It was a great concert, would recommend it to anyone for a good night out.
So move forward 24 hours and the packing had been done at the weekend, which was helpful as Celia's work Xmas do resulted in us not getting to Bed till 1am, with the taxi due at 7am.
Where we live in Stanmore, North West London we had not had any serious snow by that date, but as the taxi took us round the M25 the white stuff became more and more evident and we started to understand why Gatwick had closed the previous week.
We arrived at Gatwick, boarding passes in hand, thanks to on-line check-in. Just after 8:30 am, very early for our flights, but knowing that if we had left home 1 hour later we would probably have taken 2 hours or more longer to get round the M25 car park.
Now as this was my delayed 40th Birthday trip, we were traveling Club on British Airways, so once at Gatwick we made a beeline for the Club Lounge to grab some breakfast (nowhere near as good as at Terminal 5 Heathrow) and waited for the flight.
Actually the plane was still pre-boarding so we hung around the gate for about 10 mins before the call came to board, and we made our way down the air-bridge, but still had to turn right when we got to the aircraft. We took our seats, Celia in the Aisle and me with the window backward facing seat, but did end up with the window seat that did not actually have a window, as there was a gap in the windows and it aligned perfectly with my seat. So no nice shots out the window during the flight.
The flight took off about 30 mins late, but we were soon on our way to Orlando. An hour or so in to the flight Lunch was served, I went for the roast beetroot and feta salad as a starter followed by the Seared Fillet of beet au jus with braised red cabbage, crushed potatoes and roast butternut squash. Which were delicious.
in fact the main was so good i had to have a bite before i could take the picture.
The flight was uneventful, the ipod was in full effect as the entertainment system was poor I watched Enchanted and listened to the December episode of the Dibbcast amongst other things. I will also recommend a Power Monkey as it allows me to recharge the ipod mid flight which when you are watching Video the battery seems to drain rather quickly.
And then after 9 and a bit hours, we finally start to descend past the Kennedy Space centre and into MCO. Having earlier this year seen the advice of use the right most queue at Immigration, we got there to find the single queue in operation, but one of the advantages of being in Club is you are early off the plane so there was not much of a queue as we made our way to the desks and we quickly found ourselves waiting for the bags to appear on the belts.
Baggage claimed we walked through Customs and were allowed to take the bags on the monorails, so made our way to the Avis rental car desks to collect the wheels, a small-ish white Hyundai. and we were off.
We have an old phone with Tom Tom maps for the US on it, so it was connected and asked to find a route to my father's house in Kissimmee, but it decided that it did not know where it was and decided to wait. I think we were halfway down Boggy Creak road before it decided it was in florida and would help to give us some directions.
I had also taken the advice from the Dibb and purchased a AT&T Simm card and tried it in my HD2 phone and got a Simm Locked message, so once we got to my fathers house, I phoned AT&T and had also sorts of fun, until it finally came to light that I could not use my new HD2 and had to use my previous phone as O2 locks their phones until the contract expires. So with the simms switched I was a proud owner of an US phone number and 100Mb of data avaliable for the period of the holiday.
We had a good chat with my dad and his wife, and a welcome home cooked meal before heading to the Staybridge suites on Apopka Vineland, which would be our base for the next 13 days.
Tired after being awake for 25 hours, we unpacked quickly and set some alarms for the morning and went to bed happy with finally being in Orlando. and tomorrow we would head to our first theme park.
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