Orlando, Florida

Humidity, Harry Potter and heat rash: these are just some of the things I discovered in Orlando. I landed in the airport and soon met up with Lucy and Matt. We bussed to our hostel – insanely good value! We paid $25 each for two nights at a motel of decent quality with a pool and free breakfast. On the downside, it was 35 degrees and humid as all hell, and basically stayed that way till Tuesday afternoon, when it released a good few hours of drenching rain.

I spent Monday in a murky state of jet lag. Not much fun. I’m still not hungry at the right times, though I somehow managed to sleep twelve full hours last night. The others went in the pool while I read in the shade and attempted not to black out with exhaustion. From the patchy red burns on the feet, it appears that I mustn’t have successfully avoided all sun.

Today we went to the Islands of Adventure theme park, home to Harry Potter World. We got there ten minutes after the park opened, and the queue for the Hogwarts Castle ride was already 120 minutes long. Lucy kept our place while Matt and I bought some butterbeer(!) in special novelty mugs(!). Mine was $10.50(!!!) That’s more than I paid for my dinner (at TGI Friday, where the waiters really care about your well-being and bring you home remedies for hiccoughs). But that’s okay, because the mug is totally awesome. I shall send it home to Mel. The butterbeer itself was delicious – for the first few mouthfuls. Then it was sickening. Might have had something to do with the obscene heat, and the fact that it tasted like 98 per cent sugar.


Anyway, during our many excruciating, humid hours waiting in the queue, I got really freaked out by all the signs attempting to deter pregnant people and dizzy midgets from riding. Some unhelpful person told me that the ride was like a rollercoaster; the second person I asked told me it was a simulation ride. So I cheered up.

The ride turned out to be pretty cool. It was by far the best simulation ride I’ve ever been on. You sit down on in a set of seats that move along a track, then get elevated and start going crazy. There was a ‘mini-adventure’ involving Aragog-type spiders, Dementors (for no reason), the chamber of secrets (for even less reason), and a really awkward ‘celebratory feast’ type moment. Pretty much what you’d expect. I screamed a lot. We went on it four times. Awesome.

Hogsmeade was amazing! There were all the shops mentioned in the books (though some were from Diagon Alley – naughty!) as well as a few others, like ‘___ Maestro’s Music Shop’. A lot were just shopfronts, but they had stuff moving in the windows – very cool. Zonko’s was pretty sweet, with Extendable Ears, U-No-Poo and Filibuster’s No Heat, Wet Starts Fireworks. Honeydukes wasn’t as cool as I expected – fairly standard sweet shop with a couple of unimaginative vaguely Harry Potter labels. Olivanders was frankly crap. Kind of hilariously bad. This creepy old man (presumably Olivander, though he seemed to have gotten over all that torture fairly well) got a young child ‘volunteer’ to test wands, and then imparted wand lore wisdom of an uninspired variety.



There were a couple more rides – the Flight of the Hippogriff and the Dragon Challenge – but I didn’t go on either, as they’re rollercoasters. No thanks. Also, the Dragon Challenge was closed. Lucy cried. She’s crazy. She went on this upside down rollercoaster of high-speed variety: insane. I went on some awesome rides, don’t get me wrong. Most were in the Dr Seuss World, and most were intended for three year olds, but I greatly enjoyed them. There was also a Jurassic Park World, a Toon World with a water-rafting ride, and a Superhero World. The water-rafting ride was great while the sun stayed out. You got completely soaked. We also got completely soaked when we started getting pelted with gigantic raindrops. This continued for the next three hours, during which we were mostly outside in various queues. Wonderful. We gave up on attempting to be dry right from the start due to the lingering heat, but this turned out to be a really sucky idea whenever we went indoors and got blasted with crazy air-con.

It was a fun day. I have an intensely interesting tan on twenty centimetres of my leg, starting at sock level and ending at leggings height. Very attractive. And it’s more of a burn than a tan. And I’ve developed a strange rash on my inner elbow and shoulder. On the plus side, Harry Potter World was totally awesome and I ate a free banana this morning.