2BoysMum&Dad
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Feb 5, 2004
(Alternative Title The Im really only 37½ plus state tax Tour)
Thursday 3rd February 2005
The Cast
Chief trip organiser Me
Chauffeur Me
Trip destination research assistant Me
Financial backer and consultant Me
And finally, the holidaymakers Just Me!
Im awake and up at around 6.20am this morning. First things first, I turn on my p.c. and while its booting up, I get going with packing my hand luggage. All I need is in a box, so it just needs packing carefully in the case. I decide to use a large handbag as well as a case to increase the amount I can take! I had forgotten to pack my spare pair of shoes in my hold luggage yesterday so they now had to go in my hand luggage. DS Michael (aged 11) comes down and turns on the t.v. at around 7am and I go upstairs to wake DH Trevor. Although I have written him a ten page essay (
) about how to look after the boys while I am away, we decide its a good idea if he gets them ready this morning and do their packed lunches while I hover/help (well, he does need all the help he can get hes only a typical man after all ). As usual, we have to dig Piers (aged 8) out of bed at around 7.45am as he very rarely wakes early enough on his own. Michael is out of the house by 8.30am (walks himself to secondary school). Although Pierss primary school is only ten minutes walk away, Trevor and I take him by car so we can go straight to the airport.
So, we arrive at the drop off area at Gatwicks South Terminal and we say our fond farewells. I go straight through to the international departures area. I showed my passport and boarding pass and then put my bags on the conveyor belt to go through the x-ray machine. For the first time I can remember, my bags werent searched and I am through to the departure lounge. From now on, I am on constant look for DIBB and Disboards members. I know a couple of families are due out on the same flight. I havent had any breakfast yet, been up for three hours and am rather peckish! I eventually settle on a cheese and salad sandwich and a large bottle of water from a place upstairs. There are long queues for hot meals so this seems the easiest option. The water will do me nicely for the flight and will be useful to carry around the parks if the weather is hot.
My flight (number VS027) on the screen now says to make our way to a set of gate numbers. This confuses me, is my plane leaving from several gates simultaneously!! Anyway, I need to go back downstairs and follow the signs. Find myself in a hub area surrounded by gates and planes. Theres a Virgin Jumbo at Gate 36 and after a few minutes, the monitors show that to be my plane. Ill be flying on the famous Virgin Hot Lips. I sit for a while and along comes a rather loud family group and I hope I dont end up near them on the plane! I get up and move about, shortly accosted by a couple who ask me if Im Zoe from the internet. Bingo! This is Doug and Jenny with a friend of theirs off out to WDW. They like rollercoasters and their friend is looking forward to doing Dr Doom at Islands of Adventure! It immediately occurs to me that unfortunately I am never going to see them again they will be up there on Kraken, Tower of Terror, the Hulk or Dr Doom with me doing something like the Carousel of Progress! Doug and Jenny are registered on Disboards and joined the DIBB after I mentioned thats where I mainly hang out.
We are boarded onto the plane and I happen to find my seat before the two people who will be my travelling companions for the next eight or nine hours. A family of four (with two girls ages about six and eight) arrive and have seats next to me and behind me. The mother and six year old decide to sit next to me, the girl by the window. The dad and older girl have middle and isle seats. They were a lovely normal family, and the girls were no trouble throughout the flight (although the younger one was very tired and a bit grumpy initially but fell asleep after half an hour).
Although they were a very pleasant family, it seemed to me that they were totally unprepared for the Florida holiday ahead of them! I was a little surprised to learn that they hadnt got any park tickets yet (they wanted to wait until they got there), they werent intending to necessarily visit all the four main Disney parks (I was surprised for a first family visit) and they had done little or no research on WDW and were depending on her childhood memories from over 20 years ago. This isnt necessarily a criticism as a lot of families like their holidays like this, but its totally the opposite to the way we prepared for our family holiday there last summer!
I occasionally reminded the mother that I was quite happy to get up if they wanted to walk around or use the toilets. But they seemed quite contented to stick to their seats and they both got up together only twice to use the toilets during the whole flights. She seemed very pleased with my occasional pearls of wisdom gleamed from the DIBB! When we landed, I expect she was ecstatic to get away from the raving loon she had had to put up with for the whole flight!
