Day 1: Universal Studios Hollywood

Tony and I decided to take a little vacation.  We started talking about it a few months ago.  We had our Universal Studios annual passes from the last time we went so we thought we would take advantage of having those passes and go to Southern California.

We thought that we would go to Universal Studios  a couple days and then Disneyland one day.  We first thought we'd drive down, but then Tony found some good rates on flights down to LAX.  Those good rates were for the early morning and late night flights.

So super early on Wednesday morning we got up and drove to the airport.  Margie (being the saint that she is) watched our kids for us while we were away.  We parked our car and got through the airport security without any problems.  We didn't have to wait very long before they started boarding our flight.

It was only about an hour and a half flight without any problems.  We landed and then took the shuttle to the rental car place.  We got our car and went in search for a breakfast place.  We had our GPS take us to Universal Studios and we thought that we would find a restaurant on our way there, but we didn't find anything.  Some fast food places, but no IHOP or Denny's.  It was nuts.  The GPS had us take some crazy back streets to avoid the crazy traffic on the freeway.  So we got to see some pretty ghetto places, but some were pretty cool too.

Tony thought he remembered that some of the restaurants outside of Universal Studios served breakfast.  He was wrong and we ended up getting food at Starbucks.  It was better then nothing.  We both got a  breakfast sandwich.  They were pretty good.  We stood waiting for the park to open and ate our food.
We had to wait about 20 minutes before they opened the gates.  We were first in line.  We went straight to the Harry Potter ride that is in the castle.

I walked through it with Tony but didn't go on the ride.  Since I get sick so easy on those kinds of rides I thought it best to sit out.  After that we did the other roller coaster and then walked through a few shops before leaving Harry Potter land.  We didn't see much last time we were there because it was so busy so it was fun to walk through stores and see how ridiculously priced things were.  Good times.

We decided to try one of the big donuts that they sell in Simpson's land.  It was a pretty good doughnut, I thought it could have used more chocolate.  After eating all we could (we couldn't finish it) we went down to do that Back Lot tour.  The park wasn't busy so we were able to do things quickly without many lines.
We went and saw a show on special effects.  It was good, but really loud.  We must be getting old.
After the tour we went down to the Lower Lot to rides some more rides.  Not before taking a picture of the beautiful scenery.  We rode some more rides and then had some lunch.  It was pretty good.  We road the water ride one more time before going back up to the main park.
We had pretty much done every ride we wanted to so we walked through some shops and then decided to leave.  We figured we did everything we wanted to and didn't need to come back another day.

We then drove the hour to get to our hotel.  We checked in and then went to the store to get somethings we needed.  We had such a big lunch we were not very hungry for dinner so we decided to just get some Italian Ice at Joe's (Tony's most favorite place).
Their were some missionaries eating there and we chatted with them for a little bit.  We found out that the owner of Joe's is a member of the church and he lets the missionaries eat for free.  This just made us like Joe's even more.  Yummy stuff.
Then we went back to the hotel where we just enjoyed hanging out and getting to bed early because we were both so tired from waking up so early.  And we wanted to be well rested for our day at Disneyland the next day.