Kennedy Space Centre

The Kennedy Space Centre is about a 70km drive from Orlando, so we set off bright and early down the maze of toll-roads...

... with an important stop along the way for IHOP.  What would a trip to America be without IHOP?

We saw this in the parking lot next to the IHOP - I can't believe that it's legal to drive with a giant lobster on your car.  Imagine how little visibility that driver has?!

Luckily we didn't see the rest of his risk on the highway (yes, the collective noun for a group of lobsters is a risk), and we made pretty good time to...

The Kennedy Space Center.  

Maybe they will give us jobs?  Working for NASA would be almost as awesome as working for the company that makes the giant robotic arm rollercoasters.

Luckily for us, it was 33 days until the last space shuttle launch - so the Space Shuttle Atlantis wasn't in this building (the giant building where they put it together).

It was on the launch pad, getting ready for its final flight.  We couldn't get very close, but it was an awesome sight.

They had some interesting exhibits, including a couple of videos and a recording of the Apollo 8 launch - this room was apparently the control room for the launch, and the desks light up as you hear the occupant talking on the radio during the countdown.  The Apollo 8 was the first manned spaceflight to leave Earth orbit.

And here's a rocket - they were amazingly big.  The badges next to the rocket are the mission patches for each of the Apollo missions, with the one at the front being Apollo 8.

 This is one of the 5 exhausts for the rocket, to give an idea of scale.

One of the crew capsules from the Apollo missions - check out how burned it is from reentry.

This is one of the new design of Orion rockets that they're building to replace the existing space shuttles.  From what we could tell, rather than piggy-backing on the rocket boosters like the current space shuttles, this design would sit on top of the rocket, much like the old Apollo designs.

And here's a replica of the Explorer space shuttle, which you can walk inside.  Big cargo bay, not much living room.

Next to the Explorer is the stuff that gets it off the ground - fuel tank and rocket boosters.  Absolutely massive.

Memorials for the astronauts killed during missions.  It looks like a lot until you think about the fact that they were flying to the moon, using computers the size of houses that were less powerful than my mobile phone.  I'm surprised they didn't blow the entire earth up, to be honest.

It's not a laughing matter, but I find this memorial a little amusing because it's so much bigger than it needs to be for the names it currently contains - someone's planning for the future.  It seems a little heartless to leave a lot of empty space for the names of the next people to get killed... but I guess it's more efficient that way.

The rocket garden.  It's interesting how different all of the designs are.

There were a number of different capsule replicas here for the children (and Stephen) to play inside.  There really wasn't a whole lot of personal space in these things.

If you thought the last one was cramped, how about this one?  I hope the astronaut was shorter than Stephen, because he couldn't even sit down properly in this one.

We had a lot of fun in Orlando, and 3 days is a good amount of time to get away from work.  Now we just need to work out where to go next!

Universal Studios Part II - Harry Potter

I was most excited about visiting the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter part of Universal Studios - I had grand plans for buying all sorts of Ravenclaw stuff (you know I would have been in Ravenclaw), and generally having a grand old time pretending I could actually do magic and stuff.  Which would be cool if I could.  Damn you, real life!

Welcome to Hogsmeade!  The Harry Potter part of the park was by far the busiest part by probably about 5 to 1.  It was absolute mayhem.

This is overlooking the entrance to the Hogsmeade Village part - this is the quiet part.  Yes, I took this from a rollercoaster (albeit a tiny cat and mouse type one).  

The rollercoaster in question was called the Flight of the Hippogryph - it was great fun for a tiny coaster.  The front of the carriage was made into the shape of a hippogryph out of wicker, and Buckbeak watched on as you ascended the hill lift.

There was another rollercoaster as well, called the Dragon Challenge - two inverted rollercoasters (the ones where your seats are suspended under the track instead of sitting in a cart on top), which had a number of near-miss points in the track, including the dual loop above where the two cars ascend the loop together.  I am not a huge fan of inverted coasters due to my completely irrational but still completely inescapable fear of heights and particularly chairlifts - these are way too close to chairlifts for my liking.  After I had my eyes closed the entire first time we went on them, Stephen made me go on them twice more with my eyes open to try to cure me.  I did open my eyes and it wasn't so bad while we were moving fast, but somehow, I don't think my fear of slow-moving chairlifts will have been cured.

