Universal Studios

On our 2nd day of park hopping, we headed into LA and went to Universal Studios!

 It was pretty empty (thanks to being a week day and kids back in school) which was great when we kept running into different characters...no lines to get pictures taken!  Zane was in character heaven!

The first "ride" we went on was the tram that goes through the different movie sets and has some "real life" simulations - anyone who has been to Universal knows what tram I'm talking about.  I told Josh that I didn't think this was a good idea to do with Zane - he can get very anxious if he doesn't know what's going on and he scares very easily - turns out, I was right! 

 It didn't help that our tram BROKE DOWN!  The brakes locked up (I only know that because I'm married to a technician that has a keen sense of smell for broken down vehicles) and we were stuck - a non-moving tram meant no breeze, which meant very sticky hot people and also meant an even more concerned Zane :(  Of course we assured him over and over that everything was fine, but he honestly thought this was part of the ride and kept asking what was happening and what was going to happen next etc!  Once they brought the mechanics down to check out the tram and figured out that this tram wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, they opted to bring down a new tram for us to all transfer too.  Apparently, no park-goers are every allowed to just willy nilly walk around the fake streets and get up close and personal with the Hollywood facads so when they brought down the new tram, they also brought a host of security with them to stand at every 10 feet of the little "street" we had to walk down - I personally thought the whole ordeal was pretty cool so of course snapped a few pics :)  By the way, Landon just munched on crackers the entire time and didn't have a care in the world!

This whole tram adventure pretty much ruined Zane for most of the rest of the day.  He didn't have a lot of trust in us to go on any other rides there (until he saw the Transformer ride, then he was cool with it!) and he was very anxious and overly cautious about any "new" place we walked to at Universal.

Of course while we were at Universal we had to play tourist and take pictures with all of the fun "sets" they have set up!

Josh and I love Universal Studios and always have...but its safe to say that it wasn't Zane's favorite place!  If we were to do the whole thing over again, would we still take Zane on the tram ride...in a heartbeat!  Even though it freaked him out at times and he had a meltdown or two - he has told everyone who asks him about his trip about the tram ride and everything he saw on it and also lets them know "he wasn't happy about it" all of the time, but never fear he did think some parts of it were pretty cool - his favorite was the plan crash we drove by, haha!