Part two of our day at Universal Orlando! (I didn’t catch it, but the dragon actually shoots fire.)
The globe! It’s right outside the gate.
The gate to the park!
This park’s sections are city-based, so they have Hollywood, New York, San Francisco, Springfield (the Simpsons), and London (which fronts the Harry Potter stuff).
The London section has red telephone booths, the Eros fountain from Piccadilly Circus, and the Knight Bus from the Harry Potter movies! (Supposedly it’s one of the busses used in the filming.) This is also where you get off the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross Station (if you came from the Islands of Adventure park).
Just like in the movie, Diagon Alley is hidden behind the regular London streets. There’s several entrances in the park (including the brick one by the Leaky Cauldron), and the one we found was unmarked and looked almost like an entrance to the bathrooms (plain white stone where you go around either side of a wall set back from the entrance). The only reason I thought to try it is that there were too many people coming and going for it to be the bathrooms. And yep! You come around the corner and you’re in Diagon Alley.
They had all the things in their Diagon Alley! (They even had Knockturn Alley.)
The main ride in this section is Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts. The line is nearly as much an attraction as the ride. You walk through the Gringotts lobby (with goblins at their desks on either side), then go down a hallway to get a security photo taken (which I think they try to sell to you later), and get to see newspapers with moving pictures in them. Finally you climb some stairs into a stalactite-laden cave where you board the ride.
And after all that, we didn’t have time for Voodoo Doughnut. But we walked by on the way to the parking structure!
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