Felix and I, once again, flew down to Orlando in April for a cheerleading competition. This time, we were attending the Allstar World Championship. Notably, this is a different competition than the one I’ve gone to the past two years. That one is the Cheerleading Worlds, and it’s what most cheerleaders consider to be the “real” world championship of cheerleading. The Allstar World Championship is another big competition that does have some international teams, but is not as competitive as the Cheerleading Worlds.

Day 1: Universal Studios & Islands of Adventure

We flew in a few days before the competition so we went to check out Universal parks. My registration to the Cheerleading Worlds always came with Disney tickets, so I was excited this year to check out different parks. We started at Universal Studios (one of Universal’s three parks), which I’ve heard is the least popular park. As I walked through, I understood why. I passed rides for Minions, Transformers, Fast & Furious, and Jimmy Fallon–absolutely nothing of interest. There were basically no lines for anything, so clearly other people felt similarly. We walked to the back of the park, which held the only interesting area: Diagon Alley from Harry Potter. This area was very cool. Everything is themed to look like the movies, and when you’re inside the land, you can’t see anything else. They have a big dragon on the Gringots building which shoots fire from its mouth every 10 minutes. And you can feel the heat.

We tried the famous butter beer (it’s just cream soda) and some other green themed drink with boba. They were both really good. I love themed drinks.

We looked in all the shops just to see everything and they all had great details. Clearly a lot of thought and love went into the making of this world.

I really liked Harry Potter when I was a kid, but I like it a loss less now that I know about J.K. Rowling’s problematic views, and acknowledge the ways in which those views are visible in the media she created. Look–casual ads for slavery in the wizarding world!

So yeah, I have mixed feelings about Harry Potter, but this was a really cool world and I enjoyed being in it. There wasn’t anything else left in Universal Studios that I wanted to see, so we boarded the Hogwarts Express to take us to the connecting park, Islands of Adventure. I thought the Hogwarts Express was a literal train to take us to the other park, but it’s actually a ride that looks like a train. Once you’re inside, your window is a screen that shows you magical scenes of your train travelling to Hogwarts. That was a fun surprise.

The train takes you to Hogsmeade Village, another Harry Potter-themed area. This quaint, wintery village feels quite out of place in the hot, Florida sun. It was also packed. The Harry Potter stuff is clearly a favorite because the areas were more busy than anywhere else in the park. We went on Hagrid’s motorbike ride and it was fun.

This part of the park has Hogwarts Castle, but it was mostly covered in scaffolding. Nothing magical about that.

The castle houses a ride and the line for it is super cool because you get to see the inside of Hogwarts as you walk through. They have great details, like this room of portraits where the portraits are all alive. The ride was a motion simulator and made me feel pretty sick.

After this we got lunch and checked out the other parts of the park. None of it was anywhere as interesting as the Harry Potter stuff though. We did some random rides just because they were what was there: King Kong, the Velocicoaster (Jurassic Park-themed), a slow one in Dr. Seuss Land. The Dr. Seuss Land was well themed but all it had was little kid stuff.

Felix and I got the Universal Express Pass for this trip, which lets you skip most of the line for rides. We probably could’ve gone without it because the park wasn’t super crowded (by theme park standards) and there were only three or so rides where the passes saved us significant time. We ended up with more time than we knew what to do with. Near the end of the day, I saw that a ride in Diagon Alley, which was previously down, was running again so we took the Hogwarts Express back to Universal Studios. Note: the train does play a different video when going the other way.

The ride is inside Gringots and it has a cool line area where you get to see the bank and they have a bunch of animatronic goblins. This ride made me less sick than the Hogwarts one.

As we were walking out, we noticed a hallway that took us to a somewhat hidden space. It was dark alley with buildings, displays, and it’s own little shop. I was impressed that the area was so detailed, and they had put so much care into something that wasn’t well advertised. I hadn’t even noticed it the first time we were here. Nice job, Universal.

We had dinner at the Three Broomsticks, and I was excited to have a magical-themed dinner but it was just mediocre English food.

That’s all for Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure. I liked the Harry Potter Stuff but found nothing else in the parks noteworthy.

Day 2: Interlude

We were slated to have a cheer practice on Friday but didn’t know when it was going to be, so we didn’t want to plan a park trip. So I spent my day at…drum roll please…work! I worked from the Hazen office in Orlando, because that’s a cool thing people at my company do. Turns out their office gets lunch every Friday so there were a good amount of people in the office and we all had lunch together. They were very nice–seem like a cool office.

Felix and I had cheer practice in the evening, which is less about actually practicing and more about wearing matching practice gear once. We practiced outside on a hill which introduced issues that we don’t usually have. My gym posted this action shot from our practice and I crack up every time I look at it because it’s so unflattering.

Day 3: Allstar Worlds Qualifying Round

Saturday was day 1 of competition. It’s a qualifying round for finals, but there were few enough teams in our division that everyone automatically qualified for finals. So basically, it was a practice day, and a chance to see where we stood among our competition. Spirits were pretty low because our sister team, Vintage (the team I was on the last two years), had gone earlier and made some big mistakes that cost them their spot in finals. Vogue (my current team) went out and did a pretty good routine. We ended up in second place out of five teams. Vogue won their division last year (they were competing at level 4 and this year we are level 5), so it was a little disappointing to be in second, but it left room for improvement.

