stage room, because once you're past the first twenty rows, it doesn’t matter where you sit. I was not having the best time that evening. I wasn’t feeling the fangirl glee of the opening skit — apparently most of the performers were StarKid (Very Potter Musical) people, and the fact that that’s such a fandom Thing has always mystified me, so I wasn’t into all that and kind of boggled at how excited people were to see them. I did think the use of the DoM doors was clever, and the way they used various characters for the various rooms — the Doctor and Marty McFly for the Time Room, Dumbledore and Sherlock and Captain Picard and Hermione and … I can’t remember who else for the Brain Room, Sam and Dean Winchester having been in the Death Room a bajillion times, etc. But I wasn’t feeling it like everyone else and it made me sad.
After the skit, everyone dispersed and Emily went to meet Meg (“Arabella”) for a drink. In my exhaustion and fangirl un-glee, I went back up to the room, crashed on the bed, and checked the Tumblr app on my phone. And then something happened. My eyes passed over a post where someone said they’d been watching Hannibal on Hulu and this ad popped up.
And I started laughing. That wheezy, can’t-breathe laughter. For like thirty minutes. I made a trip down to the deli to get some dinner and brought it back, still laughing at odd intervals, and much more optimistic about the weekend ahead. Only I could get my groove back by potato cannibalism.
Friday, August 1
This was a day entirely of panels and planning. First up was the Mark Does Stuff panel, where he told stories about readers who don’t understand boundaries, read us the Gurren Jesus fanfic (which he’d read at an NYC event and which has the greatest sentence in the English language — “Hitler, I’m going to kick your ass in the name of the Father, Myself, and the Holy Ghost,” said Jesus.) He also read a chapter of Harry Potter as written by Ayn Rand. An awesome woman named Meg (not Arabella!Meg, but a different Meg who reads Mark's sites and who I remember from the West Wing and Hannibal posts) also brought pie — an orange pie and a strawberry pie, both of which we were to pretend didn’t exist because we would supposedly get in trouble for having non-official food at a con event ... or something, I didn’t quite understand that.
Next was the Pemberley Digital panel with Bernie Su and Alexandra Edwards, which I had thought was going to explore how they developed shows and adapted material, but they didn’t get into that until people asked in the Q&A. It was more a showcase of what they’d done than how they’d done it. Still fun, but not what I was expecting. Next, Emily moderated the “LDB: One Year Later” panel, with Bernie, Alex, Mary Kate Wiles (Lydia Bennett) and Maxwell Glick (Mr. Collins). It was great hearing about how they were going to continue Lydia’s story through the book (since she’s the only character who doesn’t really get a happy ending in the series), and apparently Mr. Collins is a popular character with younger viewers.
Next up was the Emma Approved panel, which Emily was also moderating but which took place on the main stage with the big screens. Way more intimidating and I was very impressed at how Emily held it together, especially meeting all the awesome EA peeps. Joanna Sotomura (Emma), Brent Bailey (Knightley), Dayeanne Hutton (Harriet) and James Brent Isaacs (B. Mart) were all there, and JB is apparently a huge Austen buff. I don’t approve of real-people shipping, but Joanna and Brent — who are dating in real life — were disgustingly adorable. They had recently wrapped production, and some of the cast’s favorite scenes to shoot are coming up in the final few episodes (there will be 72, not counting the Q&A and music videos).
After the EA panel, we stayed in the big room for the Frankenstein M.D. presentation (which included the first two episodes). It looks pretty good so far, and Emily agreed with me that Anna Lore, who plays Victoria Frankenstein, looks an awful lot like![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hymnia (with red hair). After this, we grabbed some lunch (again, from the deli) and went back to the hotel room to plan our shipping wars panel for the next day. And somewhere in the middle of that, Emily (as a LeakyNews writer) got the scoop on the forthcoming news about Frank Churchill and how EA planned to reveal The Big Twist in Emma (ship debate in-joke, sorry).
Saturday, August 2
I woke up a bit earlier the next morning so that I could get to the “IT RHYMES” Hannibal discussion at 9:00am. I was pleased to note that it actually was a discussion, consisting mostly of the panelists bringing up questions and all of us giving our thoughts, instead of a couple of people talking at us. Things only got tense once, predictably when the issue of Beverly came up. I still have mixed thoughts on this.
