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Day 3 – Adventure Land »

Ants and I had 10 hours sleep last night. It was much needed.

Our hotel room

View of the toilets, which have 6Litres of water in them!
Instead of the flush we’re used to, they suck then refill. Very weird.

We repacked our bags because today we have to send one of them off to our friend in a place called Ben Lommond (2 hours south of San Francisco). He is going to be picking us up at the end of our Contiki tour, and taking us to Sacramento for Ants’s geek tournament. We had to do this, because we can only take 1x 20kg (or 1 bag) each on the Contiki tour, so we have to get our stuff to San Fran somehow. We FedEx’d it for $25 which was pretty good. We thought it would be more.

While walking back from the FedEx shop, we saw some filming going on. Wish we knew what it was for.

We headed toward the metro, brought a $5 day pass each, and went back to Universal Studios.

The first thing we did was go on the Studio Backlot Tour, (link is of full tour at a fansite) and our City Pass allowed us onto the front carriage before others got on. We saw:

- Timeline Drive, showing a lot of posters of past films
– Fire Station 51, the working fire station that is also used for filming.
– The Front Lot (35 soundstages) – huge and lots of them. They all display posters of what is being filmed inside.

- Production Bungalows, where there are writers houses for when they needed to stay on-lot to do their writing. This particular Bungalow belonged to Alfred Hitchcock – the silhouette is right beside the house number 5195

- Metropolitan Area including New York Street, Brownstone Street, and Courthouse Square

- The old rickety bridge which has been used in numerous tv and films but most notably from a MacGyver episode.

- Transport Unit: past cars tucks and tanks that featured in several different movies (click here for all the cars we saw – I didn’t get very good pictures of the most of them)

DUSENBERG from The Mummy Returns

- ORANGE JULIUS’ MAZDA RX-7
– SLAP JACK’S TOYOTA SUPRA

- The Fast and the Furious Extreme Closeup; a display of two cars on contraptions that can make the cars to whatever is programmed in. Click here for more photos

[video to come]

- Jurassic Park set with spitting (water) dinosaurs and crushed cars

- A flooding Mexican village

- Mexican street

- 6 point Texas which has 6 different points on it, with essential saloons and such. There could have several camera crews filming in it at once.

- A King Kong miniature set, with a parting lake in front of it (originally was used for Moses parting the red sea act)

- King Kong escapes through New York, (Edit, this was one of the rides that was destroyed in the fire)

[Video to come]

- Little Europe with lots of streets from different countries all around Europe

- Court of Miracles, where Frankenstein’s monster appeared in 1931

- ‘The Big One’ – a setting where your placed in the middle of the underground, and there’s an earthquake. The roof collapses, the trains fall down on top of you, and a working train hurtles in.

- Amityville where Ants got scared out of his witts when Jaws jumped out at him

[Video to come]

- My favourite part of the tour – Wisteria Lane. It’s usually closed for filming, but we got to see it. So excited!

[video to come]

- Whoville

- The Psycho House

- War of the Worlds – part of the set of War of the Worlds where the jumbo jet crashed into the houses.

- Falls lake: where there’s a backdrop behind the lake which makes it look like you’re in the middle of the sea

The Lodge (above)

- a set for the Mummy where you go into the Tomb of Imoteph and you “get swallowed” by bugs.

We also went on the Inferno ride, which was pretty boring. Basically they paid homage to the firefighters of America (don’t get me wrong, they do a fantastic job, however I was over praises 5 minutes into the video, and then it carries on for further 10 minutes). Then you walk through to another room and you stand on this platform. They are pretending to be shooting a scene for the movie and there’s fire and flames and heat everywhere. One part the platform you’re standing on drops a few inches before the €˜big finale’. Ants got some good photos though.

We went back up to the top of Universal and went into the Waterworld performance. Despite the movie, this was very well done. The whole set was centred around a deep pool, and all the actors (out of TV and Broadway etc shows) played out a battle to get the location of land. The actors/actresses were very daring too, doing some fantastic stunts including falling into the water from about 10-15 metres high, and swinging down ropes to the ground. Very cool, and very worth seeing. Unfortunately my battery ran out on my camera, so I could only get one photo

On the way out the door we stopped in at a haunted house. Now I was expecting this to be really awesome with lots of people in costume jumping out to scare you, but it was so poorly done. There were barely any people dressed in costume, and it was so obviously a set design it wasn’t scary at all. It paled in comparison to the Maize Maze in Sanson, and this was Universal Studios! I was so very disappointed. I realised why there was not wait time for it.

One thing that I noticed is on the postcard stand there is often mini-postcards available which are fantastic for scrapbooking. I tend to buy postcards of things I’ve seen but can’t get photos off (like King Kong) so minicards are super handy.

