UGH! What a day! So My husband had the day off on a Friday which rarely happens and we decided to wake up and go stand in line at The Neibolt St. House on the corner of Hollywood & Vine. We have been wanting to check it out since it opened up last month and this was the last weekend and also opening day of the movie so it was now or never. We decided to go early before 1:00p.m. (starting time) in hopes that the line would be shorter and go faster than the three hour wait I heard it was, but just incase I was prepared to wait the three hours, what I was not prepared for was the nearly 6 hours I waited.
We arrived around 11:45 a.m. and even before 1:00 p.m. the line started to move and it felt like it was moving at a decent pace I thought to myself "Awesome it's only going to be around two hours", but boy was I wrong. Once we got closer it seemed as the line just got slower and slower. I just about went crazy towards the end. I wanted to scream out loud and throw a tantrum. I think the heat and hunger kicked in and I felt like I was going to have an anxiety attack and I wasn't the only one. One guy actually got light headed and was passed through the line a bit quicker. I looked around at the crowd around me that was once cheerful, talkative, and excited; by the end they were an annoyed and lifeless bunch, I could hear everyone wanting to jump ship, I thought about just saying "fuck it" myself - I couldn't do it anymore, but I just couldn't see myself walking away after I had invested all that time in line and we were so close to the prize.
We kept on keeping on and we finally made to the front and were given enough time to take pics with the house and "Georgie" which was very cool. Georgie was our guide through the the house where "It" lives. We went inside the house and up a spiral staircase to the second floor of the house. We went through a couple of rooms and then back down some stairs that lead through the sewer where it lives and that was it. They told us it was a fifteen minute experience and it was about half of that. It was cool to visit the set, but did it feel like a maze not really there were two maybe three actors throughout the whole maze everything else was special effects and animatronics.
When we finally walked out of the maze it was 5:30 p.m. Yes it was close to a six hour wait . I can't believe I wasted my whole day there in the sun and starving and the maze wasn't even great! Would I do it again or recommend you waiting all that time in line? Absolutely not! It's the craziest thing I've ever done. Life is too short to waste it in a line when there are dozens if not hundreds of mazes in Los Angeles this time of the year.
The only thing that sort of made up for the wait was the additional and also free VR experience afterwards. It was a bit weird at first we were loaded into a bus with two sections the first half was pretty pointless a dark room that's supposed to be a sewer nothing happens in there, but they put you in there so you wait for the other people to finish their VR experience, although I would have rather waited outside watching the trailer to the movie than squished in a dark small space with sweaty strangers. Finally the door opens to a nice air conditioned section of the bus and you take a seat in one of the chairs and begin your experience which is about six minutes - so the whole time inside the bus is about twelve minutes. It was good to have that little extra something after the other experience and kind of made the wait feel a little less maddening. I've convinced myself the wait was three hours for each experience, but I still wouldn't do it again. It was insane to wait that long.