I decided none of the next few panels interested me more than simply preparing myself for the ship wars panel, so after lying down for an hour, I did exactly that. I was extremely nervous and Emily and I were both concerned that we would never be able to cover everything we wanted to talk about, even glancingly, in 40 minutes.
We were disappointed that our request for a projector had been forgotten, but VERY pleased to see that we had a full room for our panel. And we actually managed to cover the entirety of our outline. Emily was magnificent, cruising through topics like a pro. I was less magnificent, particularly when it came to boiling the Ms.Scribe story down to a few minutes. I was a bit thrown at learning that only half the room had even heard of her and even more surprised that of those people only three or four had ever heard of Charlotte Lennox, which made our reveal of her true identity a bit anti-climactic. It was kind of hilarious that we couldn’t even get to the end of our presentation before people were asking questions. One asked, predictably, about JKR’s recent statements about whether Harry/Hermione might have been the better choice. Emily assured everyone, to appreciative response, that Rowling did NOT say she wished she’d written Harry/Hermione or that it would have been better in any way. There was also an enthusiastic young girl who I wish had been debating with us back in the day and who we basically had nothing to say in response to except “Rock on, girl!” Emily recorded the whole thing, and I hope we can eventually get it online somehow. I’d very much like to cut it into a video with the slides we made but didn’t get to use.
When our panel ended, SEVERAL people came up to our table to say “THANK YOU” and to tell us how much they enjoyed it. I have a feelinggloatation and the Ms.Scribe story are going to get some traffic in the near future (if they haven’t already). After the panel, I got to meet Meg -- Arabella!Meg -- who had attended our panel, and that was a pretty big deal to me (even though I’m not an “After the End” enthusiast, I'm still a Quiller). Emily and I headed back to the room, but housekeeping hadn’t been there yet, so we killed some time at the pool before coming back to rest up for the evening’s activities.
So ... the Esther Earl Charity Ball. I confess that I had no idea who Esther Earl was prior to about six weeks ago, when Emily told me. I’ve never read The Fault in Our Stars, don’t really care to, and I’d never even heard of John Green (much less that novel) before about a year ago when it showed up on some poll for the Greatest YA Novel of All Time (or something similar). Fandom has certainly moved on, I guess. But it was fun to get dressed up — I even wore my Ravenstag eye shadow from Aromaleigh’s Hannibal-inspired collection. And it was great to see everyone cut loose. At one point, a bunch of beauty pageant contestants who were competing elsewhere in the convention center, gathered outside our ballroom and were dancing to the music.
The ball was fun, even though I couldn’t stay for all of it (my flight left at 6:15am, so I had to be up at like 3:00!). But I have to say that the best part was the half-hour we spent outside the ballroom with Meg, snarking about fandom, and (very) briefly getting to see Melissa, who knew who I was and gave me a hug but didn’t remember meeting me at Lumos (she was right, though, it was an era ago). She graciously (and surreptitiously) gave us all wristbands for the VIP area, so we went back there for a while and eventually saw the arrival of the Pemberley Digital folks. It amused me to no end to see “B. Mart” followed by a harem of young ladies. It helps when you look like the love child of Robert Pattinson and Daniel Radcliffe.
At 11:30 I left and crashed in the room, hoping I could sleep in a hurry and not be too zombified when I had to wake up to leave. Of course, I left packing for the morning, so I ended up shoving everything in my bags (and ended up leaving some swag behind). I had a smooth but uncomfortable trip back, only hitting one snag when we arrived at LaGuardia earlier than expected and had to wait about half and hour for a gate to clear so that we could deboard.
As the taxi took me back to my apartment building, I listened to Ace Frehley's "New York Groove," which put me in the proper mindset to be back home. It was a great trip, and I'm glad I went (and that I hadwahlee_98 as a vacation buddy).
Now to start saving for BNAT 16 and the holidays!
NOTE: This post contains a lot of photos, especially of the park. I've embedded some, but anything I feel like people would think are "spoilery" (namely, pictures inside the Hogwarts castle and in the queue for the Hogwarts Express) I've linked, so that people don't have to see them if they don't want to.
