Continuing on with our theme parks we did back to back theme park days – first up was Universal Studios Hollywood. The main attraction of this was definitely Super Nintendo World, which is a Mario themed area with rides, interactive games and character meet and greets. They don’t have this at the Orlando version of the park so we were keen to experience it, and it didn’t disappoint.

You enter the world through a green tunnel, like in the video game, and then become immersed in all things associated with the game.

We even got to meet a few of the characters…

If you bought a special “Power-up” wrist band you got to play extra interactive games and collect coins and keys throughout the area. Si obviously had to buy one.

There was an awesome Mario Kart ride, where you get to ride around a track in Bowser’s castle, firing out shells to get rid of the baddies. It was very cool…unlike the augmented reality hats/visors we had to wear which were not so cool.

We did loads of other cool rides too, including the ‘Studios Tour’ which takes you behind the scenes of their working studio. It has some iconic areas such as Amity Island from Jaws (complete with mechanical shark!) and various scenes and sets from different movies. They’ve also got various areas which recreate special effects so you’re put in a live earthquake and flood scenario.

The Simpsons, Jurassic World and Harry Potter areas are always fun to wander around in too.

A lot of the rides were different to those in Universal Orlando so there was loads to do, and a long, tiring day!

Disney California Adventure

Our second consecutive park day we went to the other Disney park on offer – we’d already been to the other one earlier on in our stay. Again there were some different rides, along with some classics that we have done many times before in Orlando.

There is a ‘Cars land’ which is themed around the pixar Cars movies. This area has a really popular ride which has a standard queuing time of 2 hours! We therefore headed to this one when the park opened at 8am, and fortunately only had a short wait. Again the theming was excellent. Not sure I’d want to wait in line for 2 hours mind. It was so good we went back on it a second time later, using their single rider line to have a shorter queue time.

We did a few new rides including a Spider-Man themed ride where you fired webs at robotic spiders using CGI effects which was good fun. You scored points like in a computer game for this, but we embarrassed ourselves by being beaten by two teenage girls in our car!

We also did the river rapids ride, a large ferris wheel which gave good views of the park and various familiar rides from our trips to Florida.

We were flagging by about 5.30pm after a long day so opted not to stay for their nighttime show.

It was our last day of the trip, so we fly back tomorrow. It seems like we’ve been away for ages! We’re looking forward to seeing everyone and being back home for a bit.