The best part of the park, however, was.... 

Hogwarts Castle.  It was really well done, and the Forbidden Journey ride inside it was by far the highlight of my trip.  They start telling the story as you are queueing for the ride (a great way to distract people from the fact that they're waiting) - Hogwarts is open to Muggles for an Open Day, and you are walking through the castle on a tour, through the main entry hall, and then through the Headmaster's Office, where a holographic video of Dumbledore tells you that the magical demonstration is cancelled and you will instead be going to listen to a lecture on the history of Hogwarts by the History of Magic teacher.  In the next room (the Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom), you hear Harry, Ron and Hermione talking - they are eventually revealed to have been hiding under the invisibility cloak, and a holographic video of them tells you that they think the lecture will be boring, so they're going to make it so that you can fly down to the quidditch pitch to watch a match instead.  After this, you are loaded onto the ride - 4 chairs in a row in a bench format, with safety harnesses.

It's well-hidden during the ride, but this is effectively what you're sitting on:

Yes, a GIANT ROBOTIC ARM.  (This is the coolest thing I have ever seen.)  What's cool about the Harry Potter ride is that the giant robotic arms are on a track, so that you move through the ride along the track at the same time as being thrown around to avoid skeletons, dementors, and the Whomping Willow.  It gets better though - at various points in the ride, concave wrap-around video screens are placed in front of your chair displaying simulator-style video footage of you dodging dragons and flying around the castle, which your chair moves around perfectly with, making the ride a kind of hybrid between a traditional car-based ride and a simulator.  It is immersive, intense and brilliantly executed - I was absolutely blown-away by the ride and I highly recommend it to everyone.

(I'll stop ranting about how amazing that technology is now.)

Here's me with the Ravenclaw banner.  You can tell that I would be in Ravenclaw because I can't stop going on about how brilliant the technology powering that ride is.  I forgot to bring my scarf though - sadly, the items for sale in the shops there were all either Gryffindor or Slytherin - no love for the Ravenclaws (or the Hufflepuffs).

The Hogwarts Express was parked in the station, although sadly unable to take me to Hogwarts.  

The books are full of descriptions of unique food and drinks, and the theme park does its best to recreate some of them.  I bought a chocolate frog, which unfortunately melted before I got to eat it...

Although I did get a sweet collectible chocolate frog card!  They also had pumpkin juice, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour beans (and they do mean every flavour - ugh), and...

Butterbeer!  This is another example of brilliant user experience.  No one really knows what butterbeer would taste like, but people are expecting something that has a creamy kind of taste, with a head like beer, and that's a little bitter like beer underneath.

It was really tasty, and it matched the flavour that you would expect perfectly - it wasn't until later that we realised that it was actually just a generic soft drink (cola, but not as strong tasting) with melted ice cream on top, like an ice cream spider (or float if you're North American).  Once again, a brilliant execution, matching perfectly what people expect while using common ingredients.  Pretty tasty too!

All-in-all I highly recommend Universal Islands of Adventure - although I am concerned that they require your fingerprint to enter the park, which I find to be an invasion of privacy.  If you can get past that though, it's well worth the visit.

Universal Studios Part I

After our somewhat disappointing day at Disneyworld, we visited Universal Studios with the aim of seeing the new Harry Potter themed part of the park.  We had a brilliant time - so much so that I've had to split Universal Studios into two blog posts to fit all of the photos in.  The queues were much shorter - I think the longest we waited for a ride (on a Saturday) was 30 minutes, vs waiting over an hour at Disneyworld (on a Friday).  

Universal has two parks as well - the "Universal Studio" park which has more of the movie-related tours and shows, and "Islands of Adventure", which has most of the rides.  A smart designer, however, has put the Harry Potter part into Islands of Adventure, and put the tallest rollercoaster in the park into the Universal Studios park - a smart way of encouraging people to buy two-park tickets.  Even better, they put both parks on the same map - deliberately pointing out what you were missing out on every time you looked at the map.

Things are much more modern and better set out in Universal.  It's not groundbreaking by any means, but they have boards all over the place showing you what the ride queue times are - it's good because as a visitor it means you can plan your rides without running all over the park, and from the park's perspective, it would help to balance queues by encouraging people away from rides with long queues and into rides with shorter queues.  More good user experience design.

