Vacation Day One – All Aboard the Hogwart’s Express

It’s amazing how easy the drive to the airport is at 4:30 in the morning. We managed to get a full row, plus the aisle seat across from that row, so all of us got to sit together (gotta love boarding card A30 on Southwest). The flight was pretty uneventful. We had a brief stopover in St. Louis, during which Mikaela got to go up front and visit the cockpit – a rare treat these days that appears to only be available during those times when the plane is on the ground, passengers are not in the process of boarding, and passengers currently on the plane are not in the process of deplaning. We even landed in Orlando a bit early.

We picked up our rental car and headed for the Hard Rock Hotel (thank you GPS). We got there around 12:30 p.m. Our room wasn’t ready yet, but we were all starving anyway, so decided to get lunch there at the hotel at The Kitchen restaurant. The decor was fun, and our waitress was friendly and attentive. The kids got a kick out of ordering from the kids’ menu printed on a kid-sized oven mitt. They both chose the Mac & Cheese. Unfortunately, the kitchen at The Kitchen was one of the slowest I’ve ever encountered. In the time it took to get two starving kids their lunches, they could’ve made both the macaroni and the cheese from the raw ingredients. I had a crab cake sandwich and Miriam had a turkey sandwich. My sandwich showed up without the remoulade the was supposed to accompany it, and I was in no mood to wait for it. All of our meals were OK, but hardly worth the wait.

Our rooms still weren’t ready after lunch, so we checked our bags with the desk and headed to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter. We got there at about 2:30 p.m., and it was HOT. I was nervous about what the crowd would look like on a Friday afternoon, but it really wasn’t too bad. On the way in, we stopped for a picture with the Hogwart’s Express and its conductor. You can see from the picture just how intense the sun was – it was so bright that photographer me didn’t even notice that I was cropping the shot tighter than I should have, and leaving out distinguishing marks of the train. Jonathan refused to get out of his stroller (which he quickly began referring to as his “rollercoaster”) to have his picture taken with the conductor. It quickly became apparent that, for this day at least, it was all sensory overload for him. He was just going to sit back, observe, and absorb it all.

Introductory picture out of the way, we headed for the thing Mikaela had been most looking forward to – Ollivander’s Wand Shop. Ollivander’s is actually a small, brief, show. Ollivander’s presents several touring challenges. First, only 20 guests get in at a time, so the line is ALWAYS long. Second, even after you get into the shop, only ONE guest gets to have a wand choose them. Third, there is very little shade along the line, and as I mentioned, it was HOT. Our strategy was to get into that line immediately.

If Mikaela didn’t get chosen the first time through, we figured we could just keep going through the line until she got her chance. Of course, we also did our best to improve her chances of being chosen, but more on that in a moment. Miriam, Mikaela, and Jonathan got into the Ollivander’s line and I dashed off to get some butterbeer to keep them cool. I went with the frozen version to help combat the heat (and because the non-frozen butterbeer – according to the bartender – can’t be drunk with a straw, it keeps fizzing out of the straw once you draw it through).

To my relief, no one objected to me rejoining the family in the line when I came back with the butterbeers (I made a point of asking those around us). The last portion of the line before entering the shop runs along the side of the shop, and in late afternoon actually offered a bit of shade. We took advantage of this and pulled Mikaela’s Hogwart’s robes (complete with tie) out of our park bag. She put them on, and when we entered the shop she really did look the part of a new Hogwart’s student. I located Mr. Ollivander in the shop, and quickly maneuvered Mikaela so that she would be in his line of sight. Sure enough, when the door closed and Mr. Ollivander asked for a volunteer, he invited Mikaela to the front as soon as her hand went up.

After Ollivander’s, Jonathan and Miriam decided to do some walking around and shopping while Mikaela and I tried to get in a couple of rides. Mikaela wasn’t quite ready to try Dragon Challenge, so we went first to Flight of the Hippogriff. This was also our first experience with Express Pass. Express Pass ROCKS. We walked straight past a 30-45 minute queue and almost directly onto the ride. It’s a pretty basic rollercoaster, but was a good introduction to amusement park rides for Mikaela, who hadn’t been on anything bigger than what’s at Nick Universe inside Mall of America before. After Flight of the Hippogriff came the big question – we were all pretty tired and it had been a long day. We were planning on coming back the next day anyway. Did Mikaela want to go on Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey now, or wait for tomorrow morning? After a couple of minutes of consternation about the posted 60 minute wait time, we decided to go for it.

The queue is beautifully themed, and made the wait go quickly. It was fun identifying the various things we saw – from talking paintings of headmasters, arguing amongst themselves, to the Sorting Hat to plants in Professor Sprout’s greenhouse. The ride itself was fabulous, and I actually bought the on-ride photo, because the look on Mikaela’s face is priceless:

She was very quiet as we got off the ride, and didn’t even say much as we went through Filch’s Emporium, through which you exit. But as soon as we were outside again, she exclaimed (completely unbidden), “That. Was. AWESOME!!!!!”

After the ride, we were all fading pretty hard from the heat and the long travel day. So we headed to the Three Broomsticks for dinner by 5 p.m. The theming in the restaurant is cool – if you watch carefully, you can even catch house elf shadows darting around here and there. The food was OK, but we really weren’t up for eating all that much at that point. We had planned on getting the Feast and sharing, but we weren’t hungry enough to make that worthwhile. Instead, the kids got chicken legs, Miriam got a salad, and I had the Cornish pasties. One bit of advice – skip the Pumpkin Fizz. Butterbeer was excellent, but pumpkin fizz was downright vile.