Orlando

[Mark] “You should rent a car”, the Irishman next to me advised. Thank goodness we took his advice – distances between the parks and hotels are just too great for walking and we would have spent the same amount of money on cabs and buses had we tried without a rental. We’re getting to be old hands at the rental game now; we’ve used Hertz before, so our first task was to find the Hertz dealer. Not in the Orlando airport, but there is a shuttle – lug our 4 suitcases onto the shuttle and get deposited at the dealer, join a queue, and after about an hour we are $760 poorer, one car and about 300 advertising pamphlets richer. Oh, not to mention an appointment for the following day for a timeshare salespitch. What we will do to get a few dollars off the price of the Disney Park tickets!

Then came the interesting bit – finding the hotel. We had a week booking through timeshare at the Westgate Villas, but that was only from Saturday night; we had to find another night’s accommodation for the Friday. A quick search (back in the UK), using RatesToGo.com, found us a double room at the Quality Suites Inn, fairly close to the airport. This establishment does not come with our recommendation: Jaime’s comment was that anything with ‘Quality’ in it’s name, is likely to be anything but! The passages were smelly, flattened old chewing gum stuck on the floor, the lifts were tediously slow and the clientele were, well, less refined. The front desk advised me not to walk to get some food, so we ordered pizza in. The room wasn’t too bad though, and we slept well. Breakfast was served in disposable plates and plastic cutlery; after that, we trudged our 4 suitcases out of there for our timeshare presentation.

This presentation lasted about 2 hours – we didn’t buy anything, but enjoyed looking at some superb luxurious vacation villas/suites – in the Marriot range. The salesman was a Brazilian named Pueblo who is a musician (nominated for a Grammy as a producer once) who now sells timeshare. Interesting chap, probably the reason why we spent longer than necessary to get the cheap Disney tickets! The cheap tickets? Well, $425 for 5 of us, tickets for 2 theme parks and one water park – only 3 days! We would go on to spend another $650 for the other 3 days.

The Westgate Villas is a huge complex with hundreds of units. Our unit has two bedrooms en suite, a large living/eating area, as well as kitchen. It is one of about 30 units around a small lake. It is clean, and functional and meets our needs.

[JM] I am writing this after 5 days of Disneyland and we are now almost Disneyed-out! We’ve been to Blizzard Beach – one of the waterparks – which is themed on a snowy beach. We went on the various slides and rafts, and had a lot of fun. Good to be cool! After The Beach, we had to go shopping in Downtown Disney as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was out and Jaime neded to purchase the book as a matter of extreme urgency.

Next was Animal Kingdom with the Everest and Dinosaur roller coasters, and a very well done ‘Safari’ through a generic Africa – live animals on grass plains; sounds quite kitsch, but was in fact very good – saw some antelope we don’t get here in southern Africa, so quite interesting.

Then came Epcot centre where we visited Legoland. The highlight was definitely a simulated hang-gliding trip over some spectacular American sights: brilliantly done with a ski-lift-type arrangement that moved to simulate flight, and ‘wind’ directed at us from the front. Yesterday Mark took Gabi and Chloe to Seaworld while Jaime and I shopped at a wonderful ‘brand-names’ outlet mall. Today Chloe wanted to stay home – she’s exhausted – so Mark valiantly offered to stay behind with her, while I took Gabi and Jaime to ‘Typhoon Lagoon’ – the other waterpark. We had fun in the sun again but 4 hours was long enough! Tomorrow it’s Magic Kingdom with fireworks in the evening, and then it’s Saturday, and off to Canada!

[Mark] The theme parks (including the water parks) are all huge – lots of walking in very humid heat. The parking areas might be the size of a few hundred rugby fields!! Finding your car afterwards is a bit like finding your golfball in the rough! Because it is summer holidays here, the queues are very long; one can easily spend 40 minutes in a queue just waiting for a ride! The FreePass system in Disney is very useful – pick up a pass which allows you to come back (usually in an hour or two) and walk straight to the front of the queue. We have tried to have an early start each day, but after 5 or 6 hours, we’ve all been quite keen to go home; so we only see a small part of each park. The one exception to this was the last day, when we went to the Magic Kingdom, where we went home at about 3 pm, then returned at 8, braving the crowds, and watched the fireworks display which was on at 10 pm – very spectacular. Getting out of the park after this was a big squeeze in the crowds, and we only got back to bed after midnight. This was our last night, so there was no problem with being tired the next day (or so we thought…)!

The last day started off innocently enough – a mad scramble to get packed up before 10 am. Check out, then off to the shops to buy another suitcase (we had made a few purchases during the week and had outgrown our 4 cases!). Get to Orlando International airport with plenty of time to spare; expected time of departure to Vancouver via Dallas 3.30pm. The plane was delayed, initially because of weather – they had to circle the airport for a while – then lack of fuel, so it was sent to Fort Myers for refuelling. We started getting anxious about our car rental and hotel in Vancouver. We only started boarding at about 5.40 pm but once we’d taxied a little way out, we were told there was a little red light that was flashing and they’d have to return to have it checked out. And there we sat, in the plane, in our seats which was the last row of the plane, right in front of the toilets with the worst air ventilation! While testing, they switched off the power, the air and the water (no toilets), so we were quite uncomfortable for the hour or two they kept us there. Eventually they decided to deplane; as we, the last off, were about to leave, we were told the problem was fixed, stay on the plane as they would be reboarding everyone.

On arrival in Dallas, about 5 hours late, of course we’d missed the plane to Vancouver, so we were given vouchers for the Gaylords Hotel and meal vouchers. We settled in to the room and ordered room service (fillet steak) at 11.15 pm, had a wonderful sleep, great breakfast and relaxing morning there. I write this now in Dallas airport, with a very gloomy sky overhead; hope the next connection will take off as I have a meeting with the College tomorrow morning in Vancouver to get registered as a doctor again in Canada.

Postscript: The plane was delayed, 3 or 4 hours; we arrived late in Vancouver but managed to get to the College appointment in time!