ADVENTURES! V.1A: LEAKYCON 2014 ETC.
Well, here I am. It's been a crazy couple weeks and I'm still mostly avoiding Tumblr (for some...reason? I think to make myself focus/not fall into the rabbit hole?) until I can get these writeups written. I'm always like, Does anyone even care about these things, or am I just chronicling my own adventures for the sake of my own vanity? I guess a couple of people have told me they enjoy them in the past. Whatever bc I'm gonna do it anyway.
This is to be the first of three FIVE OR MORE UGH similar posts, apparently I'm too wordy to live: vol. 1(a, b and c) is LeakyCon Adventures, vol. 2 is StarKid Summer Season Adventures, and vol. 3 is 48 Hour Film Project Adventures. Volume 4 is "I'm dead, how the fuck did I do all of these things in less than two weeks."
Standard disclaimer: I just vomited this up so please don't judge my formatting or typos; also I may have left out some crucial anecdotes or gotten some facts/timelines goofed because I'm running on half-assed notes and fumes so if I forgot something throw it in the comments! And without further ado!!!
Tuesday
Which, I mean, every trip REALLY starts the night before, when I'm frantically packing everything despite the fact that there is no need to be frantic because I'm a really good packer. Three cheers for travel anxiety!! I MADE myself lay down to attempt to sleep by midnight, because my Tuesday morning flight left bright and early at about 9am and we had to get to the airport mad early. No trouble there, really. With my assorted sundry cosplay items jammed in my backpack, my alligator stuffed in my purse and my fragile items securely buried in my checked bag, the only thing at the airport that gave me any trouble at all was... Brandon??
This cryptic motherfucker. I'd seen a tweet or two from him a few weeks prior implying that he was going to be at Wizarding World sometime at the end of the month, and I was like, hah, wouldn't that be fun if he was there while I was there and we could hang out! But Tuesday morning he's tweeting about chugging his last Baja Blast to stay awake and how early flights are the worst, and I was like, okay, well, Mr. Vaguesauce, see you at the freakin airport. We must have been on different airlines though because I didn't see him at all, even though we were going to the same place at roughly the same time of day. hmmmmm what the fuck are you on about sir. AND WHAT EVEN WAS THE POINT OF NOT TELLING ME. lmao.
My ORF > ATL flight was 98% painless. I HAD been hoping to play Siege of Spinner Cay on the flight, but it turns out it wanted me to re-validate some Telltale info which I couldn't do without wifi, so I had to make due writing like 2 paragraphs of this klaine fic I've been trying to crank out, and listening to the Twisted soundtrack, and doing the in-flight magazine crossword puzzle. Also, there was a teeny tiny dog riding in his owner's lap that was making THE WORST NOISE out of fear/panic, oh my GOD it was irritating, like, I felt bad for the dog but oh my GOD??? It sounded like the squeaky wheel on an elementary school TV cart. It started during takeoff and as far as I know never stopped, though I did eventually put my headphones in. Yikes.
In Atlanta I got my Monkey Island ish sorted, which was good, because thanks to some shitty Orlando weather my layover got extended an extra half an hour or so, and I had plenty of time to play. Soon enough we were finally actually boarding though and I chatted to some girl with cute short hair and an AWESOME suitcase, only to discover she was also headed to LeakyCon. Hehehe fun! We kind of pal'd around until they finally let us on the plane, but she was sitting nowhere near me, so bummer. I think her name was Allie? or similar? YOU WERE COOL AND I NEVER SAW YOU AGAIN AFTER THE AIRPORT boo tbh :(
So I finally land at MCO and I start to catch up on what's going on with everyone else: Namely, that Sera's flight out of Toronto, which was supposed to leave at 6:30 am, is STILL on the ground. They apparently got everyone on board, taxi'd out to the runway, and then discovered some kind of mechanical malfunction and had to bring the plane all the way back and deplane EVERYONE and keep the thing grounded until they got it fixed. Ultimately, Sera's flight to Orlando was delayed by seven hours. I feel like every time I travel, some shit goes wrong for me, UNLESS Sera is also traveling at the same time, and then it gets passed off onto her. I almost feel responsible for this. AWFUL. Anyway, she was supposed to be the first to Florida but now it's me, and with my mini-delay, Hannah and I were arriving a lot closer together, so the plan was just to pop over to Southwest's arrivals after getting my checked bag and chill for a minute. Plane friend Allie and I encountered another Leaky person whose name I am forgetting (sorry!) and the three of us partnered together to achieve success find what we were looking for: bag claim for me and Allie, and the other person's friends arriving on a separate flight. Hooray!
Southwest was actually conveniently right where Delta had let out also, so I just went back the way I came and kind of parked it for a while. Struck up a nice lil companionship with a 40something guy named...Ricky? Randy? who watched my junk while I went to fill my water bottle - we talked about him visiting his daughter, and about his work (some kind of garbage disposal thing but like, higher up than a garbage man? BASICALLY it came down to him getting a lot of cool, free, awesome stuff that people just throw out in the trash, like the really nice men's tote bag he was using) and I guess I said some stuff about Harry Potter and my green hair or something hahaha I think we mostly talked about him. The whole thing went on a little longer than it needed to, so eventually I put my headphones back in and started up Lair of the Leviathan after having finished Spinner Cay on my ATL > MCO flight. Managed to save RIGHT as my computer battery kicked the bucket, and then abandoned RickyRandy because I super needed an outlet to charge my phone. Also because I needed to get away from this REVOLTING teenaged PDA couple who were sitting across from us. Like, super yikes.
Eventually: HANNAH! We were super stoked to see each other aahhhh the bae. Her purple hair is rad as fuck. Meanwhile, Sera's plane is FINALLY in the air, seven hours after its intended departure time, so after some snacks and catch-up Hannah and I check the Air Canada times online and get a ballpark figure for her. We decide to just wait it out in MCO rather than trying to check into the hotel, and we check the boards to figure out where she's coming out...only...the boards do not think Sera's flight exists??? Like eventually we figured it was just because she was supposed to have arrived so long ago and that flight wasn't still up there but DANG. NO SERA FOR US. :( JK though because she finally got there and we did the running and the hugs and all of the things hooray hooray. Dipped out of the airport ASAP in an Uber and headed to the hotel! Our Uber driver was a SUPER COOL older dude named Gary who chatted a lot to Sera about Canada stuff (he's visiting the Toronto area soon) and was incredibly nice to us even as he got lost and confused in the TORRENTIAL, ZERO-VISIBILITY DOWNPOUR that struck literally just for the 20 minutes in which we were trying to get to our hotel. Welcome to fucking Florida.
Sera's like, we're at the Rosen Centre? And I was like, I thought it was the Rosen Plaza? And we literally could not figure this out so we just stopped at both. But, Plaza. So we unload there and go about the check-in process and she says, Sorry, the hotel was overbooked, so I think we moved you to the Rosen Shingle Creek.
Um. Fucking excuse me? I was doing the people-dealing stuff at this point so I was like, We never received any kind of notification about this, and she told us we should've gotten an email, but I was like no, look, exactly one week ago today we did get an email, and that email was confirming our reservation here at the Rosen Plaza. LeakyCon had told us that some people were moved, because of overbooking, so we knew it was happening to SOME people, but had assumed not to us, because we were LITERALLY NEVER NOTIFIED. But apparently that's what was fucking happening, so the concierge girl (who was actually super nice and helpful, and I tried not to be a bitch because it wasn't her fault) hooked us up with a free shuttle to the Shingle Creek and it's at least 5:30 by now by the time we check in there instead. Of course, Shingle Creek doesn't have anyone's name on file with the reservation except Gabi, despite the fact that Kelsey, Sera and I were included on the original Plaza reservation, so I had to pull up my original confirmation email to be like LOOK, OKAY, JUST GIVE US A FUCKING ROOM. Finally: 9106. We did not think we would ever make it.
(Wow I was not expecting the Tuesday section to be this long. Apparently I have a lot of feelings about the INJUSTICES WE WERE DONE. TUESDAY WAS TERRIBLE.)
None of us have really eaten anything that could conceivably be called "A Meal" at this point, so while we figure out how to order some Chinese delivery, Gabi's making all of their crazy international flights relatively fine, and Kelsey's...not. Something happened with Kelsey's flight too, I think the Stupid Orlando Weather problem and also possibly a Stupid Denver Weather situation too, and she was not going to be leaving until VERY LATE LIKE WAS NOT GOING TO ARRIVE IN ORLANDO UNTIL AFTER 1AM EST. n-nooooooo the worst. The Chinese place gave us a SHITTON of food but that was almost not even enough to help us all stay awake long enough to greet Gabi and Kelsey when they arrived. I started playing Carlos Valdes's EP out of sheer spaced-out boredom. MONKEY WITH THE GLASSEZZZZZ~ whatever. BUT FINALLY LIKE 1:45 OR LATER THEY ARRIVED AND WE DID ALL OF THE HUGS AND WE WERE DYING EVERYWHERE AND YYYEAAHHHHHHH oh my god. getting to florida was terrible and I never want to do it again. TOO BAD IT'S IN ORLANDO AGAIN NEXT YEAR. kill.