After Waterworld it was getting on into the afternoon, and we still had to find our way to Anaheim so we picked up our luggage, Metro’d to Union Station, then dashed for the Amtrak. We were disappointed that we didn’t get to have a look around Union Station, being it’s one of those places you should go, however.

We ran to the train, and it was hauuge! Heaps of carriages, and each carriage was two story. It was so busy being a Sunday afternoon that there was standing room only. The trip itself was fairly boring. Nothing to see except for sandy-coloured, mostly bungalow houses. Occasionally there was freeway, and then there were the few American passengers on the train that wanted to talk to us. The trip only took 30minutes (the train was fair hoofing it).

We then jumped into a taxi, whom we quickly found out had no idea where he was going. We told him the address, and he asked me to put the address into his Navman. He kept saying “the street number of your hotel is too high, there’s no hotels up there”. We kept saying “We don’t know the area, all we have is the address”. He started following the Navman, then decided that it was taking him the wrong way, so he turned around, took us through a University, and then decided to follow the Navman. I was fuming when he took us through the Uni and he picked up on that, which I think is why he changed his mind. In total the trip took us 15-20 minutes or so, for what should have been a 5-10 minute trip. He was very surprised when he saw our hotel. He only charged us $10 instead of the $5 that was on the metre, and he definitely didn’t get a tip!

The motel was great, lovely and clean, and we get breakfast in the morning. After dumping our stuff, it was straight to Disneyland!

It was a very warm but pleasant evening. Probably about 25ºc or so. We got our 3-day park hoppers from our CityPass and wandered around. It was so amazing! We found out that because it was a weekend night the park was open until 11pm, and there were fireworks and other things display. We decided we were going to go see the fireworks behind Sleeping Beauty castle to night, and try and catch the other light show at the pond later on.

While waiting, we went on the Pirates of the Caribbean boat ride. Each scene was a different setting of the story, so you went past the hidden treasure, through the town where Jack lands, past a bunch of drunks selling wenches. The likeness of Jack Sparrow was so convincing, even down to his witty €˜save my own skin’ personality. One part had a gun fight between two ships. The cannons blasted out air at high speeds, so if it hit you, you could feel it. It was even formed in a circular motion so it felt like a ghost cannon ball going through you. Not only that, there was water being shot out to look like splashes of cannon balls. So awesome.

Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse with Sleeping Beauty Castle in the background.

Sleeping Beauty Castle all lit up.

We went and found a space to wait for the fireworks display. It was so so amazing, and I took a video of it. Accidentally I didn’t take it on very good quality though. My arms were jelly after holding the camera up for 15 minutes. I was trying to actually watch the show with my own eyes as opposed to watching it through the camera screen, so sometimes my filming isn’t the best! Anyway here’s the video.
[ video to come of fireworks]

The crowd thinned wonderfully after the fireworks, so we took advantage of this and went on the Star Tours ride.

The storyline is that you are with a new pilot who is trying to get you to your destination, however overshoots it and ends up fighting against the Death Star. You’re in a simulator belted into your seat, and you feel like you’re really flying through space, complete with G-force at take off, and smooth turns when the pilots taking you around corners (except for when he does things like run into an asteroid field. Then it’s not so smooth. I loved it, and would have gone again, Ants got motion sickness poor bugger. So we decided to call it a night and try for the light show tomorrow.

On our way out, we wandered past the shops, and saw all the lovely things I wanted to buy!

While wandering out, we needed to get some dinner and water, so we headed out a different way to that which we came in so we were closer to the 7/11. Anthony got totally disorientated and wouldn’t believe me when I was trying to tell him which way we needed to go. Finally he asked a security person where we needed to go, and admitted defeat. It’s okay honey, it’d been a long day (ha, I was right!).

At the 7/11 we brought two huge bottles of water, milk and we found twinkies and a wrap thingee called torquitos. Twinkies tasted like cardboard with a big of cream and sugar stuck in them. The Torquitos were okay, they tasted like CC chips and chicken. Wouldn’t buy either of them again though.

When we got back to the motel, we discovered unsecured wireless internet (excellent *Mr Burns hands*), so we stole it, and Skyped Mum and Dad. It was so good to talk to them!

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Current Fashion: Sneakers for distance walking
Point of Interest: American toilets have 6L of fresh water in the bowl, and the suck down then refill, instead of keeping all the water in the cistern like normal toilets.
Weather: Hot hot hot

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Extra for the interested

Studio Backlot Tour – Wikipedia

The Studio Tour – unofficial fan site

Current Mood: drained

Tags: Amityville, Amtrak, Desperate Housewives, Disneyland, Jurassic Park, King Kong, Psycho House, The Fast and the Furious, The Mummy, Universal Studio Tour, Universal Studios Hollywood, Whisteria Lane, Whoville

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