We both took off Friday from work, woke up bright & early to get our pack on before we headed to the airport. When we were booking our flights we KEPT seeing that flights were cheaper into Tampa than into Orlando which we discovered was perfect because we could go to the beach!!!
We boarded our plane and literally talked to each other non stop for the 2ish hour flight. Once we got off the plane and got our bags on the advice of our friend Robbie, we headed off to Clearwater Beach!
It was actually pretty chilly out at the beach, so we didn’t last that long out there. We ate dinner at Frenchy’s South Beach Cafe which was pretty much across the street from the part of the beach we had settled down on, so we had a beautiful view at dinner. After that we figured it was time to make the drive to Orlando, which wasn’t too bad we both were just really tired. After getting checked in we pretty much got in our beds with our books and read until we fell asleep. We had to make sure the sleep two nights before the race was decent as we knew there was a good chance the night before would not be!
Saturday morning we woke up, read, and worked on our Fab Ab Feb goal before we headed down to the hotel gym to get in a few miles on the treadmill. We showered and off we went to try a restaurant that was new to us – Cafe Tu Tu Tango.
While Beth drank her Matisse Margarita and Teal drank her Michelangelo Mojito, we decide to claim carb loading with our meal selections. Ha, this is a tapas restaurant so we shared everything which meant the White Bean, Sun Dried Tomato& Artichoke Spread, Cajun Chicken Egg Rolls, Prosciutto & Mango Flatbread, Langostino Mac & Cheese and Oriental Marinated Steak Skewers. It was all dee-licious! After lunch it was off to Wide World of Sports Complex to hit up the expo and get our bibs!
We didn’t stay too terribly long at the expo, but we both made sure to pick up a couple things of Nuun [grape for Teal & tri-berry for Beth]. How can you beat the price of $5 a tube? Yah, exactly. Beth got herself some new TOMS 🙂 We met Heidi & Brian for dinner at Portobello in Downtown Disney. Those two weren’t lying when they said that place was gooood! We may or may not have hit up Ghirardelli after dinner for a treat before checking out the largest Disney store ever and people watching.
We called it a night pretty early as we all had to get back to our hotels and clearly we had a race to run the next day which you read allll about yesterday!
After the race was over we found ourselves an Einstein’s and got bagels, went back to the hotel and began being lazy for a little bit. Beth started tweet talking with some friends about how we reeeally wanted to go see Harry Potter World. One of the ladies had been before and told us to quit dilly dallying as Harry Potter fans are crazy and the park would be crazy! How does she know this? Because she’s one of those people! Her words! Ha. So @lastgoodnerve thanks for the push to go! We bought tickets to Islands of Adventure at Universal in our hotel lobby and made our way there. Harry Potter here we come!
We got in the park and we could see it!
HOGWARTS!
This is the part of the blog were you get an excessive amount of pictures so, um, ENJOY! What you see as you walk up to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter …can you spot Teal in the picture?
the sign says "Please Respect the Spell Limits"
We were in HEAVEN for real! Our first stop was at the Hogwarts Express and we had our picture taken with the conductor. He was so fun! He thanked us for coming from the country of Texas to visit him. 🙂
At this point we hadn’t had lunch so we were anxious to eat some sort of food so off we went to Three Broomsticks for a feast of roasted chicken, potatoes and corn. Then we went to checkout Zonko’s and Honeyduke’s!
At this point it actually started to rain a little bit so we took that as an opportunity to go into Hog’s Head and try Butterbeer for the first time. We opted for sharing one instead of us both getting one and not finishing them….yah, we didn’t even finish the one we were sharing. It was good, different, but good!
Teal buying the Butterbeer in Hog's Head
Then we made our way up to Hogwart’s itself! If we are being honest neither one of us is really that big on rides, but we went ahead and rode the Harry Potter and the Forbbiden Journey ride. Which is where we got to see the sorting hat while we were in line for the ride! We should also take a break to mention that there is a bathroom that has Moaning Myrtle in it…..loved how much they put into this place! Don’t worry we both made sure to check into Moaning Myrtle’s Bathroom on Foursquare. 🙂
We walked around in Dervish and Banges and the Owl Post. We looked pretty much at anything and everything we could while we were there. Since we weren’t willing to shell out $100 each for a cape we decided to trythem on and simply having our picture taken in them. 🙂
The ticket price into the park was totally worth it to both of us solely so we could see the Wizarding World of Harry Potter! It was awesome and something we’ll always remember, BUT since there were technically some other parts of the park we decided to explore them too. We had our pictures taken with character’s in Seuss Landing.
We checked out Jurassic Park. Beth was excited about this because Jurassic Park is one of those movies for her fiance that when it is on TV he has to watch it which means she watches it or at least bits and pieces a lot.
run for your liiiife!
We walked through Marvel Super Hero Island just as Wolverine, Captain America, Spiderman, Storm & Rogue were making their grand entrance. We made our way through the Lost Continent, but didn’t really do much there. We did stop for a cheesy photo opp in Toon Town and sent pictures to the boys at home. 🙂
And then we found Popeye and Olive Oil!
We spent a little over four hours walking around Universal’s Islands of Adventure and by that time we’d seen pretty much everything. Our legs and feet were killing us. Yah, for the walking back to the car part of getting out of there. We opted to order room service because we just didn’t want to be getting in and out of the car. Thanks Zest restaurant at Sheraton Safari for having delish food for us to eat while we chit chatted, watched the Oscars, tweeted, and read. We like to multi-task! The next morning we read some more, packed up our suitcases and got on the road to Tampa.
We prepaid for gas when we got our rent car and we were bound and determined to use up that tank! Hope they were able to drive our little Ford Focus to their gas pumps because it was seriously teetering a fine line of being completely out of gas. We are awwesome! We checked into our flights and were kind of freaking out that our boarding passes printed out with no assigned seats – uhh, did you overbook and we aren’t going to really be on this flight?? All was fine until we got on the flight and had lots of turbulence. Pretty sure we’ve mentioned it before but we had a bad flight together in 2006 that Beth has blocked out and Teal remembers very clearly hitting a patch of dead air and a drop. Needless to say Teal has reservations with every plane ride, but she handled the turbulence on this flight like a champ! We got back to Dallas and were ready to get our butts home except for when we got to Teal’s car it was uhhh, dead. Thank you Airport Support for coming to our rescue and giving us a jump! It really was a wonderful weekend full of so much fun stuff!
