JAWS - THE RIDE THAT GOT AWAY!

Today - June 20th 2024 - is the 49th anniversary since the release of the first ever summer blockbuster movie, JAWS!  As the countdown for the big 50th anniversary next year begins, let's look back at the greatly missed JAWS THE RIDE!

Jaws The Ride opened at Universal Studios Florida in 1990. Its troubled early days/years are well documented online and in print and a revised version of the ride finally opened in 1993.

I first experienced the Jaws ride in June 1994 when I was 13 years old and it terrified me! It all felt so real, with the build up to the encounter starting long before you boarded your tour boat:

• learning about the actual Chief Brody that the movie was based on as you waited in line watching the comedic ‘Hey There Amity’ show on raised monitors;

• setting off for an Amity Boat Tour but don’t worry “no sharks have been spotted for years”;

• turning the corner to see the sinking Amity 3 tour boat by the lighthouse, then a shark fin breaking the surface;

• hiding out in the stinky, dark boat house but the shark still finds you;

• being attacked on the port side just before a giant explosion at the Amity Gas Co. singes your eyebrows;

• and then a final shark attack amid a shower of sparks as it chomps down on the power cables just like the climax of JAWS 2!

Brilliant! They don’t make theme park rides like that anymore!

Back then, there were no digital cameras and the cameras we did have used actual film which needed developing later at a cost - whether your shots were any good or not. You took a chance having your camera out as you were at risk dropping it overboard or getting it wet during the shark attacks. The boat skippers also warned you that there was to be no flash photography. I was lucky enough to take several photographs of the Jaws ride in 1996 and 1998 which I now cherish for the memories.

Visitors were also lucky to see props from the last Jaws movie, 1987's awful 'Jaws The Revenge', including a shark which was left on display in the 'Bone Yard' (now the Plaza Stage area near the Hollywood Rip Ride Rockit) to bake in the sun and have its teeth stolen.  Immediately outside the ride, in the town of Amity, you could get up close to a chomped Amity Police boat and the Neptune's Folly boat which killed the shark during the finale of that much derided movie. 

Theme park goers bid ‘farewell and adieu’ to the Jaws ride at Universal Studios Florida in early 2012 and it was subsequently replaced with the immersive Diagon Alley from The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. 

The hanging captured shark (known as Bruce after the prop shark from the original movie which itself was named after Spielberg’s lawyer) was installed in 1990 outside Jaws The Ride but was thankfully relocated from Amity to Fisherman’s Wharf when that part of Universal Studios was redeveloped. 

Bruce is still popular to this day. The nearby Chez Alcatraz bar cleverly capitalizes on the visiting Jaws fans by tempting them with the dramatic Ocean Attack cocktail!

But be warned: don’t do a Chief Brody and attempt a ‘half-ass autopsy’ on the bad fish after a few drinks: selfie-seekers won’t appreciate seeing that little Kintner boy spilling out all over the dock!

LOOK BACK: VOODOO DOUGHNUT (UNIVERSAL ORLANDO)

 

“Good things come in pink boxes” and that’s definitely true at VOODOO DOUGHNUT at Universal Orlando’s City Walk. 

The doughnut eatery was founded in 2003 in Portland, Oregon, and while it has outlets in at least 9 U.S. states, the only one in Florida is at Universal Orlando’s City Walk, which became the company’s seventh store in 2018. We had walked by it dozens of times over the last few years, on our way to and from Universal Studios, but had never ventured inside. 

Voodoo often gets very busy and the line can extend outside. They have a couple of clever systems to help:

• Mobile Pickup. Simply scan the QR, download the app and pick your collection time. When we tested it, the doughnuts could have been ready for collection as quickly as in 15 minutes. Not bad, when the line was extending out the store!

• Inside the store, staff members walk the spiral line, taking your order as you pore over the menus and salivate at the revolving samples of the types of doughnuts on offer.

We lined up on a visit during a quiet period - 12:50pm on New Year’s Day 2024 - and received our doughnuts within 6 mins. 

That wasn’t the only impressive thing. The total cost of our order was less than $10! We heard another customer also commenting on how reasonable the prices were (they might have been even cheaper if you ordered multiples).

We ordered:

🕺 Memphis Mafia - a large fritter with banana chunks and cinnamon, covered in glaze, chocolate and peanut butter, peanuts and chocolate chips. The biggest and priciest offering. $5.95

🍩 Dirt - a ring doughnut with vanilla frosting and Oreo cookies. $3.20

😢 Tax = $0.60

💰 Total = $9.75

On our previous visit to Voodoo, in summer 2023 at Universal Hollywood, we sensibly shared a Memphis Mafia fritter for breakfast. This time we chose one each but still ended up sharing the Elvis themed one, as it was so big!

We sat in the sunshine on City Walk, tucking in to our doughnuts, watching the store get busier and busier as people ventured inside to try the magical flavors on offer. We are bound to return some day, and will be brave and try something different (the Voodoo Doll doughnut looks great!).

