This is doable in terms of offerings, wait times for food, etc. The only thing to question is if you’d be able to physically eat it all
You can knock out 1 entree in the pre-park close portion.
Grabbing snacks is easy as you go - churros, pretzels, etc.
Butterbeer was also easily accessible and we grabbed sodas, powerade, monsters, etc throughout the night as well.
I also had a backpack and brought some ziploc bags so that I could save half a churro or the cinnabon bites, etc and have them for breakfast which was a big help. My sister grabbed 3 Monsters on her way out of the park as well
This may sound awful, but I mostly want to sample things. I usually don’t want to waste food, but here I’d grab a “Krusty Burger” to see if it’s truly as “meh / bad” as people say or are “Pizza Tots” as good as hyped. I’d probably only eat partial portions.
I was planning on the same! My “Year of Universal” still has a budget to follow!!
The advice we’d seen was to avoid the HP areas for the first 1.5 hours after park close. There were still quite a few people milling about after that point, but nothing like daytime hours.
IIRC, the price of the 2 evening OI event was roughly the same as a 2-day park to park ticket without express pass. So the free food becomes a “throw in” and we felt no need to try to eat our money’s worth. And for a summer trip, the cooler evening hours were fantastic.
We had a list of food places we were interested in and were largely lucky with places not having long lines. Butter beer was our only “must do” and it was available all over HP. The cart at the entrance by Jurassic Park never had much of a line (it moves fast with no payment needed).
The taco place and FF ice cream did perpetually have good sized lines from what I saw. But everything else looked to be 10 min at most. We ate at both Finnegans and Thunder Falls Terrace within the first 30 min of free food at had no line at either.
Our approach was more a list of rides we wanted to do, and I knew which food places along the route we were interested in if the lines weren’t too long.
In my research after not being able to fit, I found there’s a FB group where lots of people post their measurements and success fitting in various rides. I’ll see if I can find that because it may be useful. I’d say take advantage of the tester seats for sure.
Nope, totally get that here! Also, some of the dishes were smaller portions (or at least I hope). Like all of the tots were small containers with 7-8 tots so it was a perfect way to sample all of those (we got buffalo and green eggs). I’ll go through our overall “stats” sometime today and see how many rides and food items we did each day and post that. My gut reaction is that 8-10 rides (not Hagrid’s or Velocicaoster) and samples of a good number of food items would be doable.
All of this is super helpful. My friend and I are going for one night only in December. We thought about two nights, but Saturday was sold out by the time I logged on. I am not a huge Universal Studios fan, but love the HP stuff. My thinking was that this was a way for her to do all the HP stuff and at least some of the other rides without crowds and more on our time schedule (coming from west coast). She has celiacs disease so food is always tricky for her. I don’t know that we’ll be eating much during the event other than butter beer! But good to know we can probably get on all the rides we want at least once and spend time in Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade.
If it’s helpful, these were notes I jotted as I went so I’d remember to put everything in my trip report. It gives a quick look at what all we were able to do. More details in my trip report.
Saturday:
19 rides/shows
Beer (not included)
Crepe (not included)
Butterbeer x 2
Churro x 1
GH&H and BC Tots
Cinnabon
Bonus Bites Meal
(ride totals include re-rides) In addition to these totals, we spent time in stores, doing spells, taking in atmosphere etc. So you could definitely do less rides, and more food and hit your targets, IMO.
From the looks of your and @amvanhoose_701479’s reports I could definitely do all that I wanted, including food. Since I’ll have an AP, rides won’t have to be the complete focus of my OIM experience, but I’ll be able to do whatever I want.
