Spring Break in Orlando

We Stayed at the Holiday Inn on International Drive. The outside look of it was very nice and noticable. One of the buildings was a tall tower and had no ceiling which was very fun. We stayed in the tower and at night you could just step out of your room and see the beautiful sky. The hotel had a nice pool with a waterfall and at night they had movie viewings for the younger kids. They also had a tiki hut style bar/drinks poolside. In the hotel, there is a gift shop, a little dance/club (wasn't open when we went), and a nice restauraunt (we went there for breakfast and enjoyed a nice buffet).

The hotel is in a great spot, which brings me to why we enjoyed our stay the most was having our hotel on International Drive. Right across from us was a water park and there were tons of gifts shops and miniature golf places. We didn't hardly drive anywhere the whole week! (We used the free bus shuttle to go to Universal Studios). There were tons of restaraunts to choose from just a short walk away. We even walked down to the largest McDonalds in the nation!!! There was just tons of things to do at night and in the day. All in all, I would give our stay in Orlando a 5-star rating and our hotel a 4.9 rating!

Universal Studios was great! On our last trip we went to Disney World, so now we wanted to go somewhere else and chose Universal Studios/Islands of Adventure! My personal favorite rides were the Mummy Returns Ride (new!) and Spiderman. What am I talking about--every ride was my favorite! At Islands of Adventure the one ride that REALLY stuck out was Jurassic Park. That was very fun! The thing, though, about all these rides is that the waits are hours long! What we did on the Spiderman ride was choose the "Individual Riders" instead of the regular line with families and people who want to go together and were on the ride in about 3 minutes compared to 1.5 hours! That was the only ride we did that on, though, because we wanted to be together for most of the rides (not recommended for families with small children, but it works great for teenagers and adults). One day we went to Universal Studios and the other day we went to Islands of Adventure because it will take a day to go to everything!

Almost all of the hotels and motels in Orlando offer free bus shuttles to and from them (a great perk, because we didn't drive our whole trip). It was great!