Because we were too hype on seeing each other the last thing we did Tuesday night was PRESENTS!! Spoilers: I brought everyone a ton of stupid presents. For Hannah I made a pinwheel and also bought her some Heathers earrings off Etsy (she was like I WAS JUST LOOKING AT THESE ON ETSY HOW DID U KNOW hehehe I'm the best), for Gabi I had gotten them a doll from Kitsch and a couple of antique books (one on French military history and one on badass women of the reign of Louis XIV, I'm such a boss and they geeked over these HARD), for Sera I bought her a Watsky Kill A Hipster t-shirt and also made her a Sloppy Seconds-themed painting/cutout thinger, and for Kelsey I did the second half of her World's Worst Musical Birthday Pack heheheheeee. All of which were in colorful bags and most of which came with cards. I am such an aggressive gift-giver I am THE WORST. No but literally all of these were birthday presents that I just never mailed to people and gave them in person instead!! So YEAH. ALSO Sera made us all fun friendship bracelets!! aaahhhh all the friendships.
But then all of the sleeping. We really needed to do the sleeping pretty badly. But Hannah, Sera and I all slept in one bed and this was probably a Bad Idea. ALSO our beds did not have like? bedspreads/comforters?? the whole time we were in Orlando which made it VERY hard to sleep bc the blankets we did have weighed like nothing and I can't sleep without heavy. Oh lord the Struggle.
Soundbite of the day for Tuesday: "He's just, like, a blank space where a person should be." Three guesses as to who Sera said that about l m a o. Second only to this was a discussion about the non-American pronunciation of puma as "pyuu-ma." pfft.
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Wednesday!
As if to imply that a large portion of the Tuesday report didn't really happen on Wednesday anyway lmao. But yeah we let ourselves goof off and do Not Much Of Anything Wednesday morning (for people who are good at sleeping this was...sleeping, for people who are bad at sleeping like me this was finishing Lair of the Leviathan hehe) until we needed to get over to pick up our registration. And like, if Tuesday was the Worst Day, Wednesday was the Second-Worst Day and it only went uphill from there because registration was a goddamn clusterfuck.
First of all, they opened 2 hours late, which is shitty but like, not a huge deal beyond just being shitty because once it's done it's done and what can you do? Besides, us Rosen Plaza Rejects out at the Shingle Creek were subject to the whims of whenever they fucking decided they were going to give us our free shuttle over to the convention, which was at like 12:30 anyway. God this relocation stuff was such bullshit. ("Go to where the rocking chairs are!" So we walk around the side of the hotel and yep, just a bunch of nerds in rocking chairs. wooooo.) And when we arrived on the scene for reg the line seemed to be managed pretty well. There was a big snake-line for people who were just getting there, and after you snaked through a bunch of times, it split off by last name into the shorter individual lines. There was also a separate RockStar line so this is where we lost Gabi, and the other four of us just sat and chilled. Saw a bunch of cool people in this line - RAD AS FUQ Bellatrix cosplayer, girl with super-neat blue hair, Proma Kholsa chilling with some volunteers, u kno u kno. (Also a tiny child dressed as Karkat? Like, friend this is not the time and place. But you do you I guess. And a really horrible Desert Bluffs Kevin cosplay too like I just do nOT UNDERSTAND PPL WHO COSPLAY ON THE DAY BEFORE/REGISTRATION DAY save it for the con proper?? whatever I am trying Not To Judge ugh too slytherin for this earth)
Between some fun time to chat with each other and some fun #straussycon shit happening on twitter this line wasn't actually TOO bad for a while, and we snaked on through until finally we reached the area where they were calling like, SOME last name letter people to cut up to the alphabetical lines that were shorter/were moving more quickly. E-F-G line was one of those so I got a pass! So did Hannah, to the K-L line, we're ballers. My line was... Fine. Annoying Scottish girl standing in front of me wanted to talk a little more than I did but I dealt with it lmao. Like TWO people ahead of me the staff got caught up on one person for a really long time and I was just...standing there... While I was waiting Gabi emerged from the RockStar line and sat down on the floor next to me to review all of their swag stuff. No house ribbons??? WE WERE ALL P PUT OUT ABOUT IT TBH. But really cool Tin Can Bros stuff!!!!! Also I saw Jordan I think. And Lizzie! All of the friends! And then finally my turn! Staff was cute ppl. The dude was like "Okay how old are you? Okay here's your 21+ wristband for the Esther Earl ball and I need to put in on you RIGHT NOW." ahahaha. And then I was good to go and I went to find Hannah so we could rejoin Sera and Kelsey who were still in the snakey line.
They finally called Sera up for C-D and I kinda went with her just for solidarity since Hannah was still with Kelsey and we were like, they are not ever going to call M-N. It was weird though because as I went past M-N to C-D, M-N actually looked a lootttt shorter? Like Sera's line was all the way to the back wall but M-N had merged with O-P and even the two put together didn't go that far back. So I was like, You know what, I am going to sneak Kelsey into this line. And that's exactly what I fucking did. I went back and got her, and we waited until the staffer dude's back was turned, and then just slotted her right into that fucking line. I was not here for this waiting for 3 hours bullshit that we were undergoing. We need to bounce yoooo.
IT'S A GOOD THING I DID TOO BECAUSE: Almost immediately after that, staff starts making an announcement that if you are NOT going to Open At The Close, they want you to come back and pick your registration up in the morning, because people who ARE going need to get theirs first because the buses are leaving for the park at 4 and here it is like 3:15. Which was fine for Sera I guess but not for Kelsey and Kelsey was PISSED because like, did we not just wait in these lines for 3 hours?? Come on NOW. A lot of people had the same attitude and they were just like, not leaving. This mandate accomplished basically nothing lmao. For the C-D line they were just having OATC people cut to the front and shuffling non-OATC people to the back, which seemed to make way more sense! But the other half of the alphabet was kind of getting yelled at? IDK I already had my stuff at this point and wasn't super following how it was all happening. Gabi was planning on making a complaint to the customer service table at the other end about another outstanding issue re: some shit emails and they were like "I will just tack that on too let me go do the thing." Meanwhile in M-N, a couple of people RIGHT AHEAD OF KELSEY were allowed to pick their non-OATC registration up, but when Kelsey got there, staff members had just switched over or something? and they wouldn't let her do it. RIGHT AFTER THEY DID LET OTHER PEOPLE DO IT. We were pissed. I was like, no, don't leave, stay in this fucking line bc if Gabi is gonna go complain and make it work you should be here anyway, just fucking try again. Everyone but Kelsey has their shit by now and it's ridiculous. I think eventually a kind staff person did bend the rules/turn the other way and let Kelsey through, but I wasn't really around for that bc Hannah and I decided to embark on a noble undertaking of buying McDonald's for everyone since we haaadddn't really eaten that day and we needed to get food before OATC since they weren't feeding us till 11:30.
HERE'S THE FUCKING DEAL ABOUT ORLANDO: It's miserably hot. Everything is about a mile or more from the convention center/con hotels. And there is no fucking public transit. Hannah and I were not 100% clear about where we were going but we had to hike all the way to this little shopping center - across stretches with no sidewalk, in some places - just to get some overpriced fast food. The McDonald's was SWARMING with tourists and we almost didn't make it back in time to like, sit and eat before the Wizarding World buses got there. This was so SHITTY. This was probably the hottest/worst stretch of walking I had to do the whole convention, because after we did this, we swore we were not going to fucking do it again. Thank god for wearing bodyglide and a black tank top that didn't show pit sweat.
Gabi had made some new friends, and we met them for like .2 seconds before they all split off and we lingered just long enough to scarf our McD's before the BUSES TO WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER CAME AND PICKED US UP, THIS WAS A REAL THING THAT WE DID, WE WENT TO WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER. God, I felt terrible that Gabi and Kelsey weren't coming with us, but it was hard to feel TOO terrible because: Wizarding World of Harry Potter. They dropped us off at Universal Studios and it was still kind of sweat city (the person in front of us in line for the park had on FULL ROBES, I was like qurl what are u even doing) but the sun was going down, things were getting better, and there was only a short hike separating us from Diagon Alley. !!!
