Jack Yesner Week 4- Returning to Universal

Returning to Universal

When I was younger, Disney World was my family’s favorite amusement park. We went at least once every year, and my family even bought a VIP tour for one of our trips. Disney World became our ideal vacation spot as it combined small thrills and an enjoyable atmosphere with many classic characters I had seen on television, and it had an added plus that it was a reasonable driving distance from my house. However, my opinion flipped on Disney World on one of my most recent trips there. On my birthday, in 2015, my camp went on an overnight trip to Magic Kingdom and Epcot. The lines were long (we waited over three hours for Space Mountain), it was extremely crowded, and there were very few rides the group wanted to go on. Disney no longer felt like the magical place that I had been to when I was a young child. I left the trip disappointed. Later that summer, my group went on our second overnight trip to Universal. I immediately felt a strong contrast between Universal and Disney. Universal had many thrilling attractions, shorter waits, and captivating lands, like Harry Potter and Jurassic Park. Universal was proving to have everything Disney did not. As the camp decided to retire their Disney trip the following summer, but keep their Universal trip, my opinions of the parks felt validated and Universal cemented itself as my favorite vacation spot. Since that first visit in 2015, I have visited Universal every year with my camp, and had additional trips with family, friends, and even school at the Shabbaton. In 2019, I traveled to Universal about once every other month! Therefore, in November 2019, on the Shabbaton trip, when my group only went on two rides the whole day because we waited for four hours to go on one ride, I thought it would be fine because I would be back soon enough anyway. I turned out to be very wrong.

As many of my trips occurred with school or camp and I did not have fastpass in those trips, I asked my parents in January 2020 if we could go to Universal as a family in July for my birthday. When my family travels together to Universal, we typically stay at a specific hotel that gives unlimited fastpass for the entire vacation. My parents said they were unsure if we would go, but they would strongly consider it. But consideration did not prove necessary as in March 2020, due to COVID-19, Universal shut down completely. Additionally, we did not want to go once it reopened in June 2020 either because we wanted to wait until a vaccine was available. Since I had been going to Universal frequently up to that point, it was deeply upsetting to not be able to go there for such an extended period of time. Once we got vaccinated, over a full year later, talks to revisit Universal were back on the table. My parents were still skeptical, but my frequent persuasions finally convinced them and they scheduled a trip for September 26-29. 

Finally returning to Universal after such a long absence was extraordinary. Everything about the trip ended up going perfectly. We went on a Monday and Tuesday at the end of September, and there were virtually no crowds. The weather was clear, the park was open for a sufficient amount of time, and our fastpasses let us on all the rides without waiting in lines. Even though I enjoyed this particular trip, the best part for me was the reassurance that the frequency of my visits to Universal would return to what it once was, because we had purchased a deal that gave us annual passes.

 I would highly recommend going to Universal if you have not been recently as the rides (especially the new ones), theming and immersion, and general atmosphere is simply incredible. Do you like to visit Universal? Have you been recently? What are some of your greatest memories from Universal?