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Thread: Dad's Taxi Doesn't Do Disney. 2016 Trip, Part 1

  1. #1
    Florida Chatterbox Dads_Taxi's Avatar
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    Dad's Taxi Doesn't Do Disney. 2016 Trip, Part 1

    Part 1

    So, here we are again, and this time I didn’t have 11 months to wait between booking the flights and getting on the plane.

    This particular trip is a bit different in that:
    a) there are only 5 of us here - a record low headcount, and
    b) we’re not going to the Disney parks.


    In February, eldest daughter Lydia was bemoaning the weather, and decided she needed to go somewhere warm in the Easter school holidays. Scrolling through flights on her phone she spotted £400 BA flights, Manchester to Orlando, within the school holidays. This Easter seems to have thrown up a whole variety of holiday dates in different regions around the country, and in both Stockport and Manchester the school holidays didn’t actually encompass the Easter period at all. This had two advantages, in that we got a nice long 4 day weekend over Easter (ok, those of us not working in television got a 4 day weekend, didn’t quite work out for me), closely followed by a two week break from school, and, more importantly, it threw the price-inflating algorithm that doubles flight prices during peak times into complete confusion.

    Mrs Dad’s Taxi and I stopped browsing Summer-Sun brochures at the mention of £400 flights, and thought it worth investigation. A quick text to my friend with the villa at Bridgewater Crossing confirmed that it was vacant for the fortnight, and so after a few checks and double checks that we weren’t hallucinating we decided to book them. There were many options, all around the £400 mark, and we nearly got caught out by one promising route via London until I spotted that we had to get from Heathrow to Gatwick to make the connection. Er, no thanks BA. We settled on a route that didn’t look too bad, MAN-ORD-MCO, with American Airlines but booked with BA, at £429 each return, and our return flight is via JFK. Some juggling of dates to minimise the cost meant we only have 10 full days in Florida, but that will do for us.


    A flurry of activity then followed, and soon we had the villa confirmed, the car hire organised (with US Car Hire of course) and after some debate we bought our various park tickets but decided we didn’t need to include the Disney parks on this trip. For starters we don’t have as many days as usual, but also we’ve not budgeted for this holiday at all, so something had to go. The Disney parks seem to be a LOT more expensive than we remembered, and the exchange rate is very poor at the moment - it was under $1.39 when we were buying the tickets - so sorry Disney, we disny want to come this year.

    So, by last Sunday evening the cases were packed, the taxi booked and I had the most dreadful night’s sleep imaginable. I was so restless, not with excitement, but I think nervous that I’d forgotten something. About 4 am I reached for my mobile phone and sent myself a quick email reminding me to find the travel insurance documents - so that was one thing I HAD forgotten.

    So we get to Manchester Airport, and I’m already tired. In 18 hours I have to drive on the wrong side of the road. Great. Oh well, the holiday begins here.

    Me and first plane


    AA55 left Manchester nearly 30 minutes late, but the crew put their foot down, or whatever the plane equivalent is, and 8 hours later we arrived at Chicago just on time. In Flight Entertainment was limited to the screens hanging from the cabin ceiling, with two films shown during the flight: Creed, and Tomorrowland. I was surprised to see that the headphone sockets were standard 3.5mm jacks, so my Amazon purchase of aircraft headphone adapters was unnecessary! Complimentary in-ear headsets were available too. Personally I had The Night Manager loaded on my tablet to watch, and my kindle to read, so I was occupied, and I helped Georgia with some GCSE maths revision for a while too. Food was a bit disappointing, we could hear the cabin crew asking “vegetable curry or beef?” As they made their way down the cabin, until they reached me.

    Cabin attendant - “would you like a vegetable curry sir?”
    Me - “or beef??”
    Cabin Attendant “I’m sorry sir, we only have vegetable curry left”


    And what she really meant was they only had a foil tray slightly bigger than an iphone, packed full of spinach and rice and a few grams of vegetable curry. And I don’t like spinach.

    Although I didn’t really want one, I wasn’t too impressed to hear that they had also run out of beer by the time the drinks trolley got to our row. Plenty of diet coke though, so we were quite happy.

    Much later, just before we started to descend, we were hastily handed some sort of warm black bean pasty thing (apologies to any Mexican food connoisseurs), which was extremely tasty and reminded us of vegetable samosas. We weren’t given very long to enjoy them before everything was tidied away ready for landing. The long stage was over.