We took some dumb tourist pics at 12 Grimmauld Place (!!!) before heading into Diagon Alley proper through the fucking HOLE IN THE WALL JUST LIKE THE BOOKS GOD YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW BADASSLY ALL-OUT THEY HAVE GONE HERE UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN THERE YOUR OWN SELF and then we were like, Everything said to high-tail it straight to Gringotts if we wanted to even get on the ride at all because the line is Murder. Hannah and Sera aren't really Rides People but they both kind of agreed that Harry Potter stuff is DIFFERENT and they were going to suck it up and do it anyway and I was like, hell yeah goblin minecart coaster so we walked over there. We walked all... the way... down... the huge ass line... and we were ALMOST to the end but then the beautiful Lizzie stopped us to say hey to me, and she ended up smuggling us into her part of the line instead. It probably shaved about half an hour off our wait time, which was GREAT, and so nice of her omg thank you Lizzie forever. She'd made some cool friends in line!! named Zara (sp?), Stephanie (??? we FORGOT YOUR NAME WE'RE THE WORST) and Maddie and we hung out with them pretty much the whole time as we desperately tried to keep cool in this long, long, outdoor line for Escape from Gringotts. There was a dude in front of us wearing too much cologne and that was straight GROSS every time we passed one of the big cool-off fans and it just blew it straight into our faces. We heard a lot of applause from ahead of us only to turn and see that the cosplayers we started calling Young Snape and Old Snape were heading down the path to get in line (Old Snape looks enough like Alan Rickman that if he DIDN'T cosplay snape it would be a fucking waste; Young Snape may or may not actually be related to Old Snape but we saw them together a lot and he makes a perfect like greasy, Hogwarts-age teen snape or whatever, he kind of reminds me of that gross Lelouche that you see around east coast anime cons sometimes hehe). FINALLY we make it to the part of the line that's INSIDE (Zara was really struggling at this point bc she's a bigger girl and she was gettin' super overheated, poor friend) and we can kind of cool off, and they have us go through this thing where you put your bags in a locker (with ur fingerprint??? that was kind of spooky cool) and then we're IN GRINGOTTS!! Selfies with animatronic goblins!! Cool newspaper articles on display with MOVING WIZARD PICS WE DID NOT REALIZE THEY WERE GONNA MOVE BC THE PAPER WAS SO LEGIT JUST A PAPER AND WE JUMPED AND SCREAMED WITH DELIGHT THIS WAS SO AWESOME. Chandeliers!! REALLY COOL STUFF!!!!
We went through the "elevator" part that's like Haunted Mansion where you're not really descending but they do a great job of making you feel like you are and then we spilled out into this SUPER crowded "underground" hallway where I think there were KIND OF two "lines"?? But so many people were crammed in there that we couldn't make sense of it all. The path to where the 3D glasses were was totally jampacked and the people standing closest to the glasses were having to grab big handfuls and pass them out to everyone else because we couldn't move. It took us a while to figure out what was going on but eventually we did when another two elevators' full of people released into the area but those of us already there still hadn't moved forward, which was...we were not moving forward. We found out later that one of the cars was down for about 20 minutes, which I guess happened to be the EXACT 20 minutes that we were down there trying to get on this ride. It was really stressful and kind of scary for a while because people kept coming in but no one was going out and after a while we were super sardined in there. And there weren't any ride attendants/park people down there with us, just guests, so we didn't have any idea what was going on. And at one point a fight almost broke out. YEAH. A FULL-ON FIGHT. This dude straight body-checked into this other dude in a TIGHT ENCLOSED SPACE, AND THEY WERE RIGHT NEXT TO ME WHEN IT HAPPENED and he was not joking, he was dead serious???? omg terrifying. we think they were probably brothers, and a woman who was probz their mom scolded them and got them to knock it off, but for a moment there I was like, A full-on riot is going to break out in this tight-packed space and someone is going to get trampled to death. Like my safety was touch-and-go there for a little while holy shit.
The line FINALLY starts moving again and we all desperately make a train to hang onto each other, all seven of us, and soon enough we are getting on the RIDE CART FOR ESCAPE FROM GRINGOTTS AND WE ESCAPED FROM GRINGOTTS. !!!!! The initial drop was AWESOME and then the rest of it kind of didn't top that ride-wise but I so did not care because Bill Weasley is awesome and the whole thing was awesome and I had super huge amounts of fun. All in all it was just BARELY worth the 3-hour wait. Like, I definitely don't regret waiting in that line to do it for the first time, but having already done it, I would never wait in that line to do it again. Cool cool. Gotta say I think WWOHP has done a fucking FLAWLESS job of seamlessly pairing their video-sequence stuff with the actual motion of the rides, like I genuinely do not know how you fucking do that and it pretty much blew my mind, on Gringotts and especially on Forbidden Journey MORE ON THAT LATER HEHE.
After Gringotts we were like, okay, we have SUPER LIMITED TIME in which to do our other stuff so we basically have to book it to Forbidden Journey ON THE HOGWARTS EXPRESS. !!!! Dude this was so rad, we snaked through the line singing Harry Freaking Potter (Platform 9 3/4 set us off I think lmao I was rita skeetering everywhere) and took some selfies with the big stacks of luggage and some pics of the train and THEN got a car all to ourselves and rode over to Hogsmeade!! The video sequence on the train is REALLY COOL though it is TREMENDOUSLY obvious that the Hermione voice over is Not Emma Watson lmao we were laughing about this like "hermione u ok." Also hooray for sitting down on seats with cushions for a hot minute. By the time we made it to Hogsmeade it was pretty much dark, and the park was clearing out, and the line for Forbidden Journey was REALLY not that long like we skipped huge chunks of it the way you do with Verbolten when the line is short hehe.
Like one line-bend ahead of us in line for Forbidden Journey was a whole bunch of StarKids!!!!! THIS WAS SO RAD!! We kept walking past them like "oh hey guys" and Julia said hey and Nick said hey and Dylan and BRosenthal were adorable and Brian and Meredith were gross and Breredithy everywhere and it was presh as fuck omg havin lots of fun with some bros. There was one part of the line where we kind of stopped under this overhang and if you looked up through a gap in it, you could see right up the side of the Hogwarts castle with like this really awesome view of it aaahhhh so we stopped and were like aaahhh cool and (important story alert) we're stopped going "aahhhh cool" and Nick stops next to us like "Whoa, what's up there?" So we were just like "...umm nothing haha embarrassing it's just the castle is really cool" and he was like "Oh, I thought you like, saw a ghost or something" and we laughed and then he goes "Hey um what part of the castle is that anyway?" And we couldn't tell if he was trolling?? like if he was like "haha nerds" sassing us for caring as much as we did or if he was being genuine, and we were kind of mumbling out an answer trying to figure it out when fucking Brian Holden claps his hand on Nick's shoulder like ~old sport and leans over to us and goes "Is that the lightning-struck tower?" IN HIS FUCKING BRIAN HOLDEN VOICE WE COULDN'T DEAL we like giggled nervously just to have some kind of reaction and as soon as they were gone we absolutely burst out laughing. Could Not Handle It. "Is that the ~~lightning-struck tower~~?" THE WHOLE WEEKEND WE ARE SAYING THIS, AND LAUGHING EVERY TIME. god fucking damnit.
Meandered through the line some more in that really cool room with the portraits of the four founders talking about stuff and then like. FORBIDDEN. FUCKING. JOURNEY!!!????!?!?! I'M SORRY BUT I'VE NEVER BEEN ON A RIDE GREATER THAN THIS RIDE IT IS THE BEST RIDE THAT THERE IS. I'm still so like, in fucking awe of how there were parts of it that were Real Ass Ride and parts of it that were You're In Front Of A Screen and they all synched together so seamlessly? and how we were flying on broomsticks with harry potter???? I definitely cried at least once, I was so overwhelmed, this is the greatest thing and I want to do it ten thousand more times. Maddie felt the same, we were like squeaking at each other when it was over and I was like AGAIN AGAIN but we did not do it again buutttt I wanted toooooo. And parts of it were real legit scary!! Like the Whomping Willow my heart kind of skipped a beat because you are So Close to it hitting you and I was like "if any part of this malfunctions mechanically AT ALL this thing is going to smash my head in." aahhhh spooky. Also I think spiders were a thing people didn't like but they didn't really bother me except one SPITS ON YOU hecka gross ahahaha. Mostly the Quidditch/broom parts though. sobbing. Anyone who can go on Forbidden Journey in their lifetime should go on Forbidden Journey in their lifetime. I need to go again. Just found out my mom is going to get to go in November and I'm so stoked for her ashagkjhlkejrh I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS RIDE I'M SO PREDICTABLE BUT THERE IT IS
As with Gringotts, my Not Rides buddies were like "okay that was cool but also terrifying" so after Forbidden Journey we kind of split up a bit! The less-ride-inclined folks were going to try Flight of the Hippogriff because we had been told that was a calmer easier sort of thing and the other half of us high-tailed it over to the Dragon Challenge to make sure we got on that at least once before all the rides closed (they were already weeding the Real People out of the park for just the OATC people aahhh so cool). We went on the Chinese Fireball side first and like. It was fun but?? This park is NOT a park that is usually open After Dark so the ride was not really equipped with like...lights...or a setup that was interesting to do in the dark? So we were just. Riding a roller coaster in the dark. You could kind of see out into the park in some places like across the Whole Universal and that was pretty neat I guess but overall I was underwhelmed with the dragon stuff especially after Forbidden Journey which was OVER OVER whelming hehe. Also there was this clusterfuck with my water bottle --
Since the park was technically closing, the "stick ur stuff here while u ride the thing" lockers were no longer available? So we were like shit, what do we do with all our junk?? FORTUNATELY, right as we were approaching Dragon Challenge, I managed to find Jordan, and when she assured us that she was going to be chilling where she was outside like the Owl Post area for a little while, we felt cool with leaving our bags and stuff with her. But as we're walking to the ride sans stuff, I realize I'm still totally holding my water bottle like a dweeb. So I was like whatever I'll just stick it behind me on the ride nbd. BUTTTT the girl working there saw it and was like, You can't take that on the ride, it's okay I'll hold it here at the window for you and just come get it when you get off. So like whatever, okay, cool.
