Day 1-- Islands of Adventure!

This all started because we realized that it might be our last chance to take the whole family on vacation.  Bentley will be at BYU in the fall and the next year he should be serving a mission and you just never really know what will happen after that.  So we decided we should take advantage of this time.  Plus, our kids were finally old enough to appreciate Harry Potter World, which they definitely weren't the last time we went to Orlando, back in 2016.  

We surprised them with this decision right after Christmas break, and let the little kids see plenty of videos about Universal Studios to get them excited.  We were all packed and ready to leave Saturday night, so as soon as we could leave church, we sped home, changed out of our church clothes, loaded everything into the car and we were off!  The drive down went smoothly, but since we'd left so late, we didn't get to our VRBO until a little after midnight.  When we got up in the morning (Craig had us all up at 6:30 and packing lunches), the kids were thrilled to see an alligator in the lake.  Good times!

Nice view other than the creature waiting to kill you. He's that speck in the water right above the balcony.)

At the entrance

We were inside the park before the rides were open to the public, just waiting for the rope to drop.  And then the wildest thing happened-- I looked around and suddenly realized I was seeing my friend Crystal from Manassas (it turned out her husband was right in front of me)!  If I'd tried to, I couldn't have planned something like that!  So we said a quick hello and then raced off to our separate rides and never saw each other again the whole week.  But it was still a fun hi!

Hi, Crystal!

Our first stop was Hagrid's Motorbike Adventure but we did pause briefly to take pictures with the Hogwarts Express!

The line was long, but this ride was so fun-- definitely our favorite!

I feel like giving you a list of everything we did probably isn't all that interesting, so I'm mostly going to post a crap ton of pictures from here on out.  Commentary to be provided whenever I deem necessary!

Every now and then this raptor would move and rattle the entire cage-- it was awesome

And I love everyone's scared faces here!

Hogwarts Castle!

This photo-op with Blue was hilarious:

I took Colton and Camille around while the bigger kids did some of the scarier roller coasters with Craig (Colton was perfectly happy riding all the scariest stuff, but it was nice of him to hang out with Camille once in a while!)

Butterbeer!

The dragon on top of Gringott's Bank was pretty amazing!

Colton got chosen to participate in Ollivander's wand demonstration, which was pretty much the cutest thing ever (especially since, at age 11, he's the same age as Harry Potter in The Sorcerer's Stone).  So then he HAD to buy himself the wand-- it chose him!!!

I love that I look totally excited to ride on the Hogwarts Express

There it is breathing fire!

We ended our first night by getting milkshakes from the Chocolate Emporium.  They were all amazing.  Like, seriously amazing.