A really really really long post on The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

A few months ago I hinted that we were surprising Havalah and Henry with a special trip, which now I can share was a spring break visit to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. We've been reading the Harry Potter books aloud as a family for a few years, (we are currently in the middle of book five), so it seemed like a great time to take the plunge and visit Harry Potter World.

To throw them off we said that we were vacationing to Mobile, Alabama, which sounds interesting, but at the same time was a little bit unusual, ha! To make it believable we did a bit of research and planned to visit the Alabama coast, as well as a few museums in the city, *wink wink*.

On the morning of our trip we woke them up at 3 AM and asked, "Wanna get a cup of Butter Beer at HPW later today?"  Henry immediately hit the ceiling.  Sleepy Havah, eyes still half closed assumed we were kidding, or just not making any sense. She didn't actually put two and two together for about 20 minutes, and then she flipped out :-)

We knew our trip would be slightly bittersweet since Disney World is also in Orlando, but we firmly decided that we would focus only on HPW, with not even a half day at WDW.  Except for a quick trip over to Disney Springs for some pin trading, we stuck to our guns.  #moneysaved

A few notes about our trip.  HPW is expensive because it's divided into two parks - one park has Hogwarts, the other has Diagon Alley, and the Hogwart's Express connects them.  To keep it  affordable, we used some signature thrifty shortcuts.  None of these ideas are groundbreaking, but I thought I'd mention them anyway. Everyday we ate breakfast at the hotel, and packed snacks for lunch.  We loaded the backpack with Uncrustables, protein bars, fruit, hummus/veggie packs, and water bottles.  Each afternoon we would get a specialty snack at the park.  Most days it was Butter Beer or Pumpkin Juice, but we also tried chocolate frogs and other Harry Potter treats.  One night we ate dinner at the Leaky Caldron which is inside HPW, but because it closed at 7:30 PM, we usually opted to eat dinner outside the park.  We gave the kids a lump sum to spend while we were there and they both chose to buy interactive wands.  It was a splurge to spend all their money in one place, but ended up being one of the highlights of our trip.  There are stations throughout the two parks that allow wand holders to perform spells to make different things happen.  So fun!

This post is VERY picture heavy, so if you make it through bless you :) If you don't, I get that! Sadly, there are zero photos of the rides.  The park provides free, but mandatory lockers outside most of the rides where they pretty much insist you leave everything, camera phone included.

I'll just say that The Wizarding World of Harry Potter exceeded our expectations in every way.  It was goosebumps good!

Come back soon and I'll share what else we did at Universal Studios when we weren't drinking the Harry Potter kool-aid. I can tell you this much - it was pretty darn fun!