just got back from a 3 day/3 night parks trip that i desperately needed - Hollywood Studios on Thursday - Epic Universe on Friday - Universal Studios/IoA on Saturday Epic Universe was amazing and even in its limited operation state my family managed to do: - a few hours in Nintendo World seeing characters, exploring and collecting all the stamps/coins/keys/etc with our power bands (got to fight Bowser Jr at the end of the day) and finding all the nooks and crannies where they have hidden activities and games - Mario Kart ride - Donkey Kong ride - Yoshi ride - rode the Frankenstein experiment (only one we did twice) - did the water ride in Isle of Berk - rode Stardust Racers (i rode yellow and my wife went on green) - went on the carousel in Celestial Park - saw the Cirque de Arcanus show in harry potter land and interacted with some of the new magic stuff there - ate/drank at the Burning Blade Tavern and at Pizza Moon (met thread legend @GrantCloud there) - of course a lot of browsing and shopping at different times throughout the day the other two Isle of Berk rides would go down occasionally and Curse of the Werewolf was down most times we checked for it, so we didn’t attempt those or the Ministry ride which was testing a standby line as opposed to virtual queue (we entertained waiting the 2-3 hours for it but decided not to put our kids through that and risk it just shutting down and wasting our time) Access Hollywood was there filming stuff though, so a lot of rides would go down for short bursts because we heard they may have been getting footage of rides so that may have been a part of why things would go offline and back on again in random intervals
But fr the park ruled, we spent A LOT of the time kinda just meandering around and just taking everything in. The only rides we did was -stardust -hiccups wing gliders (honestly mighta been my favorite ride, have a lot of nostalgia with the films and I was pleasantly surprised how immersive the coaster was) -Frankenstein -Mario kart -yoshi Otherwise we spent most of the time eating, also ate at burning blade tavern and pizza moon. Then ate at the restaurant in wizarding world too, all the food was delish and the drinks were great too. Would have liked to do more rides but since it was just soft opened lotta the rides were going down unexpected like once said. Do have a September trip planned so will just make up what we didn’t do last week then.
This is the first time I’ve felt slightly positive about the change. I just hope they don’t cheap out
This overlay helps visualize how it will fit. Looks like it's going to be awesome and well integrated. Plus a walkway from Haunted to Big Thunder will be really nice
opening up the walkway over there is crucial to crowd traffic with how much further theyre gonna expand over there so, this all looks great.
Also, it’s pretty much confirmed that Monster’s Inc: Mike & Sully To The Rescue! will shut down early next year to make room for this. Bummer to see it go since that’s one of my “usually short wait time, I’ll go on to escape the heat” rides. But I’m very intrigued to see how this whole Avatar area plays out