December 26th, 2023
Wait, why am I writing this?! I still haven’t finished writing about Vietnam and Thailand!
Well, I had another vacation that I’m going to write about. It was two days long, and it was quite interesting.
But shouldn’t I finish up the Vietnam thing first and then start on this?
I could do that order… but I really don’t care.
Anyway…..
This Winter Break, I went on another trip, this one only being two days and one night, but I think it’s still worth talking about. This one went mostly to Orange County and Los Angeles, where we spent a day in Universal Studios. We also got to do this with my brother Casey’s friend It’s Electrolyte as well as Electrolyte’s older brother, who’s in my grade. It was really enjoyable to get to do this as a breather during that hell (if you’ve read course review, you know I have a lot on my plate). The trip began on December 26th, 2023 when we left our home in San Diego to drive up to Orange County.
Casey spent most of the ride to Orange County sitting on his phone watching YouTube shorts. I spent most of mine looking out the window at the countryside. It took a couple hours to get to Orange County. But the fun isn’t going to happen just yet— I know you’re excited for the rides, the adrenaline, listening to me telling about my suffering as I spent two hours waiting for a forty second ride… we’ll get there! But before that I had a whole day of enjoying conversations with friends. If you’ve read VN2023, you might recognize some of them. We went to have lunch with another family we knew which was mostly more Vietnamese food. Not much happened there other than the adult conversations, so I decided to turn my attention to my phone for most of the lunch meeting.
Do you remember Adan from VN2023? It was him we visited next. Most of that time was spent in his backyard, playing basketball. Adan had a few of his own friends over at the time, some of them I knew beforehand. The afternoon was a pretty fun one and we ended up having dinner with Adan as well. Me, Casey, Adan, and another boy named Derek sat down at the dinner table and starting having conversations. Casey and Adan spent most of the time just sitting on their phones, but Derek and I were chatting away for most of the night. Our families are currently in the middle of planning a huge trip to Japan as I’m writing this. The trip is in the summer of 2024, and I’m very excited to begin writing about it when I have the chance. (JP2024 is crazy)
Anyway, the conversations between me and Derek mostly revolved around how stupid kids our age could be. Then it turned into a rant on how Skibidi Toilet is going to take over the world one day. Then I searched up Skibidi Toilet Video Games for some reason (Don’t ask) and actually got something on Steam. Adan (hopefully jokingly) was all, “I’ll get that game, trust,” Which got a whole bunch of laughs from me and Derek. The rest of our time was spent playing Geoguesser on my phone.
Hanging out with Derek was a lot of fun that night. I have more productive conversations with him than I have with a lot of my other friends. I’m really excited to write about JP2024 and feature him all over it!
We had to drive roughly another hour to get to the hotel we would stay at that night. The next day would be the real fun: Universal’s. We just chilled out or the rest of the night and got ourselves rested before the long day began tomorrow.
We woke up in the morning the next day and immediately had the hotel breakfast. I didn’t feel like eating much (I never do honestly) so I ended up sort of just waiting for everyone else to finish eating. When we were done, we started to get ready for the day. We were only spending one night in our room so we needed to vacate everything and set up our backpacks. We then went back to the car and began to short drive to Universal’s. It took about 15 minutes to get there. We parked our car in this ten story parking lot building (Yes, they have so many guests that the park has a ten story parking lot building… and the park actually has several of those!) and walked out towards the park, where we would be meeting Electrolite and his brother.
Just outside of the park we had plenty of things to do. There were several buildings and restaurants, many of which (based on the signs in front of them) had a lot to do with the movie characters. We just walked past these particular attractions because we knew the real party was deeper into the park, past the security line we had to get through first. Yes, they have security in this park— they have full on metal detectors and fingerprint scanning. But don’t worry— it doesn’t take too long to get through and there are other lines which will be bigger parasites to your time.
Finally, we were in the park! It was time to have some fun and meet up with Electrolite— “They’re in line for a ride on the other side of the park,” My dad informed me and Casey. That was slightly disappointing, because the past couple days we’d been itching to hang out with him. “They’re in line. An hour long line.”
Everyone agreed it would be a waste of time to just sit out while we waited for Electrolite to finish his thing, so we decided to go find some rides of our own. The first one was the minion ride, which had a fairly quick line. Oh, and when I say ride, I of course mean sitting on a seat that moves around a few feet while you watch a video of the minions. (In other words, it’s how I watch TV on a leaning seat)
The next ride was even lower in intensity. (Short wait as well) It was about the Kung Fu Panda movie and was a lot like the minion ride where you sat on a chair and watched TV. This time, the chair didn’t even move. It just occasionally vibrated, and it’s no surprise that when we got out I commented, “Thanks for the back massage,”
Anyway, by the time we had gotten through those two rides, Electrolyte’s family had just finished their other ride so we planned to meet with them near the entrance of a ride called Revenge of the Mummy. We started making our way over there. To get there, we needed to take this really long escalator ride which took several minutes to get through. While you experienced this escalator ride, you could enjoy the view of not only the park, but the entire city all the way to the mountains just North of LA.
