I leave the gorgeous ones sleeping, as they like to do and take a wander to the supermarket which is a couple of blocks away. I tell myself I am being a wonderful selfless mother and wife, going to get the essentials needed for breakfast but really I just want to indulge in an American supermarket on my own... DAMN It's good. Aisles and aisles of pointless, tasty, fattening foods. Pancake mix, pancake syrup, popcorn with butter spray, PB&J all in one jar, squeezey cheese, orange juice that only comes in gallon sizes, a billion types of bagel. Seriously, do English supermarkets look like this and I just don't notice anymore as I would NEVER buy this stuff at home? Is there anything more exciting than a supermarket in another country? I want to buy it all, but hold myself back and only buy breakfast (cereal that tastes like America and strawberries, mmmmm, finally fresh strawberries on my cereal)
Upon my return, the gorgeous ones awake and despite a slightly bizarre and sad start to the day as Gabriella's old, blind dog Gus, has died in the night after falling into the pool so there a tears, but asGabriella says, 'it feels like a Fellini film' so we hurriedly get ourselves up and out as today we are GOING TO UNIVERSAL!!!! Omg, omg, omg.... I so remember the feeling the first time we went to a theme park in America, it simply felt like a magical place. Nothing in England ever comes close to the total immersion into fantasy, giving yourself over to absolute pleasure you may say. So, going to Universal is exciting, something we have all wanted to do this holiday and ohhhh, do we indulge. From the 8 lane LA highway, gleaming in the sun on the way there we decide today is going to be awesome from start to finish and rather than get frustrated at the endless nose to tail traffic we decide it looks like the sea... A sea of sparkly cars.
And then woooooooo hoooooo, we are in the park... What to go on first? Sam is adamant we have to go on the studio tour first, so we hop aboard...and it's AMAZING. It is everything that as a teenager I wanted to see, rubber sharks, cheesy story lines including an earthquake in a SF underground tunnel and a Mexican flood (one of my favourite parts was looking behind as we were leaving the soundstage with the SF earthquake and seeing the truck that moments before was going to plunge down and kill us all, reset back up unto the flys.) It is all so well rehearsed and slick and FUN! What is not to love.
I liked the glimpse of the sound stage cafe and Hitchcock's bungalow on the lot and of course the King Kong set piece, but then I love a good scream.
Leaving the tour we race to the next ride, deciding we want to experience as much as we possibly can (considering we have done no exercise and eaten and drank everything in our paths for seemingly weeks now) The Simpsons ride is as much fun as we remember it being, but it does not satiate our need for more more more and we leap (like well fed gazelles) down the escalators and jump on The Mummy ride. One of the best reasons for coming to any theme park the day AFTER a holiday day, is that there are no queues and we simply run through all the empty lines straight to the front of everything, feeling slightly sorry for all the saps that paid extra for their Fast Pass tickets.
The Mummy ride is too short and not scary enough, so we rush to the Jurassic Park ride all humming the theme tune and avidly looking for dinosaurs in the bushes. This was not a disappointing ride as we cooed over plastic dinosaurs and ducked as they shot water at us and then....screamed as we got TOTALLY drenched. I literally looked as though someone has stood over me with a bucket, no two buckets of water and poured them over my head. Heaven. It was so hot it took us only moments to dry off whilst watching others come down the water flume and whilst watching a mum having a what she thought was a sneaky fag....right in the soak zone. Brilliant.
Giggling we skip over to the Transformers ride and despite being in the same 'car' as Beavis & Butthead we all scream and laugh and shriek and LOVE being thrown around an imaginary wasteland trying to save the All spark from Megatron, or something along those lines Infact we love it so much we run out, straight around the side and back in! No queue so straight in a car to be spun, bumped, and buffeted again! Brilliant.
Not sue that anything else can really compare to that ride, so we munch it bagels, look at the acres and acres of film studio land from the highest point and wander around the streets of 'London' and 'Paris'. We decide we really should have a look at the Horror rooms supposedly a collection of Universals horror film memorabilia...amazingly it was a very old fashioned but incredibly well
executed (!) Haunted House, with some great props, such as Chucky Dolls, some great sets, Frankensteins lab and of course complete with cast members that jump out from the dark corners and make you SCREAM!!!!!! Hilarious fun, even though you know it's coming, even though you have heard the people up ahead, even though at one point we could see over the balcony to the floor below and see monsters grabbing through bars, we still screamed! Psycho coming out of the shower made me shriek, whilst a werewolf made Sam throw women and children after him, and poor Daisy jumped so far she jumped into a wall. Brilliant.
Nothing really compares to a Haunted House.
We leave the park, arm in arm, skipping to the car (well, metaphorically) and Sam bravely negotiates, with the able assistance of our SatNav that obviously favours America as she is sharp and right on it, the LA traffic to Santa Monica, which we have seen in the distance from Venice Beach. We arrive at sunset.
It could not be anymore beautiful. We could not have had a more fun day. I could not love Sam & Daisy anymore.
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