But like we got off the red dragon and I still had time to try the blue one too, and I had just run into Claudia Ravenclawdia and we were having A MOMENT so we decided to go Hungarian Horntail together and I was like ok cool I'll just get my water bottle when we get off THAT instead. And that was big fun and I chilled with Claudia for a second and that was really cool and then I got off and tried to go back for my water bottle but it...was on the red side...and I was on the blue side.... And I had to make a BIG FUSS at this fuckin dude to go get my thermos for me omg I was so fucking annoyed like dude SHE TOOK IT FROM ME SHE SAID IT WAS AT THE WINDOW CAN YOU PLEASE JUST and I must have stood there for a straight five or seven minutes while he just like...wandered around...did nothing...did not appear to have any interest in helping me at all like fuq u guy. Smfh that was irritating as fuck.
OKAY BUT LIKE THEN. That clusterfuck completed, reunited with our bags and our other buddies (apparently Hippogriff was nowhere near as much of a kiddie ride as they had been led to believe and they were unimpressed haha oops), we got BACK on the Hogwarts Express (!!! this is too much for me okay) and headed back to Diagon Alley so that we could there in time for the free food to begin at 11:30. The return trip was so much sillier ahaha lol fake emma watson still and also HARRY EATS A SPIDER? LIKE IT'S A LICORICE SPIDER BUT U DON'T KNOW THAT WHEN HE FIRST EATS IT so random lol we were losin it. Also our ride attendant was way less sillyfun on the way back but that's muggles for ya.
AND THEN YAAAYYY THE THING! Food was like. reasonable considering it was free lol. I think Hannah and Sera waited for drinks first but the rest of us were starving and there was like, a quinoa thing, some beef stew with veggies and stuff, decent salad, and bread/rolls that were tasty. We're waiting in line and poor Pat Brady is trying to get her ish together and this glass of wine spills like all over the table where they're trying to eat aww. Also we saw BHoldz trying to get a drink of water at this water fountain and either he accidentally, or Meredith totally on purpose, set off this thing on top of the fountain thing with one of those interactive wands, and some water spouted out of the very top of the fountain and Brian had a little freakout of surprise lmao it was really funny ok. bholdz. We didn't even get a table we just camped the fuck out on a cool patch of the ground and stuffed our faces omg we were so hungry.
While we were waiting in line the Three Brothers show was going and I was sad to be missing it but food was like, more important...but then later after we had already finished mostly and I'd gotten a couple drinks (I had to at least TRY the butterbeer and it was aight frozen but what I was really after was that fizzy lemonade stuff) the Celestina Warbeck show started and I'M SO HYPE FOR CELESTINA WARBECK Y'ALL. I LOVE HER. I tried to stay sitting down but after a while I was just like nope fuck it I need a better view and I rushed up to stand on the edge of the crowd around the stage and gaaaaahhhh. Being one of her backup Banshees = new life goal ugh omg and they did the Quidditch fight song thing (it's Portree's I think or Puddlemere's? googles this ok yeah puddlemere fuck yeah oliver wood) which was EXTRA LEGIT and then there was one song where they pulled up an audience volunteer? AND THE DUDE THEY PICKED. HE WAS SO INTO IT Y'ALL he was like playing along with ALL the choreography and they put her feather boa on him and he was All About It duuuude he was absolutely the best we were so fuckin delighted omg. To the point that like they called him out at closing ceremonies when they were talking about OATC they were like "The audience guy from the 12:30 Celestina he was so great omg is he here???" and he was near the back and he stood up and everyone applauded him because he was The Shit u rocked it dude. omg. Celestina, basically. Would that I were even half as fabulous.
Most of the rest of what happened was wondering and shopping and staring at Diagon Alley and seeing friends!! We saw All of the friends. Jordan some more, and Arianna &co. here and there, and we hung out a bunch with Valentina in Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, which was PACKED with nerds buying pygmy puffs. Spoilers I totally bought a pygmy puff. It's a purple one and her name is Flavia! Maddie got a pink one and named him Steve. We both did the dorky Naming Ceremony where the cashier rings the bell and announces to the whole store that we're getting them and what their names are and stuff omg so dumb. BUT LIKE EVERYONE WAS DOING IT SO WE DID IT TOO. THE AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE. I got some WWW buttons for Avery too~ hehehe funfun. We also spent a fair amount of time wandering in Honeydukes but I couldn't justify buying anything for myself there because it was all just...candy...that u would eat and then it would be gone? And a lot of it wasn't even candy that I LIKED. I looked for those super-legit jelly slugs that Angel & Chatam got me for my birthday because I DID really like those but I guess those are the off-brand unofficial ones and not the ones they have in the park proper hahaha. So none of that for me.
BESIDES WE WERE ALREADY GONNA GET FREE ICE CREAM... We headed over to Florean Fortescue's to nab some of their lil free cups and that was legittttt. I got the salted caramel blondie (A+++ WOULD RECOMMEND TO EVERYONE), some kind of chocolate toffee thing (also bangin'), and then look Hannah and I were really set on eating the clotted cream flavor but when we got there they HAD no pre-scooped free cups of it? so we were like ??? And the girl working there was super legit and went and got us some ~from the back~ BUT it was not super-cold so by the time we were eating it it was super-melty and we were basically drinking it. But yeah we chilled for a while just on the steps of Gringotts eating ice cream and that was so great. THESE CUTE GIRLS IN DELTA ZETA SHIRTS CAME BY AND THE DELTA WAS A DEATHLY HALLOWS AND THE ZETA HAD A LIGHTNING BOLT IN IT AND I WAS LIKE "UR SO CUTE GREEK NERDS LET ME LOVE YOU" and that was the bomb and also also we took a bunch of pics in Sirius/Hagrid's motorbike that was right there, on the bike and the sidecar, supes fun. I don't have any of these actually! but they were great and whoever has them hopefully posted them/should definitely post them ok cool. Also the dragon on top of Gringotts as I'm sure you all know by now BREATHES REAL FIRE and so the fire would just go off and it was so toasty omg you could feel it really strongly all the way on the ground. cray. (Also here's something super sad: Maddie was getting real emotional in Fortescue's and we were like "... What's up friend" and she was just like "I'm...SAD...THEY GAVE HARRY ICE CREAM A LOT :(" and then we were all like NOOOOO and we also had the sads. Babby harry feels :C)
We alsoooo at Valentina's urging went to The Thing at Ollivander's! Where the wand ~chooses the wizard and all that business. The guy who got chosen was super fun hahaha he was like one of the only dudes in the group so I think that's why he was picked. The lil playacting bit was really great and I'm glad we did the thing and then it spills you back out into Ollivander's to look at wands and they have 8 kajillion wands but they're definitely mass-produced and I just wasn't ~feeling them the way I was like "I'm deffo going to get a Hungarian Wand Shop wand this year." But Sera bought Cho Chang's wand!! And that was super great I feel like that's a great fit and I'm glad for this.
After that/in between those things it was mostly just wandering and doing nothing and poking at some shops. We went into the Leaky Cauldron to look at the literal leaky cauldron and be like HELL YEAH LEAKYCON. We poked at I guess Magical Menagerie and I bought Justice this DUMB AS HECK COFFEE MUG THAT IS JUST A GIANT...HEDWIG'S HEAD it's hiLArious we could NOT stop laughing about it and I was like I have to get this for her. Jordan Edwards was Literally Everywhere and Maddie was having a Situation (maddie:jordan::me:corey so we were bonding over it A Lot) OH and I guess at one point I did also see Corey, like near the front of Diagon Alley? I was like "lol u havin fun" and he was like "yeah I think we're tryna go to Gringotts" and I was like "haha cool we just saw everyone else in line for Forbidden Journey" and he was like "o ya" and I was like "ya." Lmao super dumb. And then right before we left we ducked down into Knockturn Alley which is like SEVERAL NOTICEABLE DEGREES COLDER than the rest of it and that was very pleasant because let me remind you, we were in fucking Orlando Florida at the buttcrack of July and August and that is Too Hot For Me tyvm ugh gross. But yeah then it was over!! sad days!! especially because I did not discover/realize about QUALITY QUIDDITCH SUPPLIES UNTIL IT WAS ALREADY CLOSED AND WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE LEAVING cries forever, I just want to touch all the Quidditch things, I am a big dumb. But like!! Everything was happening so much!! I would have needed way more than 4 hours and, preferably, some daylight in order to stuff everything into my brain. aaahhhhh HOGWARTS BASICALLY ♥♥♥♥♥
After that there was LITERALLY nothing we could do but like, sleep. We rode our ghetto shuttle all the way back to the reject Shingle Creek and then, after a tiny bit of catching back up with Gabi and Kelsey, just all passed the fuck out as best we could. But y'know I'm still sleeping three-to-a-bed with Hannah and Sera so it was definitely not the best sleeping we could've done and plus there were Things we needed to be awake early for... So y'know. Minimal sleeps. Considering we stayed in the park until TWO AM and all and it's already...
