I apologise in advance for my verbose writing style – I’m a man of many words when I put finger to keyboard!
Day Zero. Living next to Manchester Airport has few advantages, until you have an early check-in, so it wasn’t too painful to book the taxi for 0715 for an 0730 check-in!
Flew US Airways to Philadelphia, absolutely perfect flight, couldn’t fault it. Enjoyed the films, the food and the punctuality, we landed 30 minutes early in fact. The same flight last year we experienced faulty in-flight entertainment, followed by 2 hours to get through immigration. This time we were collecting our cases before we were even due to land!
Wary of the time it took us to clear immigration last year, I had been over-cautious when choosing a connecting flight, so we had a 4 hour wait for the flight to Orlando, and waved off the one we could have quite easily of caught had I had a crystal ball to tell me we’d catch it no problem. As it turned out, our bags DID go on that flight; they were spinning round at MCO for a couple of hours waiting for us to catch them up!
I rushed off to get in the Alamo queue whilst the rest of the gang got the bags, but still ended up queuing for about an hour. As I have posted in the Car Hire section, self service kiosks are available for those with North American and Canadian driving licences, but I just queued with the masses! Bit tired by time we collected the car, we all thought it was 3 am of course! We’d booked through this site the 7 seater SUV, and there it was waiting for us, a shiny new Buick Enclave. Lovely.
I’d paid $10 for some sort of toll deal, which I’d have understood better if my brain wasn’t asleep and the Alamo agent had spoken better English, but I was of the opinion that I can drive through the express lanes, and so we had a lovely quick drive down to Davenport, and collapsed into bed about 11pm local, 22 hours after I’d got up.
Day 1. So, the holiday begins. We’d decided our first trip would be to Animal Kingdom, as this has been a successful first-day tactic in the past, so we pointed the car in that direction.
First stop the Safari.
Then Nemo The Musical, a new show to us, absolutely loved it.
We had a great morning, and then, about 2pm, it started to rain a bit. We had decided to try the Rain Forest Cafe for lunch, and we can highly recommend it.
Food was fantastic, as was the atmosphere. However, after a long leisurely lunch we decided it was time to go. Uh-oh, it wasn’t raining now, it was a deluge. Boy, did we get wet!! 6 drowned rats climbed into our lovely new car. Amazingly I’d treated myself to a Finding Nemo towel, featuring the hilarious seagulls, which was put to use.
Bedraggled but still in the holiday mood, we proceeded with the holiday plan – hit Walmart! Mrs Dads_Taxi has been surfing the Walmart website for weeks in anticipation! We filled a trolley with essentials, and non-essentials, and arrived back at Base around 7pm for an early night – jet lag was kicking in.
Didn’t get much sleep though, torrential rain was battering the house, a smoke detector that is about 20 feet off the floor decided it needed a new battery - “SQUEEK” every 60 seconds! And the garbage men come ever so early!
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and what is it with the smoke alarms [msneek] In all the batteries I have replaced as an owner over the years, they have always started the beeping at night [msnscared]
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