malikson98

Family Adventure: Six Flags or Universal Studios - "Hope this helps someone
- qualify for gifts at Link.. - worth a try I suppose"

trickg

I just came back less than a month ago from a vacation to Orlando and the main theme of the trip this year was Universal Studios. The kids are a bit older now and while we did take one day at Disney's Magic Kingdom, I thought that Universal was the better of the two for our family this year.

We have a Six Flags here near DC - the last time I was there the experience was so bad I vowed to never go back and that was over 5 years ago. The park employees were inatentive or just plain rude - If I'm going to drop that kind of dough at a theme park, I expect a little bit more and I registered my complaints on the way out the door after cutting the day way short.

Some of the things we thought were really cool this year:
Universal Studios:
The Mummy - plain and simple, this is a kick-bootie ride that combines a show/theme with a roller coaster. It's not a train, like a typical coaster - it's a car on rails. It's probably the neatest thrill ride I have ever been on.

Twister - if you are near the front, this experience will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up - it's kind of short and the wait is a bit long, but I thought it was worth it when I got in there.

Men In Black - this is a cool ride where you get to shoot the bad aliens with little laser tag like guns that are mounted in the ride cars.

Shrek - 3D Show - it gets you out of the heat and it's pretty cool - Shrek has to save Fiona from the ghost of Lord Farquaad.

Jimmy Neutron - same as Shrek, although if you get motion sick easy, you might want to skip those two.

Terminator 2 3D show - VERY cool 3D show where Ahhhhnold and the kid from T2 go in to destroy the Cyberdine Systems mainframe.

Back to the Future - you have to chase Biff back through time in a Delorean - again, if you get motion sick pretty easy, this ride might not be for you.

ET-Adventure - Skip it - unless you have little ones who might like it, I thought it was pretty lame.

Islands of adventure:
Incredible Hulk Coaster - VERY cool. The ride starts you off in the "Gamma chamber" and it launches you from 0-60 miles an hour in about 2 seconds - what a rush! On top of that, for all of the loops, twists, dives and turns, it's overall a pretty smooth roller coaster.

Dudley Do-Right's Rip Saw Falls - this is a log ride and you WILL get soaked, period. But, it's also a very fun log ride with a couple of surprise drops and stuff that I didn't expect and I thought it was a blast. We went that day with the idea that we would ride the water rides and we didn't mind if we got soaked - we prepared for that.

Jurrasic Park River Adventure - this was a pretty typical raft ride with robotic dinosaurs all over the place, but the final drop is a real rush and I didn't get as wet as I thought I would - then again, I was in the middle of the car and I think the people up front got good and wet.

Dueling Dragons Roller Coasters - I swear that the blue side of this suspended roller-coaster is identical to Alpengiest! at Bush Gardens, Williamsburg. The theme of this coaster is two dragons, fire and ice (red and blue) "battling" - it's worth getting the lead car because at one point you think you are going to colide with the red side car head on (they sync up running the red side and the blue side) and it's one of the funnest roller coasters I've ridden. I think I rode each side of this coaster twice - that particular day the lines were surprisingly short.

We sucked it up one day and spent the cash to get the Express Passes at Universal so that you can bypass the regular wait times and they say that you can only use each pass once per ride, however, that's only if the line attendants are doing their jobs and mark the Express Pass card. We rode several of the cool rides at Universal Studios two or three times before our cards got marked - it all depends on who is checking the passes. At the end of the day they had only marked off two of the attractions and we gave the passes to another family of four that had just gotten there on the way out the door early that evening.

Plan for 2-3 days for those two parks - Each park is good for about a day if you plan out what you are going to do and get there when the park opens - otherwise you'll find yourself like we did - rather than choosing what to do, we were choosing what we wanted to do again.

trickg

Oops - I thought you were asking which place was the best place to go to - sorry for the long review.

Something else that I thought that I would add is that the food services, in my opinion, kicked the pants off of what was generally available at the Disney Parks. For instance, I had Chicken Fettucine Alfredo, it tasted great, and I didn't pay an arm and a leg for it - it was expensive to be sure - all theme park food is, but considering how good it was, I felt it was fairly reasonably priced for a theme park.