dreyOO said:
Thanks for the review. We've got one extra day in June after a tournament. Is it worth even attempting Epic in one day if we buy the lightning pass? That's about $200pp so I wanna be sure it's not a frustrating buy.
We just got back from a full day at Epic, and yes, it's definitely doable with the Express pass. We didn't buy the Express pass, and we got to ride everything we wanted, but my family is kind of crazy at theme parks and other families we've tried going with in the past can't keep up. If you want to do it in a single day, without the Express pass, you definitely have to plan ahead. My son started paying attention to wait times a week ago, so he had a good feel for when certain rides get long.
We got there about 45 min before regular park open (not early entry). At rope drop, we headed straight for Donkey Kong. It usually has the longest lines. Since people who stay at the hotel get early entry, there was already a line of about 90 minutes. Since my son had been watching wait times, we knew this was actually a good time. Later in the afternoon, the ride got up to 3 hours. It's a lot of fun, and worth the wait.
After DK, we went to HP. This was our only mistake. The app said 100 minute wait, but we ended up waiting 2 1/2 hours. The queue is awesome, though, so were good with it most of the time. 2 1/2 hours is a long time, though, so we were getting pretty frustrated... We finally boarded and the ride broke down half way through. Apparently, this happens a lot and they ended up giving us fast passes to ride later.
At this point we were pretty hungry, so we ate lunch at Pizza Moon. It was fine, and quick. After lunch, we crushed the rest of the park. My son said the Monster Land gets slow in the afternoon, before it gets busy again at night. He was right. We did the first ride there (Monsters Unleashed) in about 10 minutes (it was ok). Then we did the Werewolf rollercoaster in about 30-45 minutes. It was really good, but short.
From there we went to How to Train Your Dragon. We waited about 45 min for Hiccups Wing Glider. Whole family agreed it was the best ride in the park. If you've done Hagrid's Motorcycle at the other Universal park, it's very similar.
The HP ride was working again, so we went back to HP and used our fast passes. This time it took us about 20-30 minutes to get on the ride, and the ride worked flawlessly. It's the best of the HP rides by far (when it works).
At this point we had done all the major rides. Hiccups coaster was down to 30 minutes, so we hustled over to that. Still awesome. Then we went back to Mario and rode a Yoshi ride my daughter wanted to do. It was pretty lame, but it gave good views of Mario World. It was definitely for much younger kids than mine, but my daughter loves Mario and wanted to ride it. At this point, the park was going to close in about 20 minutes. Since DK was just around the corner, we went and rode it again. We got through the the line and ride in 17 minutes. After we got off, the park was only going to be open for 3 more minutes. Both Universal and Disney have policies where they let you ride the ride as long as you are in line before the park closes, so we immediately jumped back into the DK ride.
We could have definitely spent more time exploring the different worlds. They are all super impressive. We skipped dinner. We're exhausted. We rode every ride we wanted to, some multiple times, and the park is awesome. I highly recommend.
