We’ll be heading home in just a handful or
so of hours from now, and while I’m looking forward to being home again; I don’t
really want the adventure here to end either.
It’s been yet another amazing day! We’ve had awesome weather for our last full
day here, and in addition to doing another round or two of our favorite rides;
we also pretty much covered every show or activity that we hadn’t yet covered
at both parks by the end of the day. We
started the day again with the early admission to the park through Diagon
Alley; met up with Grandma and Grandpa once they got to the park too; and
played together all morning until stopping for lunch in Hogsmeade.
The parents and grandparents were ready for
a break after that, so they took Zack with them and went back to the hotel to
spend the afternoon hanging out around the pool. Michael, Tim, Rowen, and I took the twins,
Naomi, and Aiden with us for the afternoon and went on all of their favorite
rides. We also caught the parade and had
an ice cream snack break at one of the play areas; and eventually went back to
the hotel to meet up with everyone else before going out for dinner at
CityWalk.
Having another ‘real’ meal was great, but
then there was a bit of sad for us when it was time to say goodbye to Grandma
and Grandpa when they were ready to head home.
We won’t see them again until they get home to Witch Falls again, and
that could be as much as two months from now; since they haven’t decided for
sure when they’ll be back – other than that it’ll be before the holiday weekend
in May. We did those goodbyes outside of
the restaurant, and then Michael, Tim, Rowen, and I were set free to go back to
the parks and play until they closed at nine and ten o’clock. The parents and kids were planning on staying
and wandering around CityWalk for a while before going back to the hotel for
the night – and possibly a bedtime swim if the kids weren’t ready to sleep by
then.
We definitely had more fun than they did;
and it was extreme teen play time as we spent that three hours or so blasting
through our favorite rides one more time.
Basically, we started at one end of the Islands of Adventure Park and
worked our way through to the other end of the Universal Studios Park. While the water rides were fun during the
day, we stayed away from them this evening; since being wet all evening wasn’t
something that any of us were interested in; but we were busy enough going on
all of the coasters and other extreme rides.
Getting wet was an option when we went for
a swim after getting back to the hotel.
We checked in with Mom and Dad; said goodnight to Ethan, Ehlana, Naomi,
and Aiden since they were still all together in Mom and Dad’s room while Uncle
Adam and Aunt Leanne were packing for the trip home and keeping things quiet so
that Zack would sleep for them. The pool
time was good, and then the alone time I had with Michael after that was great,
but we also needed to pack to be ready to go home too; so an hours-long
make-out session wasn’t something we could get away with adding to the schedule
without staying up all night.
That was tempting, but we resisted the urge;
and will save up our first boy-girl hotel sleepover for another occasion. Not having an all-night make-out session with
our boyfriends doesn’t mean that Rowen and I haven’t still be up late. She was back in our room by one; we both got
ready for bed; and then got to work on packing up everything for the trip
home. It took a while to do that; though
it wasn’t as tough a job as you might be thinking it would be with all of the
souvenirs and gifts we’ve purchased this week.
Having Grandma and Grandpa here in Florida too had one very nice bonus
for us – they took a lot of our purchases with them over the past two days and
are shipping them to us so that we didn’t need to worry about extra luggage for
our trip home. We only have a few things
with us – like the interactive wands that we were still using today; and a few
gifts that we didn’t want to wait to catch up with us before giving to certain
members of our family or our best friends.
It was going on two by the time we tucked
ourselves in for the night and I got started on my bedtime computing. There was some family business work waiting
for me to deal with; and Rowen fell asleep before I got that done. We’ll need to be up early again to get
checked out and load the vans for the trip back to the airport. Hopefully, we’ll have time for breakfast too;
but we’ll grab something at the airport if we don’t have time to do that
first. We’re going to have another long
travel day, but since we have a relatively early flight; we should still make
it all the way home by late afternoon as long as we don’t have any major delays
along the way.
This is another too-short report to even
come close to covering all of the amazing from today, but I am getting tired
now, and only have time for another nap before we’ll be up and going again; so
that’s going to have to be it for this update.
Every last little detail would just be boring to most Magi reading this
in the future anyway; and the only thing that really matters is that we have
had an amazing adventure this week that I really can, thankfully, remember
forever!
We’ll be getting back to normal life again
by Monday, and that might not sound exciting by comparison to a week at Disney
and Universal during a weather week that was about as perfect as anyone could
hope for; but then ‘normal’ is going to be very special this spring and summer;
so it won’t be boring around home for very long.
That’s a line of thought I can go into more
detail another time, though, and I do need to get some sleep now, so I’m out of
here; and, until next time...
...May the Magi Force be with you!