Day 4: Allstar Worlds Finals

Our coaches reviewed our scores with us in the morning on Sunday and said we had done well but were boring. We really needed to perform and leave everything on the mat if we wanted to win. Hey, that’s feedback I can take.

The competition ended up being really delayed and our warm up time was pushed back. People on my team coach other teams at our gym, and our warm up ended up coinciding with one of those teams awards sessions. We did kind of mini warm up and then a bunch of people left to watch awards. I think this is really funny because the first place team was behind us watching us not warm up and probably wondering what was wrong with us. Vogue is a pretty casual team so honestly this was not a huge concern. The team that my teammate coaches won their division, and when she came back, we all cheered and hugged her, wasting even more warm up time.

We went out and did the best routine we’ve ever done. Our technique was good and we gave it all the energy we had. Everyone who watched said it was great. See video here. We felt great knowing we had done the best we could, so how we placed was up to the other teams.

Going into awards it really felt like anything was possible. The first place team was a couple points ahead of us on day 1. The third place team seemed pretty good, but they had made mistakes on day 1. That meant if they hit a clean routine on day 2, they could overtake us. Or the first place team could make some mistakes and we could overtake them. And…we freaking won.

When they didn’t call our name for second place, everyone started screaming knowing that we had won. It was so exciting. When they did announce us as the winners, everyone was jumping and hugging each other and crying. It was a pretty unreal feeling because I thought it was most likely we weren’t going to win and I had been trying to prepare myself for that. It feels especially good knowing that we came up from second, like we really earned it.

Afterwards we went outside to take photos with the banner. Felix and I got one of our best stacks photos yet. It felt really cool to walk around wearing our medals and having strangers congratulate us. There’s nowhere else these medals carry such swag so we had to soak it in.

Everyone took a break and met back up in the evening at a restaurant called Señor Frog’s. They served drinks in really tall glasses and gave everyone balloon hats. It was good silly fun.

Day 5: Epic Universe

Ok, back to theme park stuff. On Monday we headed to Epic Universe, Universal’s newest theme park. The idea behind the park is that there’s a central celestial land which contains portals to other lands. We arrived right when the park opened and headed to the first land we came across, which happened to be Nintendo land. This land is extremely well themed. Absolutely everything looks like it’s from a Nintendo game.

We went on a Yoshi-themed ride that just lets you look around at the cool stuff in the land.

We went on a donkey-kong ride that was pretty good. This land was cool but it was super crowded even early in the day. It felt kind of claustrophobic to spend time there. I picked up a themed drink and we headed out.

The next land we went to was Isle of Berk from How to Train Your Dragon. Felix and I both love the HTTYD movie, and I read the books as a kid, so this was the land we were most excited about.

It was freaking amazing. They had a big lagoon with Viking ships, and a hill of Viking houses, including little huts with dragon tails sticking out of them. We walked by an animatronic frost dragon that would periodically breathe steam on guests. I love this land.

We went to a stage show called the Untrainable Dragon. It has fun dragon puppets and animatronics, including a really cool toothless that flies over you. The plot of the show is kind of dumb but I was only there for the dragons.

We got lunch in the Mead Hall which was also very well themed. We got Swedish meatballs (quite good), and some turkey wings that were huge and very messy to eat. I suppose that was in theme with the Viking stuff.

We did some rides in the land, which were fun. At one point we passed by an animatronic Toothless that you can meet, but the line was long so we just watched from afar.

Next we went to the Harry Potter themed land. This world is based on the Fantastic Beasts movies, which I have never seen, and it’s supposed to be 1920’s Paris. We went to a show called Le Cirque Arcanus, which I thought was going to be a circus show. It was about a magical circus, and had some really pitiful, unimpressive circus acts upfront. Then it turned into a puppet show of magical creatures, which was decently cool, but I didn’t get any pictures. The plot was also dumb. Maybe it would have been more meaningful if I had seen the Fantastic Beasts Movie. After the show we walked around to explore and I got a themed drink that wasn’t great. This land just didn’t interest me like the other Harry Potter worlds since it’s not based on media I care about. There is one ride in this land but it was down so we left.

We went to the last land in the park, Dark Universe, which is just generically Halloween monster themed. We went on the Frankenstein Experiment ride and it was ok. I just didn’t care much about this land so we didn’t spend a lot of time here.

We took a break for dinner and then went back to Harry Potter world because the one ride in the land was running again. The ride is set in the London Ministry of Magic during the Harry Potter Movies, which makes you wonder why the rest of the land is 1920’s Paris. The ride line takes you through the inside of the Ministry and has really cool scenery.

Felix and I had been using our Express Passes all day to skip lines, and it was very worthwhile in Epic Universe. The wait time for this ride was listed as 200 minutes but we got through in about half an hour. The ride was pretty fun.

For our last activity, we headed back to Isle of Berk to ride Hiccup’s Wing Gliders one more time because it was my favorite ride. Isle of Berk is definitely my new favorite theme park land (sorry Pandora). It just has so many great details that make you want to hang out there.

We noticed that the sewer manhole covers have dragons on them, and this was really exciting to me as a sewer engineer.

Epic Universe is a pretty cool park. Universal really stepped it up and is giving Disney a run for their money.

That’s all for this trip. Thanks for reading!