The States, Part I
Sat 04 February 2017I’ve split the part about Universal Studios into it’s own post.
We’ve had a great few first days, making the most of being able to ask people proper questions about where/how to do things. Hooray for English!
On the first day we went to a shopping mall, but there wasn’t much there for us, just lots of weird fancy clothing brands, so we came back and played minigolf (Laura totally destroyed me). The road we ended up on was pretty cool, there are lots of interesting things, and a bus that takes you up and down it as far as you want for $2. Extremely touristy, but we are tourists, I suppose!
The second day we went to NASA out on Cape Canaveral, which was really cool, we even did a simulated space shuttle launch (All the legal warnings beforehand made me a bit scared but it wasn’t too bad). It was really great wandering round learning about all sorts of spacey things - I know a lot more space history than I did before. It was crazy walking up to real rockets, and just seeing the scale of them - humongous! And seeing the rocket mover was cool too - built on such a huge scale but very delicate, so it doesn’t bounce too much (of course the roads it goes on are all specially graded too).
The next day we weren’t sure what to do so I convinced Laura to go to Aquatica (it’s not quite warm enough to be good water park weather, but it did warm up through the day). Aquatica was all Kiwi themed with lots of colourful kiwis everywhere, and all the rides had Māori names (like whānau falls). The only problem was that the voice person they used for the whole park was Aussie, so it sounded totally wrong. But they had a really good wave pool that made proper 2 meter swells, and rides were really good. One went though a dolphin aquarium, which was very cool - Laura missed the dolphins the first few times because she looked the wrong way!
We went to WonderWorks which was pretty fun, it’s just a place with lots of sciency/fun things, like a bed of nails and tesla coils. We also did laser tag and a ropes course, where I was very brave and did nearly all of them (with Laura helping me of course). In the afternoon we just sat round the pool and read our books.
We’re both excited for tomorrow, our first day at Universal! And breakfast at the Leaky Cauldron! Laura’s been planning out the fastest route for us to run to the entrance to Diagon Alley.
Stay tuned for part II - Univeral Studios