CONTINUED IN V.1B
This is to be the first of three FIVE OR MORE UGH similar posts, apparently I'm too wordy to live: vol. 1(a, b and c) is LeakyCon Adventures, vol. 2 is StarKid Summer Season Adventures, and vol. 3 is 48 Hour Film Project Adventures. Volume 4 is "I'm dead, how the fuck did I do all of these things in less than two weeks."
Standard disclaimer: I just vomited this up so please don't judge my formatting or typos; also I may have left out some crucial anecdotes or gotten some facts/timelines goofed because I'm running on half-assed notes and fumes so if I forgot something throw it in the comments! And without further ado!!!
Tuesday
Which, I mean, every trip REALLY starts the night before, when I'm frantically packing everything despite the fact that there is no need to be frantic because I'm a really good packer. Three cheers for travel anxiety!! I MADE myself lay down to attempt to sleep by midnight, because my Tuesday morning flight left bright and early at about 9am and we had to get to the airport mad early. No trouble there, really. With my assorted sundry cosplay items jammed in my backpack, my alligator stuffed in my purse and my fragile items securely buried in my checked bag, the only thing at the airport that gave me any trouble at all was... Brandon??
This cryptic motherfucker. I'd seen a tweet or two from him a few weeks prior implying that he was going to be at Wizarding World sometime at the end of the month, and I was like, hah, wouldn't that be fun if he was there while I was there and we could hang out! But Tuesday morning he's tweeting about chugging his last Baja Blast to stay awake and how early flights are the worst, and I was like, okay, well, Mr. Vaguesauce, see you at the freakin airport. We must have been on different airlines though because I didn't see him at all, even though we were going to the same place at roughly the same time of day. hmmmmm what the fuck are you on about sir. AND WHAT EVEN WAS THE POINT OF NOT TELLING ME. lmao.
My ORF > ATL flight was 98% painless. I HAD been hoping to play Siege of Spinner Cay on the flight, but it turns out it wanted me to re-validate some Telltale info which I couldn't do without wifi, so I had to make due writing like 2 paragraphs of this klaine fic I've been trying to crank out, and listening to the Twisted soundtrack, and doing the in-flight magazine crossword puzzle. Also, there was a teeny tiny dog riding in his owner's lap that was making THE WORST NOISE out of fear/panic, oh my GOD it was irritating, like, I felt bad for the dog but oh my GOD??? It sounded like the squeaky wheel on an elementary school TV cart. It started during takeoff and as far as I know never stopped, though I did eventually put my headphones in. Yikes.
In Atlanta I got my Monkey Island ish sorted, which was good, because thanks to some shitty Orlando weather my layover got extended an extra half an hour or so, and I had plenty of time to play. Soon enough we were finally actually boarding though and I chatted to some girl with cute short hair and an AWESOME suitcase, only to discover she was also headed to LeakyCon. Hehehe fun! We kind of pal'd around until they finally let us on the plane, but she was sitting nowhere near me, so bummer. I think her name was Allie? or similar? YOU WERE COOL AND I NEVER SAW YOU AGAIN AFTER THE AIRPORT boo tbh :(
So I finally land at MCO and I start to catch up on what's going on with everyone else: Namely, that Sera's flight out of Toronto, which was supposed to leave at 6:30 am, is STILL on the ground. They apparently got everyone on board, taxi'd out to the runway, and then discovered some kind of mechanical malfunction and had to bring the plane all the way back and deplane EVERYONE and keep the thing grounded until they got it fixed. Ultimately, Sera's flight to Orlando was delayed by seven hours. I feel like every time I travel, some shit goes wrong for me, UNLESS Sera is also traveling at the same time, and then it gets passed off onto her. I almost feel responsible for this. AWFUL. Anyway, she was supposed to be the first to Florida but now it's me, and with my mini-delay, Hannah and I were arriving a lot closer together, so the plan was just to pop over to Southwest's arrivals after getting my checked bag and chill for a minute. Plane friend Allie and I encountered another Leaky person whose name I am forgetting (sorry!) and the three of us partnered together to achieve success find what we were looking for: bag claim for me and Allie, and the other person's friends arriving on a separate flight. Hooray!
Southwest was actually conveniently right where Delta had let out also, so I just went back the way I came and kind of parked it for a while. Struck up a nice lil companionship with a 40something guy named...Ricky? Randy? who watched my junk while I went to fill my water bottle - we talked about him visiting his daughter, and about his work (some kind of garbage disposal thing but like, higher up than a garbage man? BASICALLY it came down to him getting a lot of cool, free, awesome stuff that people just throw out in the trash, like the really nice men's tote bag he was using) and I guess I said some stuff about Harry Potter and my green hair or something hahaha I think we mostly talked about him. The whole thing went on a little longer than it needed to, so eventually I put my headphones back in and started up Lair of the Leviathan after having finished Spinner Cay on my ATL > MCO flight. Managed to save RIGHT as my computer battery kicked the bucket, and then abandoned RickyRandy because I super needed an outlet to charge my phone. Also because I needed to get away from this REVOLTING teenaged PDA couple who were sitting across from us. Like, super yikes.
Eventually: HANNAH! We were super stoked to see each other aahhhh the bae. Her purple hair is rad as fuck. Meanwhile, Sera's plane is FINALLY in the air, seven hours after its intended departure time, so after some snacks and catch-up Hannah and I check the Air Canada times online and get a ballpark figure for her. We decide to just wait it out in MCO rather than trying to check into the hotel, and we check the boards to figure out where she's coming out...only...the boards do not think Sera's flight exists??? Like eventually we figured it was just because she was supposed to have arrived so long ago and that flight wasn't still up there but DANG. NO SERA FOR US. :( JK though because she finally got there and we did the running and the hugs and all of the things hooray hooray. Dipped out of the airport ASAP in an Uber and headed to the hotel! Our Uber driver was a SUPER COOL older dude named Gary who chatted a lot to Sera about Canada stuff (he's visiting the Toronto area soon) and was incredibly nice to us even as he got lost and confused in the TORRENTIAL, ZERO-VISIBILITY DOWNPOUR that struck literally just for the 20 minutes in which we were trying to get to our hotel. Welcome to fucking Florida.
Sera's like, we're at the Rosen Centre? And I was like, I thought it was the Rosen Plaza? And we literally could not figure this out so we just stopped at both. But, Plaza. So we unload there and go about the check-in process and she says, Sorry, the hotel was overbooked, so I think we moved you to the Rosen Shingle Creek.
Um. Fucking excuse me? I was doing the people-dealing stuff at this point so I was like, We never received any kind of notification about this, and she told us we should've gotten an email, but I was like no, look, exactly one week ago today we did get an email, and that email was confirming our reservation here at the Rosen Plaza. LeakyCon had told us that some people were moved, because of overbooking, so we knew it was happening to SOME people, but had assumed not to us, because we were LITERALLY NEVER NOTIFIED. But apparently that's what was fucking happening, so the concierge girl (who was actually super nice and helpful, and I tried not to be a bitch because it wasn't her fault) hooked us up with a free shuttle to the Shingle Creek and it's at least 5:30 by now by the time we check in there instead. Of course, Shingle Creek doesn't have anyone's name on file with the reservation except Gabi, despite the fact that Kelsey, Sera and I were included on the original Plaza reservation, so I had to pull up my original confirmation email to be like LOOK, OKAY, JUST GIVE US A FUCKING ROOM. Finally: 9106. We did not think we would ever make it.
(Wow I was not expecting the Tuesday section to be this long. Apparently I have a lot of feelings about the INJUSTICES WE WERE DONE. TUESDAY WAS TERRIBLE.)
None of us have really eaten anything that could conceivably be called "A Meal" at this point, so while we figure out how to order some Chinese delivery, Gabi's making all of their crazy international flights relatively fine, and Kelsey's...not. Something happened with Kelsey's flight too, I think the Stupid Orlando Weather problem and also possibly a Stupid Denver Weather situation too, and she was not going to be leaving until VERY LATE LIKE WAS NOT GOING TO ARRIVE IN ORLANDO UNTIL AFTER 1AM EST. n-nooooooo the worst. The Chinese place gave us a SHITTON of food but that was almost not even enough to help us all stay awake long enough to greet Gabi and Kelsey when they arrived. I started playing Carlos Valdes's EP out of sheer spaced-out boredom. MONKEY WITH THE GLASSEZZZZZ~ whatever. BUT FINALLY LIKE 1:45 OR LATER THEY ARRIVED AND WE DID ALL OF THE HUGS AND WE WERE DYING EVERYWHERE AND YYYEAAHHHHHHH oh my god. getting to florida was terrible and I never want to do it again. TOO BAD IT'S IN ORLANDO AGAIN NEXT YEAR. kill.