Less than two weeks before I was to leave
On a whim, I checked my flight confirmation emails to see where I was laying over en route to Orlando. Good thing I did, because it turned out I had booked my flights departing from and returning to NASHVILLE, not New York. *facepalm* So I had to rebook and hope I could find flights that didn’t cost me an arm and a leg more (they ended up being about $80 more, which is better than I had any right to expect).
Tuesday, July 29 (which was, incidentally, my dad’s birthday)
Left work at 7am and caught a cab to LaGuardia (an airport I’m becoming less and less enamored of). I always enjoy the trip out there, though, because it usually involves a trip across the 59th Street (Queensboro) Bridge, which means I get to listen to Simon & Garfunkel’s "59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)" — a silly tradition of mine, but I don’t care. :P
The first leg of the trip was ridiculously smooth. I’d gotten a good spot in the boarding line, the line for the security checkpoint was short, and the flight wasn’t full so I had a row to myself. There was a small child who insisted on screaming and crying nonstop for about half the trip, but headphones made her easier to tolerate. I had a yummy sandwich at Chili’s during my layover in Milwaukee and spent the rest of the wait for the next flight watching an MST3K episode — The Thing That Couldn’t Die ("Theeeere’s a thick yellow stain on mah back brace!"). The pilot anticipated an early arrival in Orlando, but that was not to be.
About half an hour (I’ve been watching Farscape and I keep wanting to type "arn" instead of "hour") before our scheduled arrival, we were informed that there were thunderstorms in Orlando — pretty much an everyday occurrence, as I understand. But we couldn’t land in that weather, so we were going to hang around in the air space between Tampa and Orlando and try and wait the storm out. Well, that didn’t work so well, because the storm just got bigger. Soon we were running low on fuel, so we diverted to Tampa to get more (and hopefully let the storm pass so we could get to where we were supposed to be). Thank goodness for my iPod and the 1980s R&B Mix I’d made just before the trip, which allowed me to zone out while jamming to "Don’t Disturb This Groove" and the like.
Emily had already been waiting about an hour at the airport when I texted her and said I’d be ANOTHER hour, thanks to the Tampa diversion. Once I’d gotten there and gotten my bags, we took a taxi to the hotel — the Rosen Centre Hotel, which was very nice indeed (express elevators, hurray!). After settling in, we took a stroll to the Walgreens next door for breakfast supplies and on the way back spotted maybe the most hilarious sign I’ve ever seen on a hotel property.
Pic by Mark Oshiro, who appears to have stayed at the same hotel we did.
Having not had a meal since before noon and not suffering, as poor Emily was, from flight nausea, I went down to the hotel’s 24-hour NY-style deli and got some dinner. Not much else happened that evening, except that I watched the Star Trek episode “The Squire of Gothos” with Mark’s accompanying video. We had a big day coming, so it was best to get a good night’s sleep.
Wednesday, July 30
Woke up around 6:00 and got ready for a day at Universal. It took over an hour to get a taxi at the hotel, but we made it to the park a few minutes before it opened. As we passed the CityWalk movie theater, I idly thought that I’d probably have to wait to see Guardians of the Galaxy until Monday when I was back in NYC and rested. We decided to do Hogsmeade first, thinking that the insane line at the new Gringotts ride might be a *little* less intense after a few hours. So off we trekked into the Islands of Adventure park.
I was inordinately charmed by the Dr. Seuss themed area.
And we barely escaped the T-Rex.
And then we arrived at Hogsmeade, which was a little overwhelming, though I’d seen it in pictures already.
But once we caught sight of the castle, I almost cried. For realsies.
I remembered that the ride was supposed to be fairly weight-restrictive, so I tried the seat. The employee at the entrance didn’t seem to think I’d have trouble, though she said I’d have to stow my bag in a locker (which I already knew). It took about 40-50 minutes to get through the line on Forbidden Journey, but the time is not wasted by any means, as you get a little tour of the castle. I’ll link the pics, at least for the castle, in case anyone considers this stuff spoilers, but I couldn’t stop taking pics. At one point there is a video with the Trio and Harry tells Ron and Hermione to stop bickering (my heart!).
Greenhouse
Castle entrance
House mascots — I think the eagle must be on top of this guy's head and I’ve cut it out
House points
Entrance to Dumbledore’s office (password: sugar quills!)
