Today was our Universal day. After a couple of calls with work, we were on the road by about twenty to nine, and despite heavy traffic in some places we were waiting at the gates to purchase our tickets by a few minutes past ten, which was when the park opened.
The first thing we did was to head over to the backlot tour. We walked straight on to a tram, and thoroughly enjoyed the tour, which lasts for about 45 minutes. Interesting to see all the new sets that have been built, and are now very nearly finished, after the 2008 fire, albeit obviously sad that the BTTF courthouse square was lost in the blaze. McFly nerd that I am I excited to see the Lyon Estates gates - at least a little something has survived.
The tour is a mixture of real sets that have been, and are used for filming, and some set pieces there for the tourists (Jaws, Earthquake, Mummy effects). At one point our guide had to turn his microphone off because we weed going past a soundstage where a CSI episode was currently being filmed, and we weren't able to go down Wisteria Lane - there was a security guard at the end of it along with some "closed set" bollards. Nicky was a mixture of disappointed that we didn't get to see more of the set and excited that filming was happening just around the corner.
After the backlot tour we queued up for the Simpsons ride. Jake loved it. I survived despite my dislike of simulator rides. As always full of sharp Simpsons humour.
After a break for coffee and a pastry we went and found the Shrek 4D show. I had seen it before at Universal in Florida, but last time we went there Jake was only 3 or 4 and he got into the pre show area (after a wait of an hour or so) so Nicky had to take him outside. This time we all managed to see it (Jake had seen the film sans the 4th D bit as it is an extra on one of the Shrek DVDs!).
We came out of the show and enjoyed wandering around the park and enjoying the scenery for a while before getting to the 2pm showing of the Animal Actors show. Exciting news - Jake was picked to be a volunteer for the canine actors part of the show and was up on stage for about 5 minutes. Our cameras went into meltdown, and he absolutely loved every minute of it - superb!
Afterwards we went to the lower lot area of the park (the studios are on a pretty steep hillside and so this involved going down 4 fairly long escalators). I did the Mummy coaster ( backwards and forwards in the dark, Mummy effects, no inversions), we had a look at the archive displays, and we saw Beetljuice, Wolfman et al, but other than the Jurassic Park river adventure, which none of us fancied, there wasn't much else at that end of the park, so we came back up to the top and went and found the Waterworld stunt show
Show was fantastic. We were in the first row after the splash zone. Still got a little bit wet, but it was really hot today so didn't exactly matter. After a look at the studio store we headed out of the park and spent some time in the City Walk area, including dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe before coming back to the hotel.
Plan is for a later start tomorrow, possibly heading into the Disney parks for a while.
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