Author: barnaby

Here in Orlando we went to Universal Studios Florida and not Disney.

Now I know what your thinking, ‘WhY DiDn’T yOu gO To dIsNeY LaNd???!!!’ well basically, we have no interest in Disney really. To be honest, I have watched the Broadway Lion King show more than i have watched the movie (never) and the only Disney thing we really enjoyed was Toy Story and we just don’t really want to go to Toy Story Land.

Right, now we’ve got rid of all of the no-good Disney lovers we can talk about the good stuff, Universal Studios!

Now, thanks to my friend Alfie scouting out Orlando for us, we knew what to do, and what not to do.

So we didn’t go to Islands Of Adventure.

When we got in it was really busy so we decided to go on the ride furthest away from the entrance, Men In Black, Alien Attack, where you go round on this cart thing and shoot loads of aliens that pop out anywhere, from the front of cars to bins, to the ones sat next to you called Alice and Simon Dent.

Then we went on the Simpsons ride, where you are sat in this rollercoaster and you are brought up so you can see a massive cinema screen, and then its kinda like a simulator as you go up and down the rollercoaster, trying to escape Sideshow Bob, but you’re really just moving around in this seat.

Then we went on the Revenge Of The Mummy ride, thanks to popular request by once again, the Alfmeister (thanks m8) and it was the bestride ever! it was really fun and for me, really scary as well! What you basically did was go along this track, and then you went down a bit and then stopped really suddenly. Then you go backwards down a bit, and then you see this ramp ahead of you, and what goes up must always come back down!!!!!! So as I was swearing loads and basically hyperventilating, we suddenly shot up the ramp, and went round this rollercoaster bit. Then, you go up this ramp and slow down, only to be tricked and sent down (quite suddenly and quite fast) this quite big ramp. Oh, and did i forget to mention that halfway through the ride you practically get burn to a crisp by these flames!?

Bascally, to sum up that massive paragraph you just spent about 7 years reading, it was rather scary.

Then we went on the Race Through New York ride with Jimmy Fallon, who hosts one of the various Tonight Shows.

It was really good, as it was like the Simpsons Ride but in real life. The 3D and feeling of motion was amazing.

Then we went on the Shrek 4D ride which was terrible. It was really bad quality, a Shrek short-episode-thing that you could just find on Netflix, and we waited an hour for it!!!!! Total waste of time….

Then we explored the Harry Potter side of Universal Studios, where there was an upgraded version of the Diagon Alley Set, and waited equally as long as we waited for the Shrek ride (mabye even longer!) to go on a Harry Potter ride that was alright, but still not as good as the Revenge Of The Mummy ride.

And that was it folks! Sorry for the absolute gargantuan of a blog post, but you can tell I enjoyed it! NB Mum closed her eyes on all the rides..

Barnaby😁😁👍🙃🌎

As per the Lighthouse Family – “One day we’ll live on Ocean Drive”….and thats exactly what we did do for 3 nights…..the “Sun (didn’t) shine on everything we do (did)” as it rained quite heavily for about half a day! So I will be lodging a complaint against the Lighthouse Family, thank goodness they don’t work for the Met Office.

Thanks for that Dad… even though it was probably the hottest place we’ve been, at a low of 29 degrees celsius, and that was in the shade!

Mum and Dad seemed very excited about the whole ‘Ocean Drive’ thingymajiggy, but to me they just looked like a couple of buildings in an old stylee.

We also enjoyed the beach loads, and spent rather alot of time on it. The water was nice, but was an odd brown colour. Can anyone guess why?Thats right! It was because of all the seaweed in there, you weirdos! One person (my Dad) loved the seaweed so much he decided to put it down his shorts, and only realised he still had some left down there when he went to have a shower, so decided to leave it in the toilet!!!

Our trip to Miami was great, but I wouldn’t go there again.

Barnaby :0 🙂

Whilst in New York me and Dad went and watched The Lion King on Broadway! The theatre was really big compared to the size of the actual building, and it was nearly as big as the Hippodrome! There was some food we could have, but at $5 for a bottle of water, we were kinda getting ripped off… When we went into the main bit, our seats weren’t as far back as we thought, but I still had to get a cushion to sit on.

The start was really great as nearly all the animals came onto the stage, including a big elephant and a few long-necked giraffes. It was also kinda cool as the young Simbaa (one of the main characters) was only ten! (same age as me.). My favourite character was probably the bird as he was the stereotypical ‘funny’ one.

Barnaby😁😎💩🎭

In Toronto, we (as in me Alice and Dad) went up the CN Tower which is blummin’ tall! At a whopping 553m tall, we were lying on a glass floor, kinda scared-but not that scared as we were only about two thirds of the way up the actual tower. It was great fun going up it, but it was all over in about 10 minutes.