They'd obviously learned a lot from Disney in terms of theme - I loved how different each part of the park looked.  This is the Superhero Island (Marvel Comics stuff).

Complete with X-Men in their original costumes!  Hi Cyclops!

Toon Lagoon was like hanging around in a cartoon, and contained most of the water rides.

Ripsaw Falls was a log flume ride - after the couple of droplets we received at Disneyworld, we weren't really prepared for the Universal water rides.  

Here's Stephen after Ripsaw Falls - at one point they squirted everyone in the face with water cannons.  We got pretty wet.

Being as we were already wet, we decided to check out the Popeye Barges - your typical tyre-based white-water rapids ride.  This ride was ridiculous - they basically poured buckets of water onto you from above multiple times.  The water from the "rapids" wasn't even a factor.  I think most of the laughter from people on our boat was the incredulous laughter of people who didn't believe that they would design a ride to make you this wet.  

Here's Stephen after the ride.  We might as well have just jumped into the lagoon fully-clothed.  It was crazy.

 Amusingly, they had "people drying machines" setup around the place - you put in your $5, and you basically hung around in the giant air drying machine for 5 minutes.  Not a bad idea, considering how wet people got.

There were a number of Jurassic Park themed rides too - here's Stephen doing his worst impression of being terrified of a T-Rex (while soaking wet).

The Hulk Rollercoaster was their big one - it has 7 inversions and is a launched hill coaster, so rather than having a conveyor belt take you to the top of the hill and then you falling down along the track, they start you moving and then you are suddenly accelerated to 65kph as you're going up the hill, and then straight into a zero-g roll, a drop and then a Cobra Roll (as you can see in the photo).  It was pretty good, although I still think the Superman Escape coaster at Movie World beats it.

The coolest part of the park was without a doubt the Wizarding World of Harry Potter - which gets its own blog post tomorrow.

Disneyworld!

We took Friday off to spend a long weekend in Orlando, Florida - only a 2.5 hour flight south.  The plan was to visit Disneyworld, the Harry Potter part of Universal Studios, and the Kennedy Space Center while we were there.  Here's part 1 of the trip - Disneyworld.

Disneyworld at Orlando has four theme parks plus two water parks - we didn't have enough time for all of them, so we decided to go to the "Magic Kingdom" (what you'd imagine when you say "Disneyworld").

This is the third Magic Kingdom that I've been to after Paris and California.  (Yes Mum and Dad, I know I've been to the Florida one before, but I don't really remember it from when I was 6!)  I was actually a little disappointed - your ticket locks you into visiting one park, but it seemed pretty small, and some of the attractions that would have been in that park in Paris or California (such as Star Wars) were in other parks and thus not accessible.  We went on most things 2 or 3 times and even went on most of the little kids' rides and we still left fairly early.

There were some cool birds and animals around though (real ones) - this is an egret.

Part of what I really like about theme parks is the immersive nature of them when they're done right.

Tomorrowland - because the future is silver and contains many circles.

Frontierland - yee haw!

Stephen waiting in a queue for his favourite ride - Splash Mountain. 

Splash Mountain - no, that's not us.  The Disney rides were fairly tame and you hardly even got splashed on them - we could have done with some splashing considering that it was 30 degrees and blindingly sunny.

It must be really annoying visiting theme parks with me, because I spend half of the time discussing the user experience of the systems and the business ramifications.  

Disney does have one really cool thing - the FastPass system.  (No, that's not my photo - my photo didn't turn out).  Basically you rock up to a ride that you want to go on, and it has a "FastPass return time" on it, sometime in the future (usually an hour or two away).  If you decide that you want to, you can put your park entry ticket into the machine  and get one of these tickets, and then come back to the ride and essentially skip the queue at the time listed on the ticket.  Whoever came up with this idea is a genius - if you think about it, you are likely to queue for a similar amount of time over the day (because you have longer queues when you don't have a FastPass), but this system taps into the guilty pleasure of jumping the queue and makes people feel like they're getting something for nothing.  A really good example of how irrational people are and how you can use that to design something that makes people happier. 

It turns out that I didn't take many picture at Disneyworld - I guess on your third Disney visit, there isn't much left to photograph.  Don't worry - I have too many pictures of Universal Studios and Harry Potter's Wizarding World for one blog post, so I'll start posting those tomorrow!