How annoying that the last 3 nights blogs haven't posted. The wifi at the hotel didn't seem to be allowing me to send or receive everything. The blogs take hours to write so I am not going to redo them. Here is a summary of the last few days:
Friday - The Everglades National Park. Gator Park was a bit disappointing as we only saw 4 gators & they were small. Held a gator but it's jaws were taped shut. There is 1.5mil hectares so could have been much better.
Saturday - spent most of day at Aventura Mall to have a break from heat & humidity
Sunday - did our own tour of the various neighborhoods - Mary Brickell village, Coconut Grove, Coral Gables, Little Havana. In the afternoon we did a pirate duck tour of the city & Biscayne Bay. Saw homes belonging to Gloria Estafan, Jackie Chan, Rosie O'Donnell & the man who invented the mag stripe on cards. Saw Fisher Island which is most expensive real estate in world - home to Oprah Winfrey, Andre Agassi & Steffi Graf. Saw home where Gianni Versace was shot dead on steps. Had swim & then dinner at one of Gloria Estafan's restaurants. Had Cuban food & tried plantains for first time - they are like bananas.
Still no package - website says delivered but that would be Charleston, then we had a weekend. Redirection didn't make it to Miami in time. Who knows if it will make it to Montgomery while we are there.
We left Miami early this morning & headed for Orlando. We arrived about 11.30am & went straight to Universal Studios. There are 2 parks there now so we bought 2 park passes. We started at the main park & did the new Despicable Me ride, Disaster ride, The Simpsons & ET before going across to Islands of Adventure where we did all the Dr Seuss rides before going to Harry Potter world. It was pretty cool to see Hogwarts & Hogsmead. We saw the Hogswart Express and had a butterbeer which tasted like a caramel/butterscotch thickshake. We did a tour of the Hogwarts castle & rode the Hippogriff rollercoaster. In Hogsmead we saw the Ollivanders wand shop which had a long queue to get in and we went to the Owl Post Office. We sent some postcards via owl post. On Superhero Island we did a superhero version of the Disney teacups. We also did the 3D Spiderman ride. There are quite a lot of these types of rides now. Some of them just seem to bump you around without going anywhere. The Spiderman one at least went out on tracks. It was pretty cool. This park closed at 7pm & about 5mins to we went on the rapids ride. We were the ones in our boat & we came out completely soaked. It was the second time we had got wet as it had poured down earlier when we were changing parks. This was much worse though so we decided to go to the hotel rather than back to the main park which wasn't closing until 8.30pm.
We are staying at Disney's Caribbean Beach resort. It seems very nice. There is a food & shopping area just a short walk away across a bridge. We went over there for dinner tonight. Tomorrow we will do the Disney parks. Buses will take us between the parks which makes it very easy to park hop.