The Fat Lady — Dawn French, not Elizabeth Spriggs
Sorting Hat
Everything you'd expect to be animated is animated, including portraits of the Founders (Godric looks quite Gimli-ish). When we got to the ride itself, another ride operator took me aside and had me try the seat again. I’m not sure what the girl at the entrance had been thinking when I tried the seat before, but perhaps she thought my bag was what was keeping the harness from coming as far down as it needed to. In any case, I was not allowed on the ride and stood at the side while Emily went on. This was not a great moment for me, and I have to admit that I cried a little — not just in disappointment in not getting to experience the ride (the walk through the castle was well worth the time spent in line, actually) but in embarrassment. I now wondered how many other rides I wouldn't be able to ride.
We did Flight of the Hippogriff next, and while it was a tight squeeze in the seat, I marveled that I was able to get on a ride designed fourteen years ago for kids and yet the much newer ride couldn’t accommodate me. I was to have bitter thoughts like this for most of the day.
After flying on the wings of impossible love (fandom in-joke, sorry), we decided to get on the Hogwarts Express and go to the new Diagon Alley extension in the other park. There was no line, but it took ten minutes just to get through the ridiculously long (but empty) queue. I’m tired just thinking about that thing. I can’t even tell you how awesome it is to be able to ride the train — which looks exactly (inside and out) like the train from the movie. I won’t say much about it, except that there are no real windows (only a movie screen that gives the illusion of a window) and that you *definitely* want to ride the train in both directions as the little movies are different each way.
Platform 9 3/4
Platform 9 3/4, with trunks
Platforms 9 and 10
Train — I tried waiting for this woman to move, but she took SEVERAL MINUTES trying to get the Perfect Selfie
A familiar billboard
Departures
The number 12 is so faded you can't even see it in this small a picture.
So Diagon Alley ... is amazing. Hogsmeade is great, but the detail in Diagon Alley is almost too much, down to the magic wall. It didn’t even matter that we didn’t get to the Gringotts ride, because the theming in the shops and restaurants is incredible.
Inside the Leaky Cauldron!
Fish n' chips, and pumpkin juice in a souvenir mug.
And we couldn’t resist having someone take our picture, since we’ve always had such a fondness for cracks. ;-)
And then our photographer, a server at the Cauldron, insisted on a selfie.
After looking around the shops and deciding that no, we didn’t want to wait upwards of four hours to get on the Gringotts ride, we took the train back to the other park to do some non-HP stuff. We did the Jurassic Park boat ride (which, for any Opryland vets, is similar to the Old Mill Scream, only instead of just going up and coming back down, goes through a whole bunch of theming — it also has a safety bar, which the OMS did not). We did the Spider-Man 3D ride, which was pretty cool — I especially loved the details in the Daily Bugle office part of the line and wondered if they regularly updated the calendars in all the cubicles. Then I guess we must have taken the train back to Universal, because the last thing we did before heading back to the hotel for a break was The Mummy ride, which was pretty great and my favorite non-HP ride, even if I didn’t have a clue what was going on.
My feet were dying and I groaned all the way back to the taxi area — which seemed ridiculously far away and I cursed how spread out EVERYTHING in Orlando is. I actually started getting a bit scared at how tired and in pain I was -- I mean, I know I'm older than I used to be, but I'm not THAT old. We made it back to the hotel and passed out for a couple of hours, then woke up to go pick up our LeakyCon badges and such at the registration area (and get our tickets to the event in the park that night). After stowing our bags and swag in the room, we headed back to the convention center, where everyone with a ticket to “Open at the Close” boarded buses to the park for the convention’s exclusive event.
Until the park closed at 10:00pm we were with all the other “Muggles” in the park, and Emily and I did an awful lot of sitting. We started at Diagon Alley — which, like Hogsmeade, is at the back of the park it’s in — but the crowd was ridiculous (thanks in part to the 1500 LeakyCon-ers who had just come into the park). Since the free food for the event wouldn’t be rolled out until 11:30, we grabbed some dinner at the Universal Monsters Cafe, which had cool theming and okay food. After the only real wait we had to endure for the Hogwarts Express (and amusing ourselves with reactions to the news about Orlando Bloom throwing a punch at Justin Bieber — and Beiber’s pathetic comeback attempt on Twitter), we headed back to Hogsmeade and grabbed some (amazingly delicious) frozen butterbeer at the Three Broomsticks and just sat for a while until the sun went down.
