Southern Belles: Universal, Walkers, and Loving on Cousins

Our New York trip was canceled last year due to covid, so our plane tickets were ready to be used.  New York didn’t seem like much fun, so Natali decided to go to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina (She only has three states left now!).  We got to Orlando, rented the car and met the Dame’s at our hotel.  I have missed those cute little faces and we felt privileged to be the first members of the family to meet Winston in person.  

 

We got up early and used our early entrance passes to get Natali on the Hagrid’s Ride.  Natali rode rides with Keeley while I wandered with Spencer and the kids (neither of us do rides).  It was fun to go on some of the little rides with Kenzie – she would laugh at me being nervous about getting sick.  I loved the Doctor Seuss area with their wonky palm trees (Spencer said they had them shipped in from over seas after their growth was permanently damaged due to a hurricane - so cool).  Winston had to eat in silence and Keeley had to pump every three hours, so Natali and I still had lots of time together seeing the intricacies of Harry Potter World and actually meeting up with the Walker family.  

 

We jumped in line with them – shhh- for the Hagrid’s Ride.  It was Natali’s favorite ride, so I decided to be brave and try it.  I rode with Heather and she laughed through the whole thing; I think the laughing took the edge off.  I made it without headache or nausea (could be that the herbal patches actually helped) but I couldn’t do any other rides for quite a while.  But after that I was more willing to try rides.  I learned I didn’t love the ones with screens, but I could always close my eyes or take off the 3D glasses if they got too intense.

 

We had a fabulous Greek lunch, enjoyed frozen and hot butterbeer (hot is definitely best) and had my personal favorite, pumpkin juice.  We also stopped for milkshakes at the cholate emporium – oh yummy – good thing we shared that.  

 

As the day warmed up, we decided to cool off by trying one of the water rides.  Well, the Popeye ride looked fun, so we hopped on expecting to get a little wet; when the ride was over we were absolutely drenched head to toe.  We felt bad that Keeley was wearing tennis shoes.  My overalls were so full of water they were 3 or more inches longer than previously.  It took us hours, but we did finally dry off; consequently, we weren’t ever hot again that day.

We stayed till closing time and then enjoyed an Italian dinner and our feet thanked us when we finally got off of them for the night.