Thursday, June 11, 2009

Time change going West works out pretty well when travelling with teenagers. If you take their preferred 10:00 a.m. wakeup call, that really puts it at 7:00 local time, which isn’t a bad compromise with Eddie and my 5:00 a.m. We managed to compensate for that by staying up LONG past our normal bedtime, so it kind of averages out.

Tuesday was scheduled for Universal Studios. The shuttle picks up at the hotel every 10 minutes throughout the day. After sleeping in a bit, we were breakfasted (at the hotel, since it’s isolated here and we’re without transportation) and ready to go.

A bit about sticker shock. There’s a coffee shop here in the hotel; I thought it was a Starbucks at first, but it’s not – they just use Starbucks Coffee. Two large coffees, with tip, are $9.10. California prices are definitely here! As part of the deal with the hotel, we get 2 breakfasts per room in the buffet. That meant that breakfast for the 8 of us was only $112.00. That was after an $87.00 discount we got with the coupons. The kids thought we were kidding when we told them to eat up because this was the one meal for the day.

Universal is a pretty cool place. It’s enough amusement park to be fun and enough sitting down to keep from exhausting the over-40 crowd. I forgot to wear my pedometer, so I don’t know how much we walked but it easily exceeded 10 miles. The best thing we did after getting into the park was get a wheelchair for Bobbie Jean. There was simply no way she could have walked up and down the hills there. The added bonus, as we’ve learned before, is that wheelchairs go to the front of the line! We tended to get priority seating most everywhere we went, and when she started talking with that southern accent these California people were enthralled.

In Universal, it was once again confirmed that I couldn’t ride roller coasters any more. I did OK on the Mummy themed one, until it suddenly stopped and started to go backwards. I was glad when it was over – so it was a bit surprising when I let myself get talked back onto it again later.

There was another ride themed on the Simpsons – it was a “virtual” roller coaster, which means you only move a little bit but the pictures surrounding you make it seem like you’re actually on the ride. Fortunately, I had the common sense to close my eyes before I tossed my cookies.

As usual, my favorite parts of the parks were the interactive 3-D movie things, although after a while getting water spritzed in your face under the guise of being dragon snot, sweat, or any other variety of things was getting old. They were pretty cool, though.

UNIVERSAL CITY WALK

Universal closes down at 6:00 in the evening, and we’d done all there was by then and were ready to head back. They have, outside the gates, the Universal City Walk which is kind of an open-air shopping mall. Since we’re without substantial transportation of our own, we opted to eat there. The kids picked and all asked about the Hard Rock Café at different times, so that was the decision.

Note to those over 40 – Hard Rock Café can send you into volume and sensory overload as you wait for your food. Even when it’s “a quiet evening”, it’s very loud. And California service is paced very differently than that on the east coast.

Dinner was at 8:30ish – which, with the time difference, meant once again that we were eating close to midnight. By the time we got back all the adults were ready to crash. The boys all went down to the hot tub for a while. Ah, the joys of kids old enough to do some thing on their own!