Trip Report: Universal's Islands of Adventure (#2)
Orlando, Florida - 11/22/2003

"Don't let me back out of the coasters this time!"

Compared to the previous Sunday, the park was packed. But that is only a comparison. Really, it was a light crowd compared to the park's capacity. We would have to wait in lines, which I didn't have to do a week ago, but our waits would not be long. We breezed through the Port of Entry and turned right. Seuss Landing has changed a bit in a week. Least obviously, the new paint on the CaroSeussEl roof looks good, as does the fresh paint in front of Circus McGurkis' Cafe. Most obviously, the Grinchmas celebration is now in full swing, with decorations worthy of Whoville all over Seuss Landing. I didn't get to demonstrate the interactive fishes in the fishing pond because they were disabled in order to protect the garlands. We took a ride on the CaroSeussEl, which still needs some paint and mechanical attention, then went to see the Cat in the Hat. For the first time in the three rides I've taken on it, I had to wait in a short line. The queue area kind of looks like the front yard of the house that serves as the boarding platform, with lines from the opening of the Cat in the Hat story projected on the walls. Another nice touch at Islands of Adventure...there are water fountains spaced at intervals in the queues. Why don't all parks with long lines do that? Of course, this being Orlando, the water usually has a foul taste to it, but...well, that's Orlando for you. And Universal seems to be doing some filtering...the water in the park is not nearly so foul as the water at the hotel just down the road. Anyway, it's another thing that Universal does that is a nice touch when you are waiting in a long line, not that we were expecting long lines on this trip.

The Cat in the Hat

Cat in the Hat was as usual, with everything still working (yes, Rastus, the clothes racks were working...). The exit is through a Cat in the Hat shop which is stacked full of Cat in the Hat related merchandise, and which I suspect recently got a major infusion of product in anticipation of the forthcoming movie. One neat thing about Islands of Adventure is that in spite of Jurassic Park, the park really is not at all an outlet for Universal's moviemaking operation. The fact that Universal owns it (owned it? How does NBC fit in now?) is kind of incidental. This place is its own little world, not a world of corporate synergy, except, of course, for the Cat in the Hat. And that movie hasn't even been released yet [Footnote 2]. Anyway, the shop is full of Cat in the Hat stuff, and I wondered if Victoria and Mary Jayne were ever going to come out. They did, but took long enough that they missed the chance to say 'hi' to the Cat in the Hat himself out on the midway.

We skipped the spitting fishies and moved directly into the Lost Continent, stopping briefly along the way to watch the Grinch get his photo taken with a couple of kids. For Grinchmas they've come up with a use for the disused ride boarding platform in Seuss Landing: it is the Grinch's lair. I guess going to see the Grinch during Grinchmas is kind of like going to see Santa Claus at the department store during Christmas.

In Lost Continent, we explored the temple of Poseidon's Fury, and this time the final effect worked properly. The show is still a bit silly (in a bad way) in certain spots, but it redeems itself with a couple of truly impressive effects.

After the show, we lost Victoria and Mary Jayne in yet another shop, then others in the group were whining about lunch. We learned that Mythos was not open for lunch, and started investigating other options. Ultimately we ended up at the Enchanted Oak Tavern, where the portions are much larger than most of us wanted. Ultimately I ended up splitting a serving of ribs with my Dad, who found a strategically located table from which he could watch a television located at the bar. The television and the neon signs don't exactly match the decor found elsewhere in the tavern, but we weren't complaining. Except that it was during this meal that Dad got to see the critical football play which enabled Michigan to defeat Ohio State, denying Ohio State a rose-bowl trip once again, at the very least.

Apart from that, what I noticed about the Enchanted Oak is that the food portions are enormous (which mostly makes up for it being outrageously expensive...it's expensive, but you get your money's worth), the food is good, but the walk-up service is chaotic at best. It's a common amusement park food service arrangement. Kings Island uses this configuration for all of its restaurants, something you might call "fast food with class". What I don't understand is why, when this kind of restaurant design has been around at least since the 1920's, amusement park operators still seem to have such a hard time making it work. Orders are taken at the cash register, then a crew assembles the meals behind a counter and distributes them. A limited menu should smplify things, as should the thoughtfuly designed customer traffic pattern. So why is it that behind the final service counter appears to be total chaos, with lots of people tripping over one another, and orders getting scrambled? That, of course, resulted in long waits, which became longer waits as problems were fixed. I don't know what they were doing, but it sure seemed like the whole operation was way more complicated than it needed to be.

The real inefficiency at IOA, though, is across the midway. With a larger crowd than the park had a week ago, Dueling Dragons was again running only one pair of trains. Well, that's not entirely true. After we had waited about 40 minutes, and just before we boarded the Fire Dragon, they finally decided to add another pair. Potentially the highest capacity coaster on the planet, and it has the longest wait in the park. I don't understand it. Adding the second pair of trains would have made the wait tolerable for another ride, and they did have the reride door/chicken chute open. But for my non-coaster-nut companions, a ride on Ice Dragon was out of the question, in part because we had waited so long for Fire.

Oh, well. I think everyone was impressed, though. We exited through yet another gift shop, and I amused myself by taking pictures of the kids climbing all over the "roots" in front of the Enchanted Oak tavern, right over the "Please Do Not Climb" sign. An old wizard was wandering about, he also seemed mildly amused by this. I was not so amused by the somewhat older kids who were rooting around in the brush underneath the Flying Unicorn coaster. They weren't actually in a 'kill zone' but they did have to jump fences to get in there. Is it me, or has something shaved some IQ points off of the customers today?