During the flight, on one of my walkabouts, I went over to speak to Doug and Jenny who were a few rows up and on the other side of the plane. It was great to speak to some people who knew a lot about the area.
So, we landed at MCO and the immigration hall was busy, but looked like it was probably only our plane occupying the place. Remembering Mike Joness tip about choosing the desk as far to the right as possible, I headed in that direction (despite the fact the two on the far right had longer queues than the others). Low and behold, a couple of English families in my queue decided to leap across to the US citizens desk when the queue there was almost gone. An Oriental looking woman in front of me persuaded me to go into that line with her and her family as I think she was also a bit nervous of doing so without being asked to do so by an immigration official! We did and I am glad we did. An electronic imprint of both my index fingers was taken and picture taken by a web-cam type camera. Got through quicker than most of the other people in the hall and got my hold luggage immediately from the carousel you can see at the back of the immigration hall behind a glass partition. I was worried that being a lone female, I might be interrogated, but luckily not. I just did my nice smile thing!
Thats it I thought. Ive done immigration and baggage reclaim bits, wheres the car hire offices? Anyone who has been through MCO International Airport will know I still had a long way to go before I was out of the airport!
Immediately after I collected my case, I had to hand it back again. It disappeared on a conveyor belt and it was about 15 minutes before I saw it again. We had to travel on a monorail type train (rather like the ones at Gatwick Airport) to the main terminal building (apparently we werent there already!). Got off the monorail and followed to the signs to the baggage reclaim area. Went through a security area where my passport was checked and hand-luggage went through an x-ray machine. After turning left into the baggage reclaim area, discovered I needed to be 100 yards to the right instead and found my case pretty quickly. I was done and finally felt I could sit down for a few moments to put away my passport and find my car hire documents before making my way outside and across to the multi-storey car park opposite to collect my car.
No problems finding Dollar. As soon as I walked into the building, there was a Virgin office with a Virgin Rep greeting passengers and she collared a Dollar man to help sort a car out for me. I must admit to being a little apprehensive about getting straight into an unfamiliar automatic, left hand drive car and driving straight off onto unfamiliar roads! I had geared myself up to having a little drive around the car park to get used to it, but the car park didnt actually lend itself particularly well to doing this and I decided I would actually be ok. The important thing was not to rush off hastily before I knew where all the important controls were (including windscreen wipers and lights).
This is my car parked in my resort car park (but not the day I arrived) ....
I had a brief look at the map I brought with me and off I went! My main objective was to drive safely, never mind the navigating, just get used to the driving first! If I end up in the right place, that would be an added bonus! I half surprised myself in getting within spitting distance of the Pop Century Resort before going wrong. Pop Century is a very new resort (open less than a year) and seems to have far fewer signposts for it than any other place. If you miss one sign for it from any direction, you are unlikely to see any more! It seems the Caribbean Beach Resort has more than its fair share of signposts and its next door! Anyway, as it happened, I just didnt take a right turn when I should have done and did a u-turn shortly afterwards, turned left and voila found the Pop Century.
Parked the car, left most of the luggage in it and just took in my wallet and hotel confirmation voucher with me to the check-in desk. Luckily the queue was short and I was seen very quickly. A nice young man with an accent similar to Mexican I think (but not Mexican) checked me in and seemed to take an inordinately long time in doing so. Very pleasant, but all the while it seemed like he was chatting me up
(). I was now getting visions of scary knocks on my door late at night! He was almost certainly just being very pleasant and trying to do his job well, but sometimes its difficult to tell the difference between a man trying to be very good at his job and a man trying to chat you up! I made quite a thing of the fact that it was my birthday in three days time and I had specifically asked to be upgraded to the 1960s buildings as that was the decade in which I was born. I must have made several references to this during our ten minute chat and he finally gave me a map showing which building I was in, which car park is nearest and the direction to go from where I was currently parked. He asked for my first name and made sure he has spelled it correctly and made some relatively pathetic reason why he needed it (I knew it was probably for the birthday card!). He seemed particularly pleased with the fact that he got me a room at the top of the building facing Epcot which would give me a great view of the parks evening fireworks.