30 YEARS OF AMERICAN ADVENTURES

Today marks the 30th anniversary of my first ever visit to the USA. I fell in love with America on that trip and it’s no wonder as it was to the theme park capital of the world, ORLANDO in the sunshine state of Florida. 

In the early 1990s, when I was 12 years old, and was told I would be going on vacation to Florida with my 60 year old grandfather, sister and cousin, I ran down the street singing: “I’m coming to America” over and over! If I’d realised then it would be a sluggish year or two later I don’t know if I’d have been quite as ecstatic! 

This was to be “the trip of a lifetime” for us and we needed enough time to save up. My mother and four lovely grandparents chipped in every week with our pocket monies and I’ll always be forever grateful for what they did to get us to Florida. 

The Orlando Holiday Boom of the 1990s was in full swing and free promotional VHS cassettes featuring exciting montages of the Orlando thrills fuelled our excitement as we literally counted down the hundreds of days. 

It felt like departure day would never arrive. But it did  - Saturday June 4th 1994 - and we were soon jetting off from the northeast of England to the northeast of America: our flight to Florida was not direct!

We had to land and refuel. 

So my first ever taste of America was Bangor International Airport in Maine. 

While I was bemused that you could buy a newspaper from a vending machine just like in the movies, that boring layover was a very underwhelming welcome to the USA. 

The Orlando theme parks were of course the opposite: they literally blew our minds! One day we were being attacked by our favorite movie monsters - Jaws, Kong, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters - and the next we were seeing real-life monsters: awesome killer whales and fearsome alligators. 

We spent an exhausting 2 weeks at Walt Disney World (Magic Kingdom, EPCOT and Disney MGM Studios), Universal Studios Florida, Sea World Orlando, Busch Gardens Tampa, Gatorland Florida, a night time visit downtown to Rosie O’Grady’s and Church Street Station, a day at Kennedy Space Center, plus the many delights of International Drive: tourist stores galore (Bargain World and Disney collectibles) and the famous eat all you want restaurants. 

We ate loads. 

We walked miles. 

We laughed of heads off. 

And we all got sunburnt, despite our mothers having dozily packed jumpers and pants for us. It was frequently 100° and lethal in sun as my poor ginger cousin discovered. But who covers up in sunny Florida? 

All good things must come to an end and we said a sad farewell to our hotel, the Quality Inn Plaza on International Dr., when we travelled west to Clearwater Beach for a final week of sun, sea, sand, stingrays and some kind of spiky seed pods that stuck in my poor sister’s butt (what a way to celebrate your 7th birthday!).

Clearwater was sedentary compared to Orlando and the fishy smell of the pelicans is the memorable highlight. There was a little excitement when we watched live breaking news on the TV in our hotel room - actor OJ Simpson was being chased down the freeways of LA wanted for murder! We watched while tucking into our dinner: a giant bag of salted Lays and a bottle of Snapple, for that’s what you’re often fed when you holiday with your eccentric grandfather! 

But our mothers mustn’t have been bothered by the American junk food diet he gave us: they allowed us to go back to Florida again and again with him. 

We were very lucky indeed. 

30 years later I’m still visiting America and still having my mind blown by the adventures I have there. Here’s to the next 30 years!

LOOK BACK: GATORLAND (ORLANDO, FL.)

GATORLAND, the alligator capital of the world, opened in Orlando, Florida, in 1949. We both visited this unique animal park separately in the 1990s and 2000s at the height of the Florida vacation boom and in summer 2022 we decided to revisit to see if Gatorland still its snappy charm!

A NEW YEAR'S VISIT TO BUSCH GARDENS (TAMPA, FL.)

We visited the BUSCH GARDENS TAMPA BAY theme park on Tuesday January 2 2024 and this was our first visit to the park since the summer of 2018. We discovered that while there had been some updates and changes, it really was much the same. 

While staying in Orlando, we purchased our ‘Any Day Two Park Ticket’ for 2 adults from the official SeaWorld website a few days before our visits to the parks. This pass gave us entry to the nearby SeaWorld and Busch Gardens with free coach transport to Tampa.

Passes x 2 = $245.98

😢 Service fee = $15.99

😢 Tax = $18.26

💰 Total = $280.23

The pass was very good value and was downloaded to our phone as a barcode PDF then scanned at the park gates. Simple as that!

The coach ride from Orlando to Tampa was easy to book online and we had to be at the rear of ICON Park, International Dr., in good time ahead of the 08:45 departure. The coach arrived promptly and filled up with guests from our pick-up spot alone, which meant we didn’t need to go to any other collection points (such as the one at SeaWorld, which we remembered had added a lot of time to our journey back in 2018). 

