Welcome to Jurassic Park!

Sorry I couldn’t help myself, and I feel like that whether you say it out loud or just in your head this saying takes place every time you walk through those large Jurassic Park gates inside Universal’s Islands of Adventure.

Just the other day I was enjoying a visit to Universal with a friend of mine that really wanted to just do a bunch of rides and attractions. Many times when I’m at the park I find myself more often than not just walking around, eating snacks and searching for pressed pennies. So the thought of a ride day was almost a foreign thought. Usually with such long wait times I just prefer not to bother, but today was the day for rides only….well maybe just one new pressed penny machine. But we will get to that eventually.

We didn’t start our day inside Jurassic Park, instead we checked out the Harry Potter area for those rides first, then we found ourselves hearing strange noises coming from the nearby bushes and foliage. This was a telltale sign that we had entered the land of Dinosaurs. In a previous post I gave some details on the new Velocicoaster attraction which to this day I still have not actually experienced (maybe some day) but you can read about that ride and the special pressed penny here. One ride in this section of the park that I have ridden in the past is the River Adventure and since it was already raining outside I figured I couldn’t get any more saturated than I already was.

We hopped inside and after a short wait, we climbed aboard our tour boat. Last time I was on a tour boat like this a huge shark jumped out at me over in Universal Studios. So my fingers were crossed that this would turn out better.

Well….I won’t spoil it for you but the tour started out nice and relaxing but quickly escalated when dinos started escaping their confinement’s. Eventually our only way out was down a huge waterfall and as you can see from the above picture we did somehow get even more soaked on this rainy day.

As with all good theme park attractions we exited off our wet boat and directly into a gift shop and for this ride the store is known as Jurassic Outfitters.

By this time of day we had successfully ridden a handful of rides so I think it’s a good time to celebrate with a brand new set of pressed pennies. Thankfully we were in exactly the right place.

In among all the dino plush, t-shirts, pins and other soaking wet guests is the new machine up again one of the walls near the entrance.

Inside this shop used to be two separate 3-design electronic penny press machines. Both of those are now gone and retired. In their place is this new fancy 8-design touch screen model that certainly seems to be taking over everywhere.

The penny designs available at this machine are very similar to the ones that used to be here in those separate machines. There is a new Jurassic World logo design, and then various dinos like a T-Rex, Raptor and Indominus Rex.

Well now that I had successfully taken a bit of a break to press some new pennies, it was time to head back on our adventure to hit up some other attractions before calling it a day. Thank you for tagging along as we spent our afternoon inside Jurassic Park and tracked down a full set of dino…pennies.

Keep on Pressing!