So, off I went with his map back to the car. Drove round to my building, unpacked the car and traipsed up to my fourth floor room. It was now 6.27pm (Florida time) according to the time on my mobile phone. I was a little disappointed that the room smelt of stale cigarette smoke. I couldnt quite understand this as I thought all Disney rooms were no smoking. The chances are, previous occupants had stood at the doorway and lingering smoke would leave their remnants in the room. It was quite a marked smell and I was worried this would be too much for me to put up with for whole week. I then noticed the message light was flashing on my room telephone, it was from Trevor and I had only missed him by two minutes! He said he would call again tomorrow. Anyway, I was now tired and needed a bath, so I decided to think about this smell problem while having a soak. I only unpacked a few necessary items, stripped off and got into the bath.
Just as I was doing so, something about the location of my room struck me as rather odd. The Pop Century Resort is actually only half built. The place was conceived several years ago but was postponed when there was a lull in the tourist industry after 9/11 in 2001. The current site has buildings dedicated to the 1950s decade, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and are arranged along one edge of a large lake a little like the Caribbean Beach Resort with a bridge crossing over the middle of the lake. Buildings on the other side of the lake are currently being erected, but you honestly wouldnt really notice it and I never heard any noise. In fact, I dont think any construction work was in progress during my week there. The buildings will be dedicated to the other decades of the last century. Anyway, enough of P.C.R. history! I was now wondering why I should get such a good and uninterrupted view of Epcot if I was in one of the 1960s buildings, I should be seeing a side of one of the other buildings, the flower pool or the lake from a 1960s room! I had now run the bath and there was nothing to do but hurry with it and pack my bags up again!
Yes, I had been put in a 1950s building!
: I didnt understand it! After all my waffling to that poor guy on reception, he must have been very confused or just didnt understand my accent! But, I had given him my special accommodation voucher which showed the upgrade. Thank goodness for Vals organisational skills, it was this that was sent to me by special delivery to my home address yesterday and the only proof I had that Id paid for an up-grade. It was just a shame the guy on reception didnt read it properly when I checked-in and I was too disorientated to notice anything was amiss at the time! I remembered commenting that it was strange he was showing me the location of the 1950s car park when I would be staying in a 1960s building! I was now on the phone to the front desk and the woman found the voucher (which she told me should have been returned to me) which confirmed my upgrade. I was advised to come back to the check-in desk again so a new room could be allocated. I was about to complain that someone should just come and collect my baggage and take me to the new room when I thought it would be better if I just packed up my car and go as it is a fair distance and I wanted my car parked in the right place ready for the next morning.
Car up the car again, back to reception, new room card issued and into my new room which was lovely. No strange smells, ideal location up only one flight of stairs (safe from flooding!), facing the other side away from the pool (so no echoing noise) and less than two minutes walk from the main building. I phoned Trevor and told him everything I have just told you!
I was now a little peckish and made my way to the food court, bought a refillable Pop Century Resort mug and filled it with ice and diet coke. Also got myself a tuna and salad filled baguette, took them outside and sat at a table eating while watching some people use the flower shaped pool. Back to the room and spent an hour or so writing up my trip report notes. To bed and head spinning with ideas for tomorrow. Shall it be MK, Epcot, MGM, AK, Universal Studios or Islands of Adventure? Decisions decisions decisions .... and I had nobody to disagree with my final choice!
Thursday 3rd February 2005
The Cast
Chief trip organiser Me
Chauffeur Me
Trip destination research assistant Me
Financial backer and consultant Me
And finally, the holidaymakers Just Me!
Im awake and up at around 6.20am this morning. First things first, I turn on my p.c. and while its booting up, I get going with packing my hand luggage. All I need is in a box, so it just needs packing carefully in the case. I decide to use a large handbag as well as a case to increase the amount I can take! I had forgotten to pack my spare pair of shoes in my hold luggage yesterday so they now had to go in my hand luggage. DS Michael (aged 11) comes down and turns on the t.v. at around 7am and I go upstairs to wake DH Trevor. Although I have written him a ten page essay (
) about how to look after the boys while I am away, we decide its a good idea if he gets them ready this morning and do their packed lunches while I hover/help (well, he does need all the help he can get hes only a typical man after all ). As usual, we have to dig Piers (aged 8) out of bed at around 7.45am as he very rarely wakes early enough on his own. Michael is out of the house by 8.30am (walks himself to secondary school). Although Pierss primary school is only ten minutes walk away, Trevor and I take him by car so we can go straight to the airport.So, we arrive at the drop off area at Gatwicks South Terminal and we say our fond farewells. I go straight through to the international departures area. I showed my passport and boarding pass and then put my bags on the conveyor belt to go through the x-ray machine. For the first time I can remember, my bags werent searched and I am through to the departure lounge. From now on, I am on constant look for DIBB and Disboards members. I know a couple of families are due out on the same flight. I havent had any breakfast yet, been up for three hours and am rather peckish! I eventually settle on a cheese and salad sandwich and a large bottle of water from a place upstairs. There are long queues for hot meals so this seems the easiest option. The water will do me nicely for the flight and will be useful to carry around the parks if the weather is hot.
