Ideas for Short Universal Orlando Trips

Wanted to share a mini-trip idea for Universal fans who live relatively close to the parks. Our family moved to Saint Johns County Florida (30 minutes south of Jacksonville and about 2 hours north of Orlando) a little over a year ago. We recently started doing overnight trips to Universal during low-crowd weekends and we are loving them!

We are early risers so we get up and out the door by 6AM on Saturday, drive the two hours, check into our resort, then hop a bus to City Walk. Stella Nova and Terra Luna have been pretty inexpensive and the buses to the legacy parks have been easy to get on because everyone else in those resorts is headed to Epic.

We get to City Walk in time to join the throngs headed into the park but we typically linger and shop in City Walk then go into the park. With going on lower crowd weekends we can still do a lot of what we want to do. We also learned that Sunday mornings are a great time to take advantage of early park admission and hop on Hagrid’s or Velocicoaster and get some other popular rides down before heading home in the early afternoon.

Does anyone else do mini trips like this? What is your rhythm for a short trip?

We have tried coming on a Friday night to spend the weekend but find it’s more stressful to fight traffic to get to Orlando on a Friday and pay for an extra night in a hotel vs. just getting up on Saturday and enjoying a much more empty I-95 and I-4!