Because we were too hype on seeing each other the last thing we did Tuesday night was PRESENTS!! Spoilers: I brought everyone a ton of stupid presents. For Hannah I made a pinwheel and also bought her some Heathers earrings off Etsy (she was like I WAS JUST LOOKING AT THESE ON ETSY HOW DID U KNOW hehehe I'm the best), for Gabi I had gotten them a doll from Kitsch and a couple of antique books (one on French military history and one on badass women of the reign of Louis XIV, I'm such a boss and they geeked over these HARD), for Sera I bought her a Watsky Kill A Hipster t-shirt and also made her a Sloppy Seconds-themed painting/cutout thinger, and for Kelsey I did the second half of her World's Worst Musical Birthday Pack heheheheeee. All of which were in colorful bags and most of which came with cards. I am such an aggressive gift-giver I am THE WORST. No but literally all of these were birthday presents that I just never mailed to people and gave them in person instead!! So YEAH. ALSO Sera made us all fun friendship bracelets!! aaahhhh all the friendships.
But then all of the sleeping. We really needed to do the sleeping pretty badly. But Hannah, Sera and I all slept in one bed and this was probably a Bad Idea. ALSO our beds did not have like? bedspreads/comforters?? the whole time we were in Orlando which made it VERY hard to sleep bc the blankets we did have weighed like nothing and I can't sleep without heavy. Oh lord the Struggle.
Soundbite of the day for Tuesday: "He's just, like, a blank space where a person should be." Three guesses as to who Sera said that about l m a o. Second only to this was a discussion about the non-American pronunciation of puma as "pyuu-ma." pfft.
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Wednesday!
As if to imply that a large portion of the Tuesday report didn't really happen on Wednesday anyway lmao. But yeah we let ourselves goof off and do Not Much Of Anything Wednesday morning (for people who are good at sleeping this was...sleeping, for people who are bad at sleeping like me this was finishing Lair of the Leviathan hehe) until we needed to get over to pick up our registration. And like, if Tuesday was the Worst Day, Wednesday was the Second-Worst Day and it only went uphill from there because registration was a goddamn clusterfuck.
First of all, they opened 2 hours late, which is shitty but like, not a huge deal beyond just being shitty because once it's done it's done and what can you do? Besides, us Rosen Plaza Rejects out at the Shingle Creek were subject to the whims of whenever they fucking decided they were going to give us our free shuttle over to the convention, which was at like 12:30 anyway. God this relocation stuff was such bullshit. ("Go to where the rocking chairs are!" So we walk around the side of the hotel and yep, just a bunch of nerds in rocking chairs. wooooo.) And when we arrived on the scene for reg the line seemed to be managed pretty well. There was a big snake-line for people who were just getting there, and after you snaked through a bunch of times, it split off by last name into the shorter individual lines. There was also a separate RockStar line so this is where we lost Gabi, and the other four of us just sat and chilled. Saw a bunch of cool people in this line - RAD AS FUQ Bellatrix cosplayer, girl with super-neat blue hair, Proma Kholsa chilling with some volunteers, u kno u kno. (Also a tiny child dressed as Karkat? Like, friend this is not the time and place. But you do you I guess. And a really horrible Desert Bluffs Kevin cosplay too like I just do nOT UNDERSTAND PPL WHO COSPLAY ON THE DAY BEFORE/REGISTRATION DAY save it for the con proper?? whatever I am trying Not To Judge ugh too slytherin for this earth)
Between some fun time to chat with each other and some fun #straussycon shit happening on twitter this line wasn't actually TOO bad for a while, and we snaked on through until finally we reached the area where they were calling like, SOME last name letter people to cut up to the alphabetical lines that were shorter/were moving more quickly. E-F-G line was one of those so I got a pass! So did Hannah, to the K-L line, we're ballers. My line was... Fine. Annoying Scottish girl standing in front of me wanted to talk a little more than I did but I dealt with it lmao. Like TWO people ahead of me the staff got caught up on one person for a really long time and I was just...standing there... While I was waiting Gabi emerged from the RockStar line and sat down on the floor next to me to review all of their swag stuff. No house ribbons??? WE WERE ALL P PUT OUT ABOUT IT TBH. But really cool Tin Can Bros stuff!!!!! Also I saw Jordan I think. And Lizzie! All of the friends! And then finally my turn! Staff was cute ppl. The dude was like "Okay how old are you? Okay here's your 21+ wristband for the Esther Earl ball and I need to put in on you RIGHT NOW." ahahaha. And then I was good to go and I went to find Hannah so we could rejoin Sera and Kelsey who were still in the snakey line.
They finally called Sera up for C-D and I kinda went with her just for solidarity since Hannah was still with Kelsey and we were like, they are not ever going to call M-N. It was weird though because as I went past M-N to C-D, M-N actually looked a lootttt shorter? Like Sera's line was all the way to the back wall but M-N had merged with O-P and even the two put together didn't go that far back. So I was like, You know what, I am going to sneak Kelsey into this line. And that's exactly what I fucking did. I went back and got her, and we waited until the staffer dude's back was turned, and then just slotted her right into that fucking line. I was not here for this waiting for 3 hours bullshit that we were undergoing. We need to bounce yoooo.
IT'S A GOOD THING I DID TOO BECAUSE: Almost immediately after that, staff starts making an announcement that if you are NOT going to Open At The Close, they want you to come back and pick your registration up in the morning, because people who ARE going need to get theirs first because the buses are leaving for the park at 4 and here it is like 3:15. Which was fine for Sera I guess but not for Kelsey and Kelsey was PISSED because like, did we not just wait in these lines for 3 hours?? Come on NOW. A lot of people had the same attitude and they were just like, not leaving. This mandate accomplished basically nothing lmao. For the C-D line they were just having OATC people cut to the front and shuffling non-OATC people to the back, which seemed to make way more sense! But the other half of the alphabet was kind of getting yelled at? IDK I already had my stuff at this point and wasn't super following how it was all happening. Gabi was planning on making a complaint to the customer service table at the other end about another outstanding issue re: some shit emails and they were like "I will just tack that on too let me go do the thing." Meanwhile in M-N, a couple of people RIGHT AHEAD OF KELSEY were allowed to pick their non-OATC registration up, but when Kelsey got there, staff members had just switched over or something? and they wouldn't let her do it. RIGHT AFTER THEY DID LET OTHER PEOPLE DO IT. We were pissed. I was like, no, don't leave, stay in this fucking line bc if Gabi is gonna go complain and make it work you should be here anyway, just fucking try again. Everyone but Kelsey has their shit by now and it's ridiculous. I think eventually a kind staff person did bend the rules/turn the other way and let Kelsey through, but I wasn't really around for that bc Hannah and I decided to embark on a noble undertaking of buying McDonald's for everyone since we haaadddn't really eaten that day and we needed to get food before OATC since they weren't feeding us till 11:30.
HERE'S THE FUCKING DEAL ABOUT ORLANDO: It's miserably hot. Everything is about a mile or more from the convention center/con hotels. And there is no fucking public transit. Hannah and I were not 100% clear about where we were going but we had to hike all the way to this little shopping center - across stretches with no sidewalk, in some places - just to get some overpriced fast food. The McDonald's was SWARMING with tourists and we almost didn't make it back in time to like, sit and eat before the Wizarding World buses got there. This was so SHITTY. This was probably the hottest/worst stretch of walking I had to do the whole convention, because after we did this, we swore we were not going to fucking do it again. Thank god for wearing bodyglide and a black tank top that didn't show pit sweat.
Gabi had made some new friends, and we met them for like .2 seconds before they all split off and we lingered just long enough to scarf our McD's before the BUSES TO WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER CAME AND PICKED US UP, THIS WAS A REAL THING THAT WE DID, WE WENT TO WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER. God, I felt terrible that Gabi and Kelsey weren't coming with us, but it was hard to feel TOO terrible because: Wizarding World of Harry Potter. They dropped us off at Universal Studios and it was still kind of sweat city (the person in front of us in line for the park had on FULL ROBES, I was like qurl what are u even doing) but the sun was going down, things were getting better, and there was only a short hike separating us from Diagon Alley. !!!