We did a lot of sitting that evening, actually, though we did walk around and explore the shops some more. We spotted some familiar faces from the Pemberley Digital series (though Emily saw more of them than I did — I just spotted Mary Kate and Max the once), and I saw from some Twitter pics that the Emma Approved people were there as well (minus Brent Bailey, who was working on a film and flew in just in time for the panels on Friday). When we went to Ollivander’s (the Hogsmeade branch), there was a little wand show and Emily got picked for the demonstration and have a wand choose her. She’d been waffling on whether to get a souvenir wand, but now she HAD to get one. :P I bought a Ginny Weasley wand and couldn’t get over how cool the merchandise bags for Ollivander’s were (though they don’t have much re-use value as they can pretty much only hold a wand box).
I got way too big a kick out of the "Public Conveniences."
Not part of the Gringotts ride, but a "Money Exchange" store, which mostly sold candy coins.
We headed back to Diagon Alley, hoping the crowd was less intense now that the park had closed, which thankfully it was.
It may be too small to see, but that's a Lockhart display in the window.
If you stand close, you can hear the bird chirping inside.
The constipation sensation that's gripping the nation!
We ended up going *back* to Hogsmeade to meet up with another Emily, one of Emily Prime’s LeakyNews cohorts. We went back into Honeydukes and I couldn’t resist the siren call of a Sugar Quill lollipop (Emily got one for herself, as well as one to give to SQ founder Arabella, who we knew we’d be seeing at some point).
I have no idea if I'll ever have the heart to eat this. Maybe for my birthday in a few weeks.
At 11:30, as promised, they started serving food. I wasn’t terribly hungry, as we’d had dinner a few hours before, but we still got some stew and bread. I also got a Scotch Egg (which was not awesome) and a bottle of pumpkin juice. We sat and ate in the Three Broomsticks and went out to get more drinks just before midnight. I know it was just before midnight, because when the clock struck midnight — on July 31 — everyone burst into a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” to Harry and JKR. Maybe my favorite moment of the whole trip.
After getting another round of frozen butterbeer for the road, we got on the Hogwarts Express again (the other Emily hadn’t been on it yet), and thankfully they’d blocked off most of the ridiculously long queue so we didn’t have to do that trek. Emily the Second stayed in the park while Emily Prime and I limped back to where the buses were and went back to the hotel to … basically die. We decided that, for the next day, we’d sleep in and use our second day in the park *just* to try and get on Gringotts.
I wish I’d been able to get a picture of the dragon breathing fire — which it does roughly every 15 minutes — but I never quite caught it in time. Bernie Su (of Pemberley Digital) apparently tried for an hour to get a selfie with the flames in the background.
Thursday, July 31
In retrospect, I think going back to the park on Thursday might have been a mistake. My feet and legs weren’t quite ready to forgive me for the previous day, and they only lasted a couple of hours. The line for Gringotts was “only” three hours, so we decided to brave it. Before getting in line, however, I tried the seat and here again was a ride I wouldn’t be able to get on because Universal hates fat people. I suspect part of my problem is that I’m not only fat but also short, so my flub is in exactly the wrong place for these safety bars/harnesses, but I’m just saying … I never had a single problem getting on a ride the last time I went to Disney.
SO, Emily was going to do single rider, but that would mean she missed the theming bit of the line, which if Forbidden Journey was anything to go by would be incredible. So we both got in the regular line — hey, if I couldn’t ride the ride, at least I could see the Gringotts lobby and Bill Weasley’s office. Well, that didn’t work out either. It was looking promising at first — the line was well-fanned (with fans that spritzed water at regular intervals — and it moved fairly quickly. Until about 90 minutes in. My feet and legs were already telling me to go f*** myself and then we hit a patch where we stood still for 20 minutes. Knowing that this ride had been shutting down for maintenance from time to time during regular park hours, we feared the worst and decided to leave the line. And at this point, Emily couldn't even do single rider because they'd closed the single rider line, so we ended up just leaving. Near exhaustion after just two hours, we had to stop periodically on our way out of the park to sit. We grabbed lunch at Panda Express in CityWalk — another excuse to sit down — and headed back to the hotel to rest up for the beginning of LeakyCon, thinking that after the past couple of days the convention was going to be a nice break.
