EPIC UNIVERSE DELIVERS A MONSTER MASH-UP

Sitting in a whirling cart, the Creature from the Black Lagoon lunging at you from the gooey depths...

- SCOTT GARCEAU

Okay, not exactly every couple's idea of a dream anniversary date. But our anniv happened to coincide with a trip to Orlando, Florida, and we decided to spend the day at Epic Universe, the recently opened Universal Studios theme park with five "portals" that lead into carefully curated zones of monsters, dragons, magic, sorcery and, um, Super Nintendo.

So when in Rome — or Orlando — do as the locals do. We lined up to see what the highly anticipated theme park in the Universal Studios portfolio had to offer.

(Caveat: Just a day or so before, both my wife and I had acquired slight arm injuries while enjoying too many thrill ride activities onboard a nearby cruise ship, making it hard for us to, for instance, throw our arms up in the air and defiantly pump our fists while yelling "Whooooo-hooo!" while plummeting down behemothian roller coasters. In fact, we found it hard to dress and undress ourselves most of the time. So our visit to Epic Universe - which features wild rides devoted to How to Train Your Dragon, Harry Potter, Universal Studios Monsters and Super Nintendo — was a somewhat more gentle, "curated" experience, with the wildness of rides peaking somewhere at the Constellation Carousel, in which one sits atop gently bobbing Rams, Lions, Archers, Tauruses and other celestial creatures circling in lazy figure eights as the big wheel keeps on turnin'. That's about as hardcore as we managed to get on our Epic Universe date.