We took some dumb tourist pics at 12 Grimmauld Place (!!!) before heading into Diagon Alley proper through the fucking HOLE IN THE WALL JUST LIKE THE BOOKS GOD YOU DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW BADASSLY ALL-OUT THEY HAVE GONE HERE UNLESS YOU HAVE BEEN THERE YOUR OWN SELF and then we were like, Everything said to high-tail it straight to Gringotts if we wanted to even get on the ride at all because the line is Murder. Hannah and Sera aren't really Rides People but they both kind of agreed that Harry Potter stuff is DIFFERENT and they were going to suck it up and do it anyway and I was like, hell yeah goblin minecart coaster so we walked over there. We walked all... the way... down... the huge ass line... and we were ALMOST to the end but then the beautiful Lizzie stopped us to say hey to me, and she ended up smuggling us into her part of the line instead. It probably shaved about half an hour off our wait time, which was GREAT, and so nice of her omg thank you Lizzie forever. She'd made some cool friends in line!! named Zara (sp?), Stephanie (??? we FORGOT YOUR NAME WE'RE THE WORST) and Maddie and we hung out with them pretty much the whole time as we desperately tried to keep cool in this long, long, outdoor line for Escape from Gringotts. There was a dude in front of us wearing too much cologne and that was straight GROSS every time we passed one of the big cool-off fans and it just blew it straight into our faces. We heard a lot of applause from ahead of us only to turn and see that the cosplayers we started calling Young Snape and Old Snape were heading down the path to get in line (Old Snape looks enough like Alan Rickman that if he DIDN'T cosplay snape it would be a fucking waste; Young Snape may or may not actually be related to Old Snape but we saw them together a lot and he makes a perfect like greasy, Hogwarts-age teen snape or whatever, he kind of reminds me of that gross Lelouche that you see around east coast anime cons sometimes hehe). FINALLY we make it to the part of the line that's INSIDE (Zara was really struggling at this point bc she's a bigger girl and she was gettin' super overheated, poor friend) and we can kind of cool off, and they have us go through this thing where you put your bags in a locker (with ur fingerprint??? that was kind of spooky cool) and then we're IN GRINGOTTS!! Selfies with animatronic goblins!! Cool newspaper articles on display with MOVING WIZARD PICS WE DID NOT REALIZE THEY WERE GONNA MOVE BC THE PAPER WAS SO LEGIT JUST A PAPER AND WE JUMPED AND SCREAMED WITH DELIGHT THIS WAS SO AWESOME. Chandeliers!! REALLY COOL STUFF!!!!
We went through the "elevator" part that's like Haunted Mansion where you're not really descending but they do a great job of making you feel like you are and then we spilled out into this SUPER crowded "underground" hallway where I think there were KIND OF two "lines"?? But so many people were crammed in there that we couldn't make sense of it all. The path to where the 3D glasses were was totally jampacked and the people standing closest to the glasses were having to grab big handfuls and pass them out to everyone else because we couldn't move. It took us a while to figure out what was going on but eventually we did when another two elevators' full of people released into the area but those of us already there still hadn't moved forward, which was...we were not moving forward. We found out later that one of the cars was down for about 20 minutes, which I guess happened to be the EXACT 20 minutes that we were down there trying to get on this ride. It was really stressful and kind of scary for a while because people kept coming in but no one was going out and after a while we were super sardined in there. And there weren't any ride attendants/park people down there with us, just guests, so we didn't have any idea what was going on. And at one point a fight almost broke out. YEAH. A FULL-ON FIGHT. This dude straight body-checked into this other dude in a TIGHT ENCLOSED SPACE, AND THEY WERE RIGHT NEXT TO ME WHEN IT HAPPENED and he was not joking, he was dead serious???? omg terrifying. we think they were probably brothers, and a woman who was probz their mom scolded them and got them to knock it off, but for a moment there I was like, A full-on riot is going to break out in this tight-packed space and someone is going to get trampled to death. Like my safety was touch-and-go there for a little while holy shit.
The line FINALLY starts moving again and we all desperately make a train to hang onto each other, all seven of us, and soon enough we are getting on the RIDE CART FOR ESCAPE FROM GRINGOTTS AND WE ESCAPED FROM GRINGOTTS. !!!!! The initial drop was AWESOME and then the rest of it kind of didn't top that ride-wise but I so did not care because Bill Weasley is awesome and the whole thing was awesome and I had super huge amounts of fun. All in all it was just BARELY worth the 3-hour wait. Like, I definitely don't regret waiting in that line to do it for the first time, but having already done it, I would never wait in that line to do it again. Cool cool. Gotta say I think WWOHP has done a fucking FLAWLESS job of seamlessly pairing their video-sequence stuff with the actual motion of the rides, like I genuinely do not know how you fucking do that and it pretty much blew my mind, on Gringotts and especially on Forbidden Journey MORE ON THAT LATER HEHE.
After Gringotts we were like, okay, we have SUPER LIMITED TIME in which to do our other stuff so we basically have to book it to Forbidden Journey ON THE HOGWARTS EXPRESS. !!!! Dude this was so rad, we snaked through the line singing Harry Freaking Potter (Platform 9 3/4 set us off I think lmao I was rita skeetering everywhere) and took some selfies with the big stacks of luggage and some pics of the train and THEN got a car all to ourselves and rode over to Hogsmeade!! The video sequence on the train is REALLY COOL though it is TREMENDOUSLY obvious that the Hermione voice over is Not Emma Watson lmao we were laughing about this like "hermione u ok." Also hooray for sitting down on seats with cushions for a hot minute. By the time we made it to Hogsmeade it was pretty much dark, and the park was clearing out, and the line for Forbidden Journey was REALLY not that long like we skipped huge chunks of it the way you do with Verbolten when the line is short hehe.
Like one line-bend ahead of us in line for Forbidden Journey was a whole bunch of StarKids!!!!! THIS WAS SO RAD!! We kept walking past them like "oh hey guys" and Julia said hey and Nick said hey and Dylan and BRosenthal were adorable and Brian and Meredith were gross and Breredithy everywhere and it was presh as fuck omg havin lots of fun with some bros. There was one part of the line where we kind of stopped under this overhang and if you looked up through a gap in it, you could see right up the side of the Hogwarts castle with like this really awesome view of it aaahhhh so we stopped and were like aaahhh cool and (important story alert) we're stopped going "aahhhh cool" and Nick stops next to us like "Whoa, what's up there?" So we were just like "...umm nothing haha embarrassing it's just the castle is really cool" and he was like "Oh, I thought you like, saw a ghost or something" and we laughed and then he goes "Hey um what part of the castle is that anyway?" And we couldn't tell if he was trolling?? like if he was like "haha nerds" sassing us for caring as much as we did or if he was being genuine, and we were kind of mumbling out an answer trying to figure it out when fucking Brian Holden claps his hand on Nick's shoulder like ~old sport and leans over to us and goes "Is that the lightning-struck tower?" IN HIS FUCKING BRIAN HOLDEN VOICE WE COULDN'T DEAL we like giggled nervously just to have some kind of reaction and as soon as they were gone we absolutely burst out laughing. Could Not Handle It. "Is that the ~~lightning-struck tower~~?" THE WHOLE WEEKEND WE ARE SAYING THIS, AND LAUGHING EVERY TIME. god fucking damnit.
Meandered through the line some more in that really cool room with the portraits of the four founders talking about stuff and then like. FORBIDDEN. FUCKING. JOURNEY!!!????!?!?! I'M SORRY BUT I'VE NEVER BEEN ON A RIDE GREATER THAN THIS RIDE IT IS THE BEST RIDE THAT THERE IS. I'm still so like, in fucking awe of how there were parts of it that were Real Ass Ride and parts of it that were You're In Front Of A Screen and they all synched together so seamlessly? and how we were flying on broomsticks with harry potter???? I definitely cried at least once, I was so overwhelmed, this is the greatest thing and I want to do it ten thousand more times. Maddie felt the same, we were like squeaking at each other when it was over and I was like AGAIN AGAIN but we did not do it again buutttt I wanted toooooo. And parts of it were real legit scary!! Like the Whomping Willow my heart kind of skipped a beat because you are So Close to it hitting you and I was like "if any part of this malfunctions mechanically AT ALL this thing is going to smash my head in." aahhhh spooky. Also I think spiders were a thing people didn't like but they didn't really bother me except one SPITS ON YOU hecka gross ahahaha. Mostly the Quidditch/broom parts though. sobbing. Anyone who can go on Forbidden Journey in their lifetime should go on Forbidden Journey in their lifetime. I need to go again. Just found out my mom is going to get to go in November and I'm so stoked for her ashagkjhlkejrh I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS RIDE I'M SO PREDICTABLE BUT THERE IT IS
As with Gringotts, my Not Rides buddies were like "okay that was cool but also terrifying" so after Forbidden Journey we kind of split up a bit! The less-ride-inclined folks were going to try Flight of the Hippogriff because we had been told that was a calmer easier sort of thing and the other half of us high-tailed it over to the Dragon Challenge to make sure we got on that at least once before all the rides closed (they were already weeding the Real People out of the park for just the OATC people aahhh so cool). We went on the Chinese Fireball side first and like. It was fun but?? This park is NOT a park that is usually open After Dark so the ride was not really equipped with like...lights...or a setup that was interesting to do in the dark? So we were just. Riding a roller coaster in the dark. You could kind of see out into the park in some places like across the Whole Universal and that was pretty neat I guess but overall I was underwhelmed with the dragon stuff especially after Forbidden Journey which was OVER OVER whelming hehe. Also there was this clusterfuck with my water bottle --
Since the park was technically closing, the "stick ur stuff here while u ride the thing" lockers were no longer available? So we were like shit, what do we do with all our junk?? FORTUNATELY, right as we were approaching Dragon Challenge, I managed to find Jordan, and when she assured us that she was going to be chilling where she was outside like the Owl Post area for a little while, we felt cool with leaving our bags and stuff with her. But as we're walking to the ride sans stuff, I realize I'm still totally holding my water bottle like a dweeb. So I was like whatever I'll just stick it behind me on the ride nbd. BUTTTT the girl working there saw it and was like, You can't take that on the ride, it's okay I'll hold it here at the window for you and just come get it when you get off. So like whatever, okay, cool.