The line to get into the Opening Ceremonies was insane. Emily and I decided to just snag a couple of comfy chairs in the corridor and follow the back of the line into the main stage room, because once you're past the first twenty rows, it doesn’t matter where you sit. I was not having the best time that evening. I wasn’t feeling the fangirl glee of the opening skit — apparently most of the performers were StarKid (Very Potter Musical) people, and the fact that that’s such a fandom Thing has always mystified me, so I wasn’t into all that and kind of boggled at how excited people were to see them. I did think the use of the DoM doors was clever, and the way they used various characters for the various rooms — the Doctor and Marty McFly for the Time Room, Dumbledore and Sherlock and Captain Picard and Hermione and … I can’t remember who else for the Brain Room, Sam and Dean Winchester having been in the Death Room a bajillion times, etc. But I wasn’t feeling it like everyone else and it made me sad.
After the skit, everyone dispersed and Emily went to meet Meg (“Arabella”) for a drink. In my exhaustion and fangirl un-glee, I went back up to the room, crashed on the bed, and checked the Tumblr app on my phone. And then something happened. My eyes passed over a post where someone said they’d been watching Hannibal on Hulu and this ad popped up.
And I started laughing. That wheezy, can’t-breathe laughter. For like thirty minutes. I made a trip down to the deli to get some dinner and brought it back, still laughing at odd intervals, and much more optimistic about the weekend ahead. Only I could get my groove back by potato cannibalism.
Friday, August 1
This was a day entirely of panels and planning. First up was the Mark Does Stuff panel, where he told stories about readers who don’t understand boundaries, read us the Gurren Jesus fanfic (which he’d read at an NYC event and which has the greatest sentence in the English language — “Hitler, I’m going to kick your ass in the name of the Father, Myself, and the Holy Ghost,” said Jesus.) He also read a chapter of Harry Potter as written by Ayn Rand. An awesome woman named Meg (not Arabella!Meg, but a different Meg who reads Mark's sites and who I remember from the West Wing and Hannibal posts) also brought pie — an orange pie and a strawberry pie, both of which we were to pretend didn’t exist because we would supposedly get in trouble for having non-official food at a con event ... or something, I didn’t quite understand that.
Next was the Pemberley Digital panel with Bernie Su and Alexandra Edwards, which I had thought was going to explore how they developed shows and adapted material, but they didn’t get into that until people asked in the Q&A. It was more a showcase of what they’d done than how they’d done it. Still fun, but not what I was expecting. Next, Emily moderated the “LDB: One Year Later” panel, with Bernie, Alex, Mary Kate Wiles (Lydia Bennett) and Maxwell Glick (Mr. Collins). It was great hearing about how they were going to continue Lydia’s story through the book (since she’s the only character who doesn’t really get a happy ending in the series), and apparently Mr. Collins is a popular character with younger viewers.
Next up was the Emma Approved panel, which Emily was also moderating but which took place on the main stage with the big screens. Way more intimidating and I was very impressed at how Emily held it together, especially meeting all the awesome EA peeps. Joanna Sotomura (Emma), Brent Bailey (Knightley), Dayeanne Hutton (Harriet) and James Brent Isaacs (B. Mart) were all there, and JB is apparently a huge Austen buff. I don’t approve of real-people shipping, but Joanna and Brent — who are dating in real life — were disgustingly adorable. They had recently wrapped production, and some of the cast’s favorite scenes to shoot are coming up in the final few episodes (there will be 72, not counting the Q&A and music videos).
After the EA panel, we stayed in the big room for the Frankenstein M.D. presentation (which included the first two episodes). It looks pretty good so far, and Emily agreed with me that Anna Lore, who plays Victoria Frankenstein, looks an awful lot like
hymnia (with red hair). After this, we grabbed some lunch (again, from the deli) and went back to the hotel room to plan our shipping wars panel for the next day. And somewhere in the middle of that, Emily (as a LeakyNews writer) got the scoop on the forthcoming news about Frank Churchill and how EA planned to reveal The Big Twist in Emma (ship debate in-joke, sorry).Saturday, August 2
I woke up a bit earlier the next morning so that I could get to the “IT RHYMES” Hannibal discussion at 9:00am. I was pleased to note that it actually was a discussion, consisting mostly of the panelists bringing up questions and all of us giving our thoughts, instead of a couple of people talking at us. Things only got tense once, predictably when the issue of Beverly came up. I still have mixed thoughts on this.
