So remember this post from about a month and a half ago where I talk about my hopes of getting on to VelociCoaster before the end of my annual pass? Well I went to Islands of Adventure but my fat butt is still not ready for the VelociCoaster. Instead, I was happy to receive second prize: my first ever ride on Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Man that's a mouthful... I'll forever just refer to it as Hagrid's now.
The ride has two unique seating positions for each "car." One on the rider seat of a fake motorcycle and the other to the left of that in the sidecar. You'd think the sidecar would be roomier for persons of fluffy sizes like myself, but no, it's the motorcycle riders seat that's more accommodating and it was the only one of the two that I could fit on. Fair enough, it was a great ride and having only a lap restraint, it felt very freeing. The ride can kick some butt in the speed department, and there's a few surprises like a part where the track ends as you're going up a lift hill and you're zoomed backwards for quite a while, then the train enters in this dark area and suddenly you're dropping right through the floor onto another set of tracks? I don't know it's just crazy. I loved it.
Now the ultimate question... is it better than the roller coaster it replaced? Namely Dueling Dragons later re-themed as Dragon Challenge under the Harry Potter IP. Sadly, no.
Hagrid's fast by nature of its powered tracks. It never gets really very high and I almost wonder if any of the speed was achieved by way of gravity at all. No inversions, no traditional lift hill, ultra-smooth track, I almost wonder if some purists debate whether this is an actual roller coaster. I mean it's an adult ride, mainly because of the thrills I mentioned above, so it's not a kiddie coaster like its neighbor Flight of the Hippogriff, but it's no Dueling Dragons. What's more it went really quick. I mean the total ride time. If it was over 3 minutes I'd be really surprised. Let me check...it says 3 minutes 25 seconds. Hmm, okay, well it feels like less. Probably because there are parts of the ride where you slow down and listen to Hagrid as he's narrating what we're looking at like this big creature with a burning butthole I don't know how else to describe it and at the end when we were doting over a beautiful mommy and baby unicorn, awww, LOL!
Like it's predecessor, the queue winds through the rock-walled caverns beneath the main castle ruins. The same castle, of course, from Dueling Dragons, albeit devoid of all the catacomb skulls they removed once the HP theming went in during the Dragon Challenge years. (By the way, I noticed as I walked by the signage in front of the Skull Island attraction in Jurassic Park that I think several of the skulls from the former Dueling Dragons queue were repurposed here, they look exactly as they did so I figure it must be from there.)
Unlike last time I was here, the weather was absolutely perfect. Mid-70s, almost cloudless skies, low humidity, it was gorgeous. But my body wasn't cooperating. I was having quite the time just trying to make the circuit of the park. After the amount of walking I did during my last travel adventure in Washington and Philly, I thought for sure my walking ability would be much improved over the last time I came to IOA. Not so. It's like I regressed a bit.
Now my weight is up a little bit from a couple weeks ago. I'm back to 291 instead of 287. Maybe that had something to do with it. But I also was very dizzy and light-headed and short of breath. Not sure what else is going on.
I left the park around 5:00 or so. I only had one Confisco margarita at the Backwater Bar, made a single, and rare, counterclockwise walk through, stopping at my one ride, Hagrid's, standing in line for about an hour and a half queue. Did the ride have a single riders line? I only thought of it after I already entered the general queue, but it does make sense since if you're a party of three a single rider is going to be needed to match up with the third person. Oh well. Single rider lines usually miss much of the pre-ride queue atmosphere and though I knew what to expect since I've been on the predecessor coasters countless times, I wanted to confirm what had been changed with this newest iteration.
By the way I'm no Grammar Nazi but I'm looking at the previous paragraph and thinking it has absolutely no congruity. Sorry about that. But I'm also struggling with this speech to text software that is pretty freaking lame, pretending to not understand certain words I'm saying, and inappropriately capitalizing non-capitalized words. The struggles of an old fashioned blogger in the year 2023.
On my way to my Avanti Palms Resort booked stay I wanted to lighten the financial load of this trip a tad by getting some munchies for the hotel room so I thought it would be fun to go a little bit out of the way and visit the Publix that I used to shop at back in the day when I lived at Park Central from about 1999 to 2003.
Of course the inside looked nothing like what I remember. Well it's been 20 years of course I'm sure Publix has updated the interior at least a couple times over these years. It looks exactly like the model of Publix that we have here in Sebring south of Lake Jackson, the Publix of my memory was a model similar to the Publix I regularly shop at Fairmont Plaza. Old and moldy. And nasty suspended ceilings. And well worn buffed linoleum. And the tiniest produce section you've ever seen in a supermarket. How many varieties of oranges even though this is the fucking orange state? Maybe two they don't have room for more. But I digress like the South Sebring branch, this Park Central branch had room for many varieties of fruits and veggies. And being the Fufu Style store, it also had your multi-variety cheeses, your charcuterie boards or whatever the fuck you call it, and of course your inflated fucking prices. But again I digress. Oh, but what I was really looking to see a change in is the demographic of patrons. As I suspected, full on fucking Planet of the Apes now. South Orlando, got to love it. But they were more bougie than back in the day, so there's that. Still, I wasn't going to chance anything by buying any packages of ramen.
But I still had criticism of what looked to be the only white employee there, the person bagging my items tied the plastic bag handles together in a knot. I sneered at him and complained about what he did but instead he just proudly said "stuff's not going anywhere." No one heard me be snippy with him, I guess, otherwise somebody might have been up in my face about berating the mentally challenged.
After grabbing some provisions of food stamp provided sandwich fixin's and Capital One MasterCard provided PBR and Modelo, I commanded Hulk to whisk me away from dirty South Orlando to even dirtier International Drive. My how I've grown to hate cities.
After a bit of rest in my hotel room, and watching Office Space (for the billionth time) on HBO no you had it right that was supposed to be capitalized, it's a movie. Fixed it for you. No I said fixed it for ya. I guess you don't understand American slang either okay fine. Reader is probably totally perplexed. Just fighting with my software again. Anyway back to what I was saying, after the movie I decided to imitate my last traveling habit and walk to the nearby well known chain restaurant for a drink or two. This time round: Applebee's!
Had two large Goose Island IPAs in these funky two-handled mugs that seem to be a signature Applebee's feature, and an appetizer called Wonton Chicken Tacos. Four little pockets made out of fried wonton, folded into a taco shape and filled with Asian style chicken bits with a sweet chili sauce and coleslaw. Sounds weird I know but they were actually really good.
Being a Monday night, I would expect for an Applebee's franchise smack dab on International Drive in Orlando, that the staff there would have considered this just a mildly busy night yet one cursory glance informed me that there were about 50 more people than the half dozen or so that were in the equally-sized Ruby Tuesday's in Maryland a couple weeks ago when both bartenders on each of those nights were wiping sweat off their brow saying that they were "swamped." Well I guess a suburb of Baltimore in the middle of nowhere except the nearby airport and one of the busiest tourist corridors in the freaking world would have different definitions of what busy means LOL.
I was supposed to stay two nights but when I woke up Tuesday morning, today, I just wasn't feeling it. I mean the weather again was absolutely gorgeous but I was already feeling my social anxieties building. And the bad version of that where I start to get snotty with people just because they're irritating me. And I'm not sure how you can avoid people at a theme park.
So I'm back home now where I think I'll stay for a bit. I don't expect any new travelogues in the near future. So I guess I'll let the pass expire in November and consider my ride on Hagrid's to be my crowning achievement of the year. Woohoo!