But like we got off the red dragon and I still had time to try the blue one too, and I had just run into Claudia Ravenclawdia and we were having A MOMENT so we decided to go Hungarian Horntail together and I was like ok cool I'll just get my water bottle when we get off THAT instead. And that was big fun and I chilled with Claudia for a second and that was really cool and then I got off and tried to go back for my water bottle but it...was on the red side...and I was on the blue side.... And I had to make a BIG FUSS at this fuckin dude to go get my thermos for me omg I was so fucking annoyed like dude SHE TOOK IT FROM ME SHE SAID IT WAS AT THE WINDOW CAN YOU PLEASE JUST and I must have stood there for a straight five or seven minutes while he just like...wandered around...did nothing...did not appear to have any interest in helping me at all like fuq u guy. Smfh that was irritating as fuck.
OKAY BUT LIKE THEN. That clusterfuck completed, reunited with our bags and our other buddies (apparently Hippogriff was nowhere near as much of a kiddie ride as they had been led to believe and they were unimpressed haha oops), we got BACK on the Hogwarts Express (!!! this is too much for me okay) and headed back to Diagon Alley so that we could there in time for the free food to begin at 11:30. The return trip was so much sillier ahaha lol fake emma watson still and also HARRY EATS A SPIDER? LIKE IT'S A LICORICE SPIDER BUT U DON'T KNOW THAT WHEN HE FIRST EATS IT so random lol we were losin it. Also our ride attendant was way less sillyfun on the way back but that's muggles for ya.
AND THEN YAAAYYY THE THING! Food was like. reasonable considering it was free lol. I think Hannah and Sera waited for drinks first but the rest of us were starving and there was like, a quinoa thing, some beef stew with veggies and stuff, decent salad, and bread/rolls that were tasty. We're waiting in line and poor Pat Brady is trying to get her ish together and this glass of wine spills like all over the table where they're trying to eat aww. Also we saw BHoldz trying to get a drink of water at this water fountain and either he accidentally, or Meredith totally on purpose, set off this thing on top of the fountain thing with one of those interactive wands, and some water spouted out of the very top of the fountain and Brian had a little freakout of surprise lmao it was really funny ok. bholdz. We didn't even get a table we just camped the fuck out on a cool patch of the ground and stuffed our faces omg we were so hungry.
While we were waiting in line the Three Brothers show was going and I was sad to be missing it but food was like, more important...but then later after we had already finished mostly and I'd gotten a couple drinks (I had to at least TRY the butterbeer and it was aight frozen but what I was really after was that fizzy lemonade stuff) the Celestina Warbeck show started and I'M SO HYPE FOR CELESTINA WARBECK Y'ALL. I LOVE HER. I tried to stay sitting down but after a while I was just like nope fuck it I need a better view and I rushed up to stand on the edge of the crowd around the stage and gaaaaahhhh. Being one of her backup Banshees = new life goal ugh omg and they did the Quidditch fight song thing (it's Portree's I think or Puddlemere's? googles this ok yeah puddlemere fuck yeah oliver wood) which was EXTRA LEGIT and then there was one song where they pulled up an audience volunteer? AND THE DUDE THEY PICKED. HE WAS SO INTO IT Y'ALL he was like playing along with ALL the choreography and they put her feather boa on him and he was All About It duuuude he was absolutely the best we were so fuckin delighted omg. To the point that like they called him out at closing ceremonies when they were talking about OATC they were like "The audience guy from the 12:30 Celestina he was so great omg is he here???" and he was near the back and he stood up and everyone applauded him because he was The Shit u rocked it dude. omg. Celestina, basically. Would that I were even half as fabulous.
Most of the rest of what happened was wondering and shopping and staring at Diagon Alley and seeing friends!! We saw All of the friends. Jordan some more, and Arianna &co. here and there, and we hung out a bunch with Valentina in Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, which was PACKED with nerds buying pygmy puffs. Spoilers I totally bought a pygmy puff. It's a purple one and her name is Flavia! Maddie got a pink one and named him Steve. We both did the dorky Naming Ceremony where the cashier rings the bell and announces to the whole store that we're getting them and what their names are and stuff omg so dumb. BUT LIKE EVERYONE WAS DOING IT SO WE DID IT TOO. THE AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE. I got some WWW buttons for Avery too~ hehehe funfun. We also spent a fair amount of time wandering in Honeydukes but I couldn't justify buying anything for myself there because it was all just...candy...that u would eat and then it would be gone? And a lot of it wasn't even candy that I LIKED. I looked for those super-legit jelly slugs that Angel & Chatam got me for my birthday because I DID really like those but I guess those are the off-brand unofficial ones and not the ones they have in the park proper hahaha. So none of that for me.
BESIDES WE WERE ALREADY GONNA GET FREE ICE CREAM... We headed over to Florean Fortescue's to nab some of their lil free cups and that was legittttt. I got the salted caramel blondie (A+++ WOULD RECOMMEND TO EVERYONE), some kind of chocolate toffee thing (also bangin'), and then look Hannah and I were really set on eating the clotted cream flavor but when we got there they HAD no pre-scooped free cups of it? so we were like ??? And the girl working there was super legit and went and got us some ~from the back~ BUT it was not super-cold so by the time we were eating it it was super-melty and we were basically drinking it. But yeah we chilled for a while just on the steps of Gringotts eating ice cream and that was so great. THESE CUTE GIRLS IN DELTA ZETA SHIRTS CAME BY AND THE DELTA WAS A DEATHLY HALLOWS AND THE ZETA HAD A LIGHTNING BOLT IN IT AND I WAS LIKE "UR SO CUTE GREEK NERDS LET ME LOVE YOU" and that was the bomb and also also we took a bunch of pics in Sirius/Hagrid's motorbike that was right there, on the bike and the sidecar, supes fun. I don't have any of these actually! but they were great and whoever has them hopefully posted them/should definitely post them ok cool. Also the dragon on top of Gringotts as I'm sure you all know by now BREATHES REAL FIRE and so the fire would just go off and it was so toasty omg you could feel it really strongly all the way on the ground. cray. (Also here's something super sad: Maddie was getting real emotional in Fortescue's and we were like "... What's up friend" and she was just like "I'm...SAD...THEY GAVE HARRY ICE CREAM A LOT :(" and then we were all like NOOOOO and we also had the sads. Babby harry feels :C)
We alsoooo at Valentina's urging went to The Thing at Ollivander's! Where the wand ~chooses the wizard and all that business. The guy who got chosen was super fun hahaha he was like one of the only dudes in the group so I think that's why he was picked. The lil playacting bit was really great and I'm glad we did the thing and then it spills you back out into Ollivander's to look at wands and they have 8 kajillion wands but they're definitely mass-produced and I just wasn't ~feeling them the way I was like "I'm deffo going to get a Hungarian Wand Shop wand this year." But Sera bought Cho Chang's wand!! And that was super great I feel like that's a great fit and I'm glad for this.
After that/in between those things it was mostly just wandering and doing nothing and poking at some shops. We went into the Leaky Cauldron to look at the literal leaky cauldron and be like HELL YEAH LEAKYCON. We poked at I guess Magical Menagerie and I bought Justice this DUMB AS HECK COFFEE MUG THAT IS JUST A GIANT...HEDWIG'S HEAD it's hiLArious we could NOT stop laughing about it and I was like I have to get this for her. Jordan Edwards was Literally Everywhere and Maddie was having a Situation (maddie:jordan::me:corey so we were bonding over it A Lot) OH and I guess at one point I did also see Corey, like near the front of Diagon Alley? I was like "lol u havin fun" and he was like "yeah I think we're tryna go to Gringotts" and I was like "haha cool we just saw everyone else in line for Forbidden Journey" and he was like "o ya" and I was like "ya." Lmao super dumb. And then right before we left we ducked down into Knockturn Alley which is like SEVERAL NOTICEABLE DEGREES COLDER than the rest of it and that was very pleasant because let me remind you, we were in fucking Orlando Florida at the buttcrack of July and August and that is Too Hot For Me tyvm ugh gross. But yeah then it was over!! sad days!! especially because I did not discover/realize about QUALITY QUIDDITCH SUPPLIES UNTIL IT WAS ALREADY CLOSED AND WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE LEAVING cries forever, I just want to touch all the Quidditch things, I am a big dumb. But like!! Everything was happening so much!! I would have needed way more than 4 hours and, preferably, some daylight in order to stuff everything into my brain. aaahhhhh HOGWARTS BASICALLY ♥♥♥♥♥
After that there was LITERALLY nothing we could do but like, sleep. We rode our ghetto shuttle all the way back to the reject Shingle Creek and then, after a tiny bit of catching back up with Gabi and Kelsey, just all passed the fuck out as best we could. But y'know I'm still sleeping three-to-a-bed with Hannah and Sera so it was definitely not the best sleeping we could've done and plus there were Things we needed to be awake early for... So y'know. Minimal sleeps. Considering we stayed in the park until TWO AM and all and it's already...
CONTINUED IN V.1B