Universal Epic Universe

Today I visited Epic Universe, a new Universal theme park that opened about 5 months ago. Apparently, it's the first new theme park in the US in over 20 years. Indeed, there has been much hype surrounding this park, so I was excited to visit it.

The park is visually impressive - with five distinct "portals" each representing various themes. There's a portal for Harry Potter, another for classic Universal movie monsters, and one for How to Train Your Dragon. Then there's an area dedicated to Nintendo and Mario Bros. and finally Celestial Park which is the center of the park.

Since the park is so new, it showcases brand new technology and innovations, and more interactive features than most other theme parks.

The downside of the park being new is that everyone wants to visit it! So the wait time for most of the rides was extremely long. The most popular ride, themed around Harry Potter, had a wait time of 4 hours all day - even more at times. As much as I wanted to try the ride, which experts have billed as the best theme park ride in the world, I didn't want to stand in line for over 4 hours.

I did try another one of the much-talked-about new rides though - Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment. "The groundbreaking ride features 14 of the most ambitious and life-like animated figures ever designed — each one depicting one of the legendary Universal Monsters."

The ride was really cool - and getting up close in a ride vehicle that spun around in all directions with Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, Wolf Man and others was a lot of fun.

Later, I went to explore the Harry Potter themed land, which is designed to look like Paris in the 1920s, inspired by the Fantastic Beasts movies. It's quite well done and really impressive. I saw a live show called Le Cirque Arcanus, which is described as a "spectacular mix of live performers, amazing puppetry, dazzling special effects and more".

Like I mentioned before, I really wanted to do the main ride of this portal, Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry, but the wait time was just too long.

I did get to try one of the rides in the Nintendo portal, a cute slow ride called Yoshi's Adventure, where you were transported around the portal.

The last ride I tried was in the "How to Train Your Dragon — Isle of Berk" portal, which was a water ride with fire-breathing dragons!

I also had lunch inside the park - at the Atlantic restaurant which had a stunning view of the lake. The food and drinks were good as well.

It was a very hot day, so I'm glad I was able to take a break sometime over the afternoon at my hotel, one of the official Universal hotels close to the park, and then return again later. Overall, the wait times for most of the rides were high during the entire day, so I'm sure it will be much more enjoyable to visit the park in a year or two, when the hype has died down a bit, and the crowds are hopefully more manageable.

I'm glad I saw the park in person though - a very different experience than going to Disney World which I've tried a lot of times now :)Read more