Okay, I know it's weird for a grown man to be excited about seeing Harry Potter, but Barbara and I have read all the books, seen all the movies, seen the movies again, seen them again, once or twice more, and we’re currently watching all the movies in honor of actually walking through the Hogwarts castle.

It occurs to me that there might be some heathens out there who don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, Universal Studios Orlando (about ten minutes up the highway from WDW) has an attraction called The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, where they have created the town of Hogsmeade and the castle itself. It was very impressive; they did a nice job.

Inside the castle is a ride that Barbara and I elected not to go on. They have a very nice feature, though: if you are not going to ride, you can walk through the castle, following the route of the line with millions of people waiting to ride, and see all the displays that attempt to keep the customers entertained while they wait in the 60+ minute line. Since most people ride, we breezed through at our own pace. Of course, we stood in line outside for about 15 minutes, until we got to the castle door, where we explained to the attendant that we were not riding, just taking the tour. He then directed us to the tour line, and we enjoyed a leisurely stroll in our own queue. Later, we decided to go through the tour again, but this time I talked to the outside attendant at the end of the line. He, too, directed us to the tour line, which, this time, bypassed the 15-minute, sun-drenched wait in the line outside. Okay. Live and learn.

There are two theme parks at Universal: Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure (or "IOA", which is also a state in the mid-west next to Nebraska). Harry is in IOA, and that is the ticket we bought, although the person selling the tickets had to ask us several times if that is really all we wanted. (“Let me get this straight. You just want the one park? You don’t want to go into the other one? Are you crazy?”) We looked around the rest of IOA, which, in addition to the Harry Potter island, also includes a Dr. Seuss island, a Lost Continent island, a Jurassic Park island, a Toon Lagoon island, and a Marvel Super Hero island. By the way, none of these is an island. I’m not trying to be philosophical, here. They literally are not islands. They are areas that are connected to each other around a lagoon. Well, use your imagination.

We were done around 3:00, and we headed back to the RV. Oh, yeah, we bought a wand at Olivander’s. It’s Harry’s wand (not sure what he’s going to do without it). We figured it’s a fake, so we tried it on the dog, and she blew up like a balloon and started floating. She’s been bouncing around on the ceiling ever since. I figure we can make a little extra money by renting her to one of the floats in the Macy’s parade.

Tomorrow, we’re finally leaving the WDW/Kissimmee area and will be heading for Nashville. More on that later.