I decided none of the next few panels interested me more than simply preparing myself for the ship wars panel, so after lying down for an hour, I did exactly that. I was extremely nervous and Emily and I were both concerned that we would never be able to cover everything we wanted to talk about, even glancingly, in 40 minutes.
We were disappointed that our request for a projector had been forgotten, but VERY pleased to see that we had a full room for our panel. And we actually managed to cover the entirety of our outline. Emily was magnificent, cruising through topics like a pro. I was less magnificent, particularly when it came to boiling the Ms.Scribe story down to a few minutes. I was a bit thrown at learning that only half the room had even heard of her and even more surprised that of those people only three or four had ever heard of Charlotte Lennox, which made our reveal of her true identity a bit anti-climactic. It was kind of hilarious that we couldn’t even get to the end of our presentation before people were asking questions. One asked, predictably, about JKR’s recent statements about whether Harry/Hermione might have been the better choice. Emily assured everyone, to appreciative response, that Rowling did NOT say she wished she’d written Harry/Hermione or that it would have been better in any way. There was also an enthusiastic young girl who I wish had been debating with us back in the day and who we basically had nothing to say in response to except “Rock on, girl!” Emily recorded the whole thing, and I hope we can eventually get it online somehow. I’d very much like to cut it into a video with the slides we made but didn’t get to use.
When our panel ended, SEVERAL people came up to our table to say “THANK YOU” and to tell us how much they enjoyed it. I have a feeling
gloatation and the Ms.Scribe story are going to get some traffic in the near future (if they haven’t already). After the panel, I got to meet Meg -- Arabella!Meg -- who had attended our panel, and that was a pretty big deal to me (even though I’m not an “After the End” enthusiast, I'm still a Quiller). Emily and I headed back to the room, but housekeeping hadn’t been there yet, so we killed some time at the pool before coming back to rest up for the evening’s activities.So ... the Esther Earl Charity Ball. I confess that I had no idea who Esther Earl was prior to about six weeks ago, when Emily told me. I’ve never read The Fault in Our Stars, don’t really care to, and I’d never even heard of John Green (much less that novel) before about a year ago when it showed up on some poll for the Greatest YA Novel of All Time (or something similar). Fandom has certainly moved on, I guess. But it was fun to get dressed up — I even wore my Ravenstag eye shadow from Aromaleigh’s Hannibal-inspired collection. And it was great to see everyone cut loose. At one point, a bunch of beauty pageant contestants who were competing elsewhere in the convention center, gathered outside our ballroom and were dancing to the music.
The ball was fun, even though I couldn’t stay for all of it (my flight left at 6:15am, so I had to be up at like 3:00!). But I have to say that the best part was the half-hour we spent outside the ballroom with Meg, snarking about fandom, and (very) briefly getting to see Melissa, who knew who I was and gave me a hug but didn’t remember meeting me at Lumos (she was right, though, it was an era ago). She graciously (and surreptitiously) gave us all wristbands for the VIP area, so we went back there for a while and eventually saw the arrival of the Pemberley Digital folks. It amused me to no end to see “B. Mart” followed by a harem of young ladies. It helps when you look like the love child of Robert Pattinson and Daniel Radcliffe.
At 11:30 I left and crashed in the room, hoping I could sleep in a hurry and not be too zombified when I had to wake up to leave. Of course, I left packing for the morning, so I ended up shoving everything in my bags (and ended up leaving some swag behind). I had a smooth but uncomfortable trip back, only hitting one snag when we arrived at LaGuardia earlier than expected and had to wait about half and hour for a gate to clear so that we could deboard.
As the taxi took me back to my apartment building, I listened to Ace Frehley's "New York Groove," which put me in the proper mindset to be back home. It was a great trip, and I'm glad I went (and that I had
wahlee_98 as a vacation buddy).Now to start saving for BNAT 16 and the holidays!
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