    Chicago Airport Immigration was interesting. There was a lot of shouting ladies directing people to the right area. We decided we were in the “returning ESTAs” category, as we had watched a video on the plane that said if we had previously travelled to the USA on an ESTA, and were travelling on an ESTA this time, we could go through immigration with the US citizens. Eventually we found a shouting lady who was repeating “US Citizens and returning ESTAs” so we joined her queue. The line moved pretty quickly, and we were soon at a self-service kiosk that scanned our passports, took our photos and fingerprints, and asked the first person in our party the questions that are on the customs form. When we told the machine that we had no more people to add, it spewed out our 5 photos, however two of us had large X’s across our photos - which we took to mean we had been rejected by the self-service method. From the kiosks there are two exits, for those with X’s, and those without. As we were obviously all together we were all directed to the X line, and went through the whole process again with a Border Control agent, who was pleasant and efficient and we were soon collecting our cases to hand them in again for the connecting flight.

    By the time we had taken the little train ride from Terminal 5 to Terminal 3, I had a killer headache, so whilst the others all seemed to still have room for a McDonalds, I sat and felt sorry for myself, which only got worse when I was ripped off to the tune of $4.40 for 6 paracetamol tablets, and $4.80 for a bottle of water to wash a couple down with! Grrrr.

    Our total stop-over time was scheduled as 3 hours 50, and it really went quickly. We were soon on board our second plane.

    Aircraft ORD-MCO


    And the flight was bang on time leaving, and nearly 30 minutes early arriving at Orlando International at just after 10pm local.

    Despite us being at the back of the plane, we were amused to see our cases pop out onto the carousel first, so within minutes we were at the Alamo desk. I’d hired a full size 7-seater SUV, and payed an extra $50 for the satellite radio to be enabled. The guy at the counter tried to sell me an upgrade to a luxury SUV for quite a good price, I think it was about $300 for the 11 days, but we just said no. When we got to the garage the attendant asked what I had hired, I said full size SUV and she knew which car was mine, maybe she had just enabled the sat radio, I don’t know, but she handed me the key to a GMC Yukon which seemed bigger than I was expecting, and made me wonder if the attempt to charge me for an upgrade was to pay for me getting a bigger car. Anyway, the car is huge and I love it.

    At 11.45pm we finally walk into the villa, to be greeted by the chirps of dying batteries in a smoke detector and a CO detector. Thankfully I can just reach them both by standing on ludicrously tall swivelling bar stools - I didn’t write a risk assessment beforehand, in case anyone is wondering - which is an improvement over a previous trip where the dying batteries were in detectors that required a Simon Hoist to reach! Then, we stagger to the bedrooms to discover there is no bedding on the beds! Now we’ve not had this happen before. After a brief search we find the sealed bags full of bedding, sort of make the beds and 22 hours after we got up, we are in bed, or on bed, or in the vicinity of a bed, and asleep.

    Day One of the holiday proper will follow soon, with far less words, and more photos!

    Last edited by Dads_Taxi; 08-04-2016 at 17:09. Reason: Wrong model of car - should be Yukon
    Dave.


  2. #2
    Florida Chatterbox
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    I hope you had a good nights sleep!!

    Those flight prices were a great find, and to good an opportunity to pass, well done to Lydia.

    Looking forward to reading day 1.


  3. #3
    Florida Expert Madabouttigger's Avatar
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    Looking forward to sharing your holiday.


  4. #4
    Gold 5 Star Member eagleydo's Avatar
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    Oh dear, not the best start, things can only get better. This could be an omen for the best visit ever
    Jan


  5. #5
    Florida Chatterbox
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    What a great trip report, I can't wait for the next instalment. I keep looking at the dollar rate and can't believe how low it is!!


  6. #6
    Florida Expert brownm's Avatar
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    Great trip report and thanks for taking the time to write them,

    I love reading about what others peoples are upto on there holidays and I can't wait for our next trip roll on May 31st,

    Regards,

    Mark


  7. #7
    Gold 5 Star Member E. Cosgrove's Avatar
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    Brilliant trip report, hope you are enjoying the gorgeous weather, so lovely I have absolutely nothing to report except that I am on my fourth book since Wednesday!
    Last edited by E. Cosgrove; 10-04-2016 at 12:21.


    Liz


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