When your LA theme park layover goes terribly wrong

Is a 12-hour visit to Universal Studios worth the $1300 airfare discount as well as having to endure my sons’ mid-air cartoonish, close-quarters brawl aboard an Airbus A350? Find out.

Universal Studios Hollywood.

I started to think the whole thing had been a terrible mistake one hour into the flight, when our two young sons – sitting several rows in front of us – started squabbling over proprietary rights to the armrest between them and the little one settled the matter by punching the big one in the mouth and splitting his lip. After a shocked pause of about three seconds the big one retaliated and there ensued the sort of cartoonish, close-quarters brawl – all flailing arms, lashing feet and wounded yelping – that would have been hilarious, frankly, if it were happening to another family on this Airbus A350, in which case I would have taken a leisurely sip of my vodka and tonic, winked at my wife and treated the whole thing as some sort of bonus in-flight entertainment. As it was, I had to unbuckle my seatbelt and dive in between them like a cagefighting referee, prising them apart and apologising profusely to the passengers all around: Sorry! Terribly sorry. Oh dear, let me wipe that off your shirt, etc. After some seat-swapping to separate the warring children I began to contemplate the 33 hours of travel that still lay ahead of us, and a quiet sense of horror settled over me. Yes, I thought. This whole thinghas definitely been a terrible mistake.

It had sounded like a brilliant idea, on paper. We were heading to London on a family holiday, and instead of flying the regular way, via the Middle East, we’d opted to go via America with a 12-hour stopover in Los Angeles. Why? Because it was $1300 cheaper for the four of us to fly that way. The plan was to make a virtue of the long stopover and spend the day at the Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood, before heading back to LAX to flop onto a plane for the final leg to London – exhausted, no doubt, but with a cache of great family memories in the bank.

Imagine my surprise to learn that, in real life, LA didn’t look anything like LA.

Now, only an hour out of Sydney, that plan was beginning to look wildly optimistic: tempers were already fraying as the boys continued to bicker and exchange threats of violence. I dealt with the situation like a grown-up, which is to say, by ordering a second vodka and tonic (yes, yes, it was still only 10am, but we were now over International Waters so the rules didn’t apply) and slipping on my children-cancelling Bose headphones. Alright, technically they’re called noise-cancelling headphones, but every parent on a long-haul flight knows what they’re really for. Slip them on and it’s not just the white-noise roar of the engines that disappears but the whining, cajoling and arguing of children too. You just sit there with zen-like equanimity, watching their mouths move as they enunciate things like “He hit me first” and “No, he hit me!”, but not hearing a sound. Bliss.

Twelve and a half hours afterlumbering intothe skies above Sydney, our 280-tonne metal tube stuffed with 350 passengers, luggage, neck pillows, farts, sighs and hot tray food touched down in Los Angeles, having cleared the Pacific Ocean in one gigantic leap. Modern air travel is amazing when you stop to think about it, isn’t it? Here’s another amazing thing: we’d left Sydney at 9.15am on Thursday and it was now 6am on Thursday, so somehow – don’t ask me to explain it, exactly – we’d arrived before we’d even left. After passing through US Immigration (where they take your fingerprints as a matter of course, which was a bit of an affront: like, I hadn’t even done anything yet) we headed outside to meet our driver, who we’d booked to take us to and from Universal Studios Hollywood, an hour or so away. We’d paid $340 – including a mandatory 17.5pc tip – up-front for this, so I was naturally expecting a stretch limo with a uniformed chauffeur. Instead we got an all-black 12-seater bus helmed by Abe, a super-chatty character who looked like one half of Cheech & Chong and drove like he had wasps crawling up his trouser leg.

Los Angeles is a city I know really well. I mean, I’d never actually been there before, but I feel I’ve absorbed the spirit of the place for years through its prodigious cultural output in film, music, books and art. So you can imagine my surprise to learn that, in real life, the place didn’t look anything like LA. I was expecting boulevards of palm trees swaying against an azure sky, smart white mansions and Farrah Fawcett types rollerblading around in tight denim shorts; I was expecting to be able to hail Snoop Dogg at a street corner, and for him to yell Wassup my man then jump into the passenger seat and start freestyling and dispensing refreshments. But alas, our experience was nothing like this; the LA flashing past the minibus windows was just a sea of sun-baked, smoggy blandness.

It had sounded like a brilliant idea, on paper.