We took a ride on the Flying Unicorn and headed off into Jurassic Park. As we did so, I pointed out the integration of the CaroSeussEl into the Lost Continent to Scott, then apparently failed to snap a photograph of it myself. Next on our agenda was the Jurassic Park River Adventure, which left us only a little wet. It was tea-time, and we were informed via cell phone that Dave and John had finally arrived in the park, so we all agreed to meet at the restaurant across from the river ride. I forget what it is called, but it has the look of a snack bar in a natural history museum, with lots of
gunite, glass, greenery, and stained wood beams.

Here, having been completely denied in my quest for a frozen Coke, I opted for a milkshake. What I found was the same type of food service operation as in the Enchanted Oak, with several queues feeding cash registers ahead of a service counter. It was complicated a little in that because this is the off-season, each regiser was serving two queues. But that didn't matter, as people were still being sent to the counter faster than their orders could come up. Again, I don't know what the delay was, but from the time the order ahead of me was delivered until my milkshake came out was about three minutes. Three minutes to read the order, grab a cup, dispense brown goo into the cup, and present it at the counter. The place was certainly not understaffed, in fact people seemed to be bumping into and tripping over each other. But service was taking forever, and there was no readily apparent reason for it. I think Universal seriously needs to re-examine their food service operations, but quite frankly I'm baffled as to what the real problem is, or I'd offer suggestions.

The milkshake was probably the worst thing I ate at a park on this trip. Oh, not because there was anything wrong with it, but because unlike almost everything else I got at a park there was absolutely nothing unusual, interesting, or remarkable about it. It was frozen chocolate goo squeezed into a plastic tumbler, probably not even real ice cream. Just an ordinary fast-food style milkshake. Perfectly OK, but a poor substitute for the frozen Coke I really wanted. But the break let us meet up with Dave and John. Finishing the tour, then, our group would consist of Dave, Victoria, Dave, Scott, Mary Jayne, Dave and John.

Finishing the tour meant taking a walk through Toon Lagoon. None of us really wanted to get drenched, so we skipped Dudley Do-Right's Ripsaw Falls, the only ride in the park with airtime. We did say hello to Bullwinkle, but generally passed through quickly to Spiderman. This time we had to wait in line, and I got to learn more of the back-story. I wouldn't mind having some of the motivational posters hanging on the walls at the Daily Bugle, with such inspirational phrases as, "At deadline you may hand in your story or your resignation. It's your choice." Almost as good as the stuff that comes out of despair.com :-(. The ride is still amazing, and on my third or fourth ride of the week, I know there is still a lot of stuff in there that I have not seen. It's easy to see why this is the park's showcase attraction. Okay, now that I have ridden Top Thrill Dragster I can say for certain that it doesn't feel anything like a 400-foot fall. But it's pretty impressive anyway. I know pretty much how all the stunts work in it, and I am still impressed.

Down the road we approached the Incredible Hulk, and three of us...Victoria, Scott, and me...took a ride while the rest of the group had a cup of coffee at the Cafe 4.

Last weekend I rode Hulk, and thought it seemed rather pokey. This time it had picked up quite a lot of speed. Unfortunately that's not all it picked up. It also gained quite a lot of violence, including several Batman: Knight Flight-type moments where I got battered back and forth on what appeared to be straight track. The ride was running faster, but one ride gave me a pummelling that I did not appreciate. Ouch! I think Hulk has earned a spot along with Kumba on the list of Coasters that Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Need To Lose Their Shoulder Bars. When I got off, I was sore.

We re-grouped, and soon decided we were done with the park. Food is important to this bunch, and the decision was made to head out for dinner, stopping on the way out to collect the mountain of stuff the ladies had bought at shops all over the park. It occurred to me that the package pick-up really ought to be out at the parking garages instead of in the Port of Entry. Perhaps in the circular structure located between the parking garages would be a good place. As it is, we had quite a lot of stuff to haul through a half-mile of Citywalk and back to our cars.

It was an interesting trip to Islands of Adventure, and a good way to see the park in a somewhat different light. The people I visited the park with are not coaster nuts, and we took the park at a different pace, and noticed different details about the park than I normally would. I still think that for the admission price, the park is seriously lacking. What they have is generally good, and is very well done. There are some interesting issues surrounding food service, which seems to be a perennial problem at a lot of parks, and it does seem odd that operations on Dueling Dragons are substandard compared to every other attraction in the park. The park is lacking in total attraction capacity, though the attractions they do have are pretty good people-munchers, except for Dueling Dragons which, at about 640 PPH, was the lowest capacity operating ride in the park [Footnote 3]. I like the park, but I remain convinced that it is far from the best park out there, and it is no where near what the hype promised on r.r-c when it was under construction. But then, that was to be expected. It's unfortunate that my 2003 roller coaster season had to end with a bad ride on Hulk, which I thougt was a good coaster. But I remember years when I took my last coaster ride in August, so to get an extra three months out of the season I really can't complain.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Footnote 1: "Every Person Comes Out Tired" [Return to text]

Footnote 2: It has by now, of course, but it came out right after my most recent visit to IOA. [Return to text]

Footnote 3: Pteranodon Flyers was down for seasonal rehab. [Return to text]

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