The ride from Orlando to Tampa was comfortable. We arrived at Busch Gardens at 10:20 am and the friendly driver made it clear we needed to be back at the coach for 7:00 pm for a swift departure fifteen minutes later. There was no way we would be getting left behind, as an Uber would have been in the region of $60.00!

⭐️ TOP TIP: If you use this free coach service, try and get seats near the front of the coach so you can see out the windshield, for the side windows of the coach are covered in a decorative wrap, meaning you can’t see out. 

Busch Gardens is a cash-free park, echoing our experience at SeaWorld San Diego last summer, so we were prepared. If you don’t have a credit card, we noticed machines in the park that you could load with cash onto a pre-payment card (no idea if there was a charge for this).

Throughout our visit to Busch Gardens, we took our time to see the many animals being exhibited. All the enclosures looked well kept and professionally maintained. 

We got to see:

• American Alligators (a larger fence had been erected since our last visit, as a guy from Louisiana had apparently hopped in with the gators in May 2023!)
• Giraffes. 
• Lions
• Porcupines 
• Zebras
• Hippopotamus
• Lemurs 
• Nile crocodile
• Pelicans
• Elephants
• Tiger
• Orangutans
• Chimpanzee (he came up to the window and sat a while with his blankets).
• Big Bird (Sesame Street)
• No gorillas (just the empty enclosure)

We were hoping to find a safari ride, as we could see vehicles in the animal enclosures taking people around, but sadly didn’t spot any signage, and as we hadn’t been given a map, wondered if this was available for VIPs only. 

We didn’t ride as many rollercoasters as we would have liked and only went on 3 rides in total. The park was busier than we hoped and many of the rides had standby wait times of 60 - 90 minutes. Some rides weren’t in operation, despite the designated ‘rides down’ board at the entrance being blank on the way in. 

We managed to ride:

CHEETAH HUNT

STANDBY: 35 mins
ACTUAL WAIT: 60 mins

FALCON’S FURY DROP TOWER (twice)

STANDBY: 15 mins

ACTUAL WAIT: 25 mins

While the actual wait for the first ride was 25 minutes, the wait for a second go was only 10 minutes. Are park visitors scared of this ride? If not, why is the line so often very short? It is a monster and the tower stands at 300ft tall, with you dropping face down at 90°, reaching 60mph! What’s not to like about that?!

KUMBAA (twice)

STANDBY: 20 mins

ACTUAL WAIT: 6 mins

TIGRIS

STANDBY: 50 mins

ACTUAL WAIT: Ride down

Only one car operates on this new rollercoaster and coupled with a slow loading process, led to a lengthy wait. The ride climbs to a height of 150ft (about the same as Kumbaa) and by the time we got close to the loading bay, it was dark. Then the ride went down! After a wasted 45 minutes, we had to make the ‘walk of shame’ back through the line as we couldn’t risk missing our coach back to Orlando. 

Sadly we didn’t get to enjoy the following:

• CONGO RIVER RAPIDS - closed.
• COBRA’S CURSE - staff were testing it and running empty cars around.
• IRON GWAZI - wait time was too long at 80 mins. 
• SHEIKRA - wait time was too long at 60 mins. We did watch it go around and noted the area smelled of vomit!
• MONTU - the standby line was 60 mins and on our last visit we were able to ride it three times in a row with no wait, so this time we weren’t fussed. 

A visit to a theme park wouldn't be complete without sampling the food:

🍕 OASIS PIZZA

A newly renovated eatery next to the Cheetah Hunt rollercoaster. We arrived for an early lunch but service wasn’t particularly quick, so it was after noon by the time we got our food. There was a ‘Pizza Deal’ (2 x Pepperoni and 2 x soda for $34.99) but it looked more like a snack than a meal!

Instead, we ordered:

🏈 Meatball Sub with fries ($16.99)

🍗 Chicken Parmesan Sandwich with fries ($16.99)

😢 Tampa Sales Tax = $2.55

💰 Total = $36.53

The sandwiches were good though they were practically the same - a crunchy grilled bun with a meat, marinara sauce and some cheese on top. The fries came with a tasty seasoning but weren’t as hot as they could have been.  

We enjoyed our food outdoors in the sunshine, sat on the terrace of the Giraffe Bar, where we had a restricted view of the grazing giraffes in the distance (wonder if their lunch was as pricey?).

🍹 COCKTAILS STAND

Towards the end of our visit we called at the Cocktails stand next to Iron Gwazi and sampled the Christmas cocktail, ‘Mistletoe’, which was tequila, Monin pomegranate syrup and lime juice ($14.99 + $1.12 tax). It was nice and sweet but had no kick whatsoever. In fact it tasted like fruity soda! If we’d realised that the Springs Taproom with handcrafted cocktails was as close by, we would have held off from buying one from this stand. 

🍺 SPRINGS TAPROOM

We got a 20oz draft Michelob Ultra ($15.49 + $0.62 tax). The bar was spacious and airy and a good place for us to have a rest after 6 hours of walking around the park.