Last week, we took off to Orlando, Florida to celebrate our first wedding anniversary! I seriously can’t believe that it has already been a year. We decided on a new to us adventure for this trip and we were really excited to experience Universal Studios Orlando. We made the decision to fly into Tampa and rent a car for one day to drive to Orlando. This arrangement was actually cheaper than flying into Orlando and getting an Uber to our resort. This added a little bit of travel to our day, but flying into Tampa was less stressful and busy. We took a 6AM flight out of Dallas LoveField, and landed around 9:30AM in Tampa.
Flying in this early meant that we had quite some time before we could check into our Universal resort, so once we had our luggage + rental car we headed to Disney Springs, because we can’t visit Orlando without a little dose of Disney! As can be imagined, it was an incredible busy day, but we killed some time by perusing some shops and getting our favorite sandwiches at Earl of Sandwich.
We picked up groceries for the week at a nearby Target and couldn’t resist a sweet treat at Rita’s Ice!
We decided to arrive at our resort early to see if they could possible check us in early. We booked 5 nights at Universal’s Endless Summer Resort – Dockside Inn & Suites. This is one of their budget-friendly hotels and is adjacent to the Surfside Inn & Suites across the street. We were pleasantly surprised when they said they had a room ready for us at 2PM! We checked in, picked up our park tickets, and headed to our room. Despite this being one of their lower-tier resorts we were very impressed by the room and the resort as a whole. The room was spacious with basic amenities — perfect for a stay where we really just needed somewhere to sleep!
We had been up incredible late the night before, woke up too early, and were running on about 3 hours of sleep. This seemed like a great time for a nap as we got ready for a busy next day at the parks! I had no problem napping and Aaron woke me up around 5M thinking that I wasn’t going to sleep later that night! We headed down to the resort pool for some sun and to wake up our bodies. The pool was a great size, and it was one of two at the resort.
We ate the extra sandwiches we got at Earl of Sandwich for dinner and went to bed early despite our long afternoon naps. We were ready for a fun day at Universal Studios, and I’ll be sharing all about that tomorrow!
Question of the Day:
Do you prefer Universal Studios or Disney World?
Traveling by Nature 