When we reached the bottom, we met Electrolite and his brother. After a quick meeting, we went to the locker room to store our stuff before we got on the ride. The Revenge of the Mummy is far too intense to keep your stuff with you, so we keep it here instead. Then we went on the line which took… I don’t even remember. It just took a long time. I’d say about 1.5 hours, which was pretty much the rest of the morning. The first half of the waiting was outside, in this back and forth labyrinth where not much happened. It was just full of people chattering and we spent most of the time conversing and standing there idle. Once we entered the building, however, everything changed.
The area became dark, filled with symbols from whatever movie the ride is for. There was a haunting voice rolling through the hallway of the line which gave me the chills, and after a little more waiting and staring at my phone… we were here. The Revenge of the Mummy. Out of every roller coaster I’ve ridden on so far, this one is definitely up there for one of the most intense, just behind the Silver Bullet at Knott’s. Electrolite’s brother probably knew what was coming, because right before we got to the ride he resigned and said he would meet us outside. I went along with them because I didn’t want to make the past hour a waste, but after experiencing the ride I half-wished I went with Electrolite’s brother.
The first couple rooms of the ride went by pretty slowly as they were basically a bunch of skulls and skeletons peeking out at you, and I pretty quickly realized that it was going to be intense. The first forty seconds of the ride, however, weren’t intense at all, which just made the suspense even more effective. I didn’t go on this ride last time I went to Universal’s Studios, so I had no idea when it would accelerate. Then we got to the point where we reached this room in which ten skulls sort of popped out of nowhere and then the thing started speeding up. The speeding up was very abrupt and intense and I had to just sort of wait out forty seconds of it. The roller coaster turned this way and that before going up, then maybe had a weightless moment here and there which made me lose it… it turned out the intense part was just a few dozen seconds long, but to me it felt like minutes.
Finally, the ride stopped! No, wait, we weren’t done yet… this isn’t where the people leave and get in… the roller coaster started to go backward, oh, hell no…
Don’t ask me how the roller coaster moved or which direction. I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was just holding on and trying to survive. And the next thing I knew, the ride was over. We went outside to meet Electrolite’s brother and then waitied for our parents to get everything out of the locker rooms. Us kids waited outside, trying to recover from the ride. Out of pure coincidence, I ran into a friend of mine I knew from school. We sort of just said hi to each other and then left, as she was eager to try out the Mummy Ride as well, which was her favorite of the rides. A few minutes after the encounter, we communicated by text and talked about our favorite rides for approximately two minutes before going on to our own things.
After a quick lunch (nothing notable really happened unless you count having a small struggle to find a place to eat), we headed to the transformers ride. The line for this ride was a little shorter than the line for the mummy ride and it was certainly worth it. The movement on the ride was fairly minimal (There was some, but it wasn’t an intense 50 mph roller coaster ride like the mummy one) and it was more of a simulation where they showed animations from the movies. (I think?) And the whole thing was basically just battling villain after villain until they ran out of characters, then the ride ended after that. Overall, a lot more chill than the Mummy Ride, but the chaos going around on their screens don’t entirely make it feel that way. I’d certainly recommend this ride if you don’t like drops (Which I don’t) or just lots of movement in general. This was the only ride that Electrolite’s Brother was brave enough to join us on.
The final ride that all of us went on together was the Jurassic Park ride, a water ride that wasn’t too turbulent but had one major drop at the end. I knew this drop was coming as I had taken the same ride in Orlando and assumed it’d be the same now. (Spoiler alert: it was.) However, everyone else didn’t know about this and waited in the line along with us. We waited about forty minutes there and made some but little progress towards the front. We waited… waited… and waited some more. Electrolyte’s brother got bored and decided to drop out, meaning he wouldn’t come with us on the ride. Electrolyte decided to stay on and his father did too after a short trip to the restroom.
We waited some more for the next hour, but we were still quite far away. Only about two hours in did we begin to get close— eventually, we were at the front, and finally we got into our seats and began to climb up the hill. Then the ride went down, but it was only a small drop. There was a minor drop after that but it wasn’t bad and was quite bearable.
After this, we rode through what was supposed to be a depiction of the dinosaur exhibit, showing us all these different dinosaurs that I can’t name. This was actually pretty interesting to see. Eventually, there was a “breach” in the exhibit and dinosaurs started appearing everywhere, which didn’t help my mood (I knew what was coming).
Eventually, the ride went to a very steep climb. It took a long time for it to finish its climb. Eventually it dropped again, but once again, only a short drop. Then it moved slowly through, as we saw a bunch of fake dinosaurs scream at us.
Then the drop came.
It was a quicker drop and before I knew it it was over, we were at the bottom in mere moments and I was slightly soaked in water. It was unexpected to Electrolyte, who later said he had wrongly predicted that there wouldn’t be any major drops.
By now, it was dark, so Electrolyte’s family left and we agreed to meet them again at a Thai restaurant about twenty minutes away. In the meantime though, Casey was interested in one of the Harry Potter rides, so we went to the Harry Potter area to let him do that. This time, none of us went on with him as we were quite exhausted of rides. Casey came back shortly after and said it wasn’t intense at all, but simply another action simulator on screens.
So now it was time to go to the Thai Resteraunt before wrapping up the trip and heading home. We waited about an hour but eventually went into the restaurant when a table was opened up for us. The food was really good (Wish I could remember what I ate) and it probably one of the best meals of the trip.
And that’s it. The story of my one day Excursion to Universal Studios in Los Angeles. Next is Japan 2024… (Unless we have another trip to document first)