My flight (number VS027) on the screen now says to make our way to a set of gate numbers. This confuses me, is my plane leaving from several gates simultaneously!! Anyway, I need to go back downstairs and follow the signs. Find myself in a hub area surrounded by gates and planes. Theres a Virgin Jumbo at Gate 36 and after a few minutes, the monitors show that to be my plane. Ill be flying on the famous Virgin Hot Lips. I sit for a while and along comes a rather loud family group and I hope I dont end up near them on the plane! I get up and move about, shortly accosted by a couple who ask me if Im Zoe from the internet. Bingo! This is Doug and Jenny with a friend of theirs off out to WDW. They like rollercoasters and their friend is looking forward to doing Dr Doom at Islands of Adventure! It immediately occurs to me that unfortunately I am never going to see them again they will be up there on Kraken, Tower of Terror, the Hulk or Dr Doom with me doing something like the Carousel of Progress! Doug and Jenny are registered on Disboards and joined the DIBB after I mentioned thats where I mainly hang out.
We are boarded onto the plane and I happen to find my seat before the two people who will be my travelling companions for the next eight or nine hours. A family of four (with two girls ages about six and eight) arrive and have seats next to me and behind me. The mother and six year old decide to sit next to me, the girl by the window. The dad and older girl have middle and isle seats. They were a lovely normal family, and the girls were no trouble throughout the flight (although the younger one was very tired and a bit grumpy initially but fell asleep after half an hour).
Although they were a very pleasant family, it seemed to me that they were totally unprepared for the Florida holiday ahead of them! I was a little surprised to learn that they hadnt got any park tickets yet (they wanted to wait until they got there), they werent intending to necessarily visit all the four main Disney parks (I was surprised for a first family visit) and they had done little or no research on WDW and were depending on her childhood memories from over 20 years ago. This isnt necessarily a criticism as a lot of families like their holidays like this, but its totally the opposite to the way we prepared for our family holiday there last summer!
I occasionally reminded the mother that I was quite happy to get up if they wanted to walk around or use the toilets. But they seemed quite contented to stick to their seats and they both got up together only twice to use the toilets during the whole flights. She seemed very pleased with my occasional pearls of wisdom gleamed from the DIBB! When we landed, I expect she was ecstatic to get away from the raving loon she had had to put up with for the whole flight!
During the flight, on one of my walkabouts, I went over to speak to Doug and Jenny who were a few rows up and on the other side of the plane. It was great to speak to some people who knew a lot about the area.
So, we landed at MCO and the immigration hall was busy, but looked like it was probably only our plane occupying the place. Remembering Mike Joness tip about choosing the desk as far to the right as possible, I headed in that direction (despite the fact the two on the far right had longer queues than the others). Low and behold, a couple of English families in my queue decided to leap across to the US citizens desk when the queue there was almost gone. An Oriental looking woman in front of me persuaded me to go into that line with her and her family as I think she was also a bit nervous of doing so without being asked to do so by an immigration official! We did and I am glad we did. An electronic imprint of both my index fingers was taken and picture taken by a web-cam type camera. Got through quicker than most of the other people in the hall and got my hold luggage immediately from the carousel you can see at the back of the immigration hall behind a glass partition. I was worried that being a lone female, I might be interrogated, but luckily not. I just did my nice smile thing!
Thats it I thought. Ive done immigration and baggage reclaim bits, wheres the car hire offices? Anyone who has been through MCO International Airport will know I still had a long way to go before I was out of the airport!
Immediately after I collected my case, I had to hand it back