Then, after that thrilling experience (not) we went to a house. Actually, no. Not a house, but half a house! It was as if someone had just got a big axe and chopped the whole house in half! It was kinda weird, but the story behind it was that ages ago they had flats on both side of the house, and they then decided that they wanted to knock all of the houses down. But this person obviously wanted to keep their side of the house, so they just kept one side! As I said, very weird…

Then finally we went to Grafitti Alley, an alley that was full of grafitti, as the name says. Dad got kinda excited because there was a “Heavens to Murgatroyd” Snagglepuss and a Top Cat.

We then exited stage left, even….

Barnaby😁😁😎😎💩👍💣💨🥇🏆🎮🕹🔥💲

And I kinda got excited with the emojis!!!

The next day we didn’t do too much….visited a cafe called “Snakes and Lattes” – which is a Board game cafe….eat and play games from their library…

Whilst we were in Vancouver, we went to Stanley Park and did a 10k bike ride. It was great fun! And also the first time I had been on a bike in a while… One time when we were going along a particularly narrow part, some people were chatting RIGHT in the middle of the path, so I rang my bell, but unfortunately they didn’t move away in time!…. So I ended up going down onto the pedestrian path and nearly falling off!

On another day in Vancouver, we went to Science World, a slightly more science-y @Bristol (or whatever the name is now). It was really cool as there were loads of things to do there, including solving really hard puzzles and looking at mind-boggling illusions, doing lots of things to test your body, playing with water in the Eureka! section, or watching a variety of different films (a music one in our case) on a MASSIVE dome cinema screen the size of our house. It was AMAZING!

Barnaby😎😁👍

We met up with some friends called James and Emma and one of them owns a recording studio, so we went there!

So, If you don’t know I play the drums, so when we got to the recording studio (containing about a million different instruments, including a double bass, and a smoke machine!), I was quite excited. Even Mum gave the double bass a try!!

Also, in San Franscisco I have found this amazing retro arcade and have spent nearly an hour in it already! There are classics like Pacman and Space Invaders, to new games that no-one has heard about but are actually decent like Space Chalis and Area 51 Combat. There were also a lot of REEEAAAALLLLYYY old things like a mechanical farm and the old shooting range things. And it was all that for about 50 cents each!

But no Diarrhoea Dan for you real Look Around You fans!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/programmes/computers/dd.shtml

(requires “retro” flash to play)

Barnaby

Today we went into the centre of Hollywood!!

First we went on a bus tour that went around the celebrity’s houses.We saw Britney Spears’s big pink mansion, Katy Perry’s house on the hill, and Steven Spielberg’s (and Iron Man’s) house. We also saw Justin Bieber’s run down house and were going to go in the portaloo outside (but we went past it too fast)!

Later on that day, me and Dad went to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! while Mum and Alice went shopping.

Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! Is a thing like the Guiness World Record Museum but was (nearly) all collected by a man called Robert Ripley. We saw odd things like:

A two headed cow,

A man that could pull his bottom lip up past his nose,

And a woman that could pop her eyeballs out of her sockets.

(Just letting you know that none of these thing were actually there, they were just wax models or pictures).

🙂

Barnaby 🙃🙂

On the 9th March we went to Hanmer Springs, a thermal pools/water park thing.

There were three slides:

One was a bowl slide, very similar to the one at Wet’n’wild but about 2x smaller,

One was a cool tube slide that was slow enough for mum to go on it,

And the final one was just like the other tube one, but was dark, and much faster, so you got thrown around quite a bit.

And then there were the pools.

There were lots of different hot pools, ranging from hot & stinky (the sulphur pools) to warm and relaxing (basically all of the other pools). There was a lazy river, rainbow pools (not sure rlly) and some hexagonal pools (for any of you who watch Look Around You).

It was fun… and although I couldn’t go in some of the pools, I did get to go on the slides over and over.

Barnaby 😎😁🇳🇿

Here are some links to images…..

https://goo.gl/images/4QaExB

https://goo.gl/images/mCvfnN

On the first of March we got up really early and went around Doubtful Sound in Manapouri for the day.

First, we got on a 40min cruise to an island, where we went on a 45min (cramped) coach journey across it, where we then went on a 3hour journey into the Tasman sea and back, and finally, we did the first two journeys back to Manapouri.

On the journey, we saw baby fur seals, massive mountains taller than the Burj Khalifa and rapid waterfalls.

Barnaby 😎😀🇳🇿.

On Saturday, we arrived in Queenstown and went on the Skyline Luge. Now, I know what you’re thinking: what is the Luge? Well, it’s basically definately go-karting. First, you put on these massive really-uncomfy helmets, then you went up a chairlift to the top of the hill where the track starts and finally you got in the Luge and went down this track down the side of some of the mountain (not off the side as most of you would hope).

On the Luge, there were two tracks. One hard and fast one, and one easier one where you weren’t that fast. You could control your speed though (and I think Alice and Mum found that very useful)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/24H_HY2X__M

Barnaby