My Epic Universal Studios Birthday Trip

Hi, everyone! April here (aka Andie as you probably know me as). As stated on my Goddess blog and on my travel page, I am a travel agent, so in this blog, I will be talking about travel, particularly, trips I have taken, starting with my epic Universal Studios Birthday Trip.

My most recent trip (and the reason for my absence last week) was to Universal Studios in Orlando. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on my blog (usually there’s limited space), but I am a huge Harry Potter fan, so I set up a Harry Potter trip to Universal.

Yep, that’s me and my friend Carol who went on the trip with me in front of the Hogwarts Express. Actually, it was taken in front of a green screen, and the background was superimposed later, but still, I thought it was pretty neat.

I’m still waiting on most of the pictures from the trip, but hopefully, I will have access to those soon. In the meantime, I just want to give you an overview of the trip, and then I will go into more detail in subsequent posts.

We had the following itinerary for our trip:

Saturday, November 20

Fly out to Orlando. I flew out from Los Angeles, but Carol is an old friend from when I was living in Pennsylvania, so she flew out separately, and we met in Orlando. We ordered room service and went online for virtual karaoke.

Sunday, November 21

Private VIP tour of Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure parks. I have to say, this was my favorite of everything with did–everything we did afterwards paled in comparison. The next post on my travel blog will focus on this day.

Monday, November 22

Manatee boat tour and swim. This was very nice, but far from my favorite experience. I’m a bit of a baby when it comes to swimming anywhere that’s not a swimming pool, and that water was really cold. Plus, I had jet lag really bad by this point. I sort of powered through on the 21st because I was so excited about the trip, and since it was my birthday, but exhaustion sort of caught up with me by this point. More to follow on this adventure.

Tuesday, November 23

So, there were some mixups with the schedule for this day. This was supposed to be Disney Animal Kingdom, but I realized the week before the trip that Disney and the Manatee tour were double booked for Wednesday. I’ll get to that more on my blog post on Disney, but I was able to move the Manatee tour to Monday, which ultimately left this day open. We went to the parks, and it was ultimately a rough morning before we headed back to the hotel, and I completely crashed–jet lag had finally caught up with me. We went back to the park in the evening, which was a bit better.

Wednesday, November 24

Harry Potter Breakfast at Three Broomsticks & Disney Animal Kingdom. Honestly? I hated it–Disney, not the Harry Potter breakfast. I cannot recommend Disney at all at this point, but more on that when I get to the Disney post. The breakfast was amazing, but more on that in another post.

Thursday, November 25

Harry Potter breakfast at The Leaky Cauldron (amazing), photo shoot at Shutterbuttons (see photo above–there is also a video. Once I obtain the online link I can share it here, but I do not have that yet), and the parks. Overall, this was a good day. Although the day before I was ready to leave early to go home, I wished I could stay longer after this day. More on this later.

AprilCoxTravel & Freelance