June 19th, 2025
I am so late on this blog post but y’all my baby is now 15😱! At the beginning of the month we celebrated my sweet boy’s birthday at Universal Studios + Islands of Adventure! I can’t believe how fast the time has gone, I still remember holding him as a baby for the first time. For those of you who don’t know Universal Studios has a new park open ‘Epic Universe’ but we decided to not go to that park since it just opened. Extremely long wait times, the CROWDS of people and the HEAT 🔥. If you are not used to the humidity and heat it can be MISERABLE in the summer here! Bring plenty of sunscreen, portable charger, fan, backpack with water bottles to stay hydrated.
We also decided to bring my nephew on this trip to celebrate summer break and Eli’s birthday! Here are a few photos of our trip [if you follow me on Instagram/ Tiktok/ or Facebook] you’ve probably already seen these but for those of you who read my blog post here is a recap of our trip!
We started out at Islands of Adventure. Our first ride of the day was Velocicoaster and even though I have rode this ride before I was not prepared nor do I remember this ride being this intense! It is definitely a thrill seeking ride! If you don’t like going upside down over water or going 100 mph then I advise to not ride this ride. We ended up riding it twice and thankfully the lines weren’t crazy long.
Our next ride ended up being all 3 Harry Potter rides and yes we did stop to get a “butter beer”. The first time we ever had it was frozen and it was amazing. This time we opted to just get the beverage cold and it was good but not like the frozen one like I remembered. Each line was around 30-45 minutes so it wasn’t too bad. We really enjoyed Harry Potter world [ it’s my absolute favorite] unfortunately Eli has never watched the movies but he loves the rides! I however have watched all the movies / read the books and LOVE IT!
When we finished riding Harry Potter ride(s) we headed over to the Hulk to ride it and then it started to POUR down rain. If you are new to the Orlando area it tends to rain a lot in the summer. Not all day but it typically rains daily at some point. Check weather apps the week/ day before to prepare. We had ponchos with us luckily. One thing I will say that differed between Disney and Universal Studios is lockers [Disney doesn’t really have them] you can carry your backpack on the rides but Universal has small lockers. We ended up getting 6 lockers for mine+ the boys backpacks / lunch. Even though Universal allows you to bring outside food into the parks it was a huge hassle that I would recommend just bringing light lunch or just buying it inside the park. I ended up snagging a pizza for the boys and myself and it ran us $45 for 8 slices. Pretty steep but it fed all of us. Also decided we all wanted a blue slushee mid snack break.
We took the train over to Universal Studios and rode the rides listed below
Rides we Rode at Universal Studios + Islands of Adventure
- Velocicoaster
- Flight of the Hippogriff
- Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure
- Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey
- Hogwart’s Express Hogsmeade
- The Incredible Hulk
- Dispicable Me Minion Mayhem
- Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit
- Revenge of the Mummy
- The Simpson’s Ride
- Transformers The Ride-3D
These were all the rides we rode the kids rode Velocicoaster and Hulk 2x but other than that Eli had a fantastic birthday! We haven’t been to Universal Studios or Islands of Adventure in four years and we were so excited to be back and just have fun! It rained quite a bit but it didn’t rain on our parade! We made the best of it ! If you’re there definitely check out City Walk for awesome shops and food! We normally stop at Voodoo Doughnuts on our way out but we were too tired after a long day of fun! We didn’t do all the rides but we did prioritize the ones we wanted to go to first and made sure that we didn’t waste time on the ones we didn’t want to do.
Overall this was such a fun day! I recommend for mamas with bigger kids who love a thrill. There are a few smaller rides for toddlers [Dr. Seuss] but not much for them to do. If you have littles I recommend Disney. Thanks to my amazing wife for getting us tickets to BOTH parks we had a blast and Eli really enjoyed it!
The day before we ended up getting Eli a cookie cake from Great American cookie , $100 cash and tickets to both parks for the day!