Allow me, reader, to make two superficial observations on driving in Los Angeles. One, their freeways are extremely bumpy, because they’re made of concrete slabs with expansion joints every few metres that send regular, percussive shudders through your vehicle. And two, LA drivers are a scrupulously polite and forgiving bunch. Not once did Abe’s sporting driving style – using the hard shoulder for overtaking, abruptly changing lanes without indicating, pushing in – elicit a horn toot, a yell out of an open window or an abusive hand gesture. I think I know why. In a country awash with firearms (even in a state like California, which has comparatively strict gun laws) you never know who might have a Glock 9mm in their glovebox, do you? And nothing promotes civility and good manners like the prospect of getting shot in the face.

Anyway, after an hour or so of bouncing around in the back of Abe’s van we arrived in Hollywood, passing right by the Church of Scientology HQ, cruising along Hollywood Boulevard past the Dolby Theatre – home of the Oscars ceremony – and taking a small detour to see the famous Hollywood sign on the hillside, which was genuinely thrilling. We were at Universal Studios shortly after opening at 8am, and once through the robust security and metal detectors at the gates (again: guns) we were through into the world’s greatest movie theme park.

First stop was the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, an entire precinct that pays homage to the film franchise. There’s a giant Hogwarts castle looming over a reconstruction of Diagon Alley, where the quaint little houses have gables and crooked roofs covered in fake snow. There’s a life-size replica of the Hogwarts Express train, stalls selling butterbeer (non-alcoholic) and shops where you can get fitted for all the wizarding gear (“Sixty bucks for a wand!” reports my younger son, appalled.) There are Universal Studios employees wandering around dressed like characters from the Harry Potter films.

The boys are cock-a-hoop with the novelty of it all. Me, not so much. You see, I’d hardly slept the night before we left Sydney, and not at all on the flight, so by my reckoning – and at this point, dear reader, you will no doubt want to bring out your tiny violins and start playing something tragic in D Minor – I had been awake for 39 of the past 42 hours. So the prospect of spending all day in a wholly artificial wonderland, brain-addled and baking under the hot Californian sun, was already starting to lose it appeal.

Still, in an attempt to pep myself up I joined the kids on one of the park’s flagship rollercoaster rides, Harry Potter & The Forbidden Journey, in which you zoom and swoop around a CGI-augmented Hogwarts while ghouls loom out at you, screaming and cackling. “Woohoo, let’s go again!” the boys yelled immediately after it finished. “Lads,” I said, “I would rather have rectal surgery than go on another roll

ercoaster. Your old Dad needs a lie-down. But knock yourselves out.”

Jurassic World - The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood.

And with these words, our family day trip to Universal Studios settled into a rhythm that suited everyone: the boys ran around exploring all the themed lands – Despicable Me Minion Land, Jurassic World, Simpsons’ Springfield, Super Nintendo World, Transformers Metrobase – while my wife and I sought out little oases of shade and relaxed. The boys would check in every now and then to stuff their faces with snacks and babble excitedly about all the rollercoasters they’d been on; their hands-down favourite was Jurassic World: The Ride, which culminates in a high-speed splashdown into a lagoon.

In the early afternoon they started to crash – and by then it was really hot, and the crowds had swelled, so we called it a day. My notes were becoming garbled by this stage, with all the sleep deprivation, and I don’t remember much about the drive back to LAX, or getting through passport control. I do remember getting on the plane and thinking London, here we come, and then deciding that, for all the effort and expense, our little LA adventure had been worth it. The boys had had a blast.

Not that their gratitude lasted long. We’d only been in the air for 20 minutes when they started fighting over a packet of chips. Call me a bad father, but I quietly slipped on my children-cancelling Bose headphones, and as their hot furious little faces turned to me and their mouths formed words like “Dad, he ate all the chips” and “They were my chips, and anyway, he HIT ME!” (I’m guessing, obviously: I couldn’t hear a thing), I mumbled Yeah yeah yeah whatever at them and promptly fell asleep.

GETTING THERE: Universal Studios is about an hour’s drive from LAX. There is public transport, and you can pre-book a car, but your best bet is to take an Uber.

MUST DO: The Studio Tour – a portion of the site is a working film and TV studio; this hour-long tour takes you behind the scenes. Also, the top five rides, ranked in order by my boys: Jurassic World: The Ride; Harry Potter & the Forbidden Journey; Flight of the Hippogriff; Revenge of the Mummy; Transformers: The Ride 3-D.

TICKETS: General admission from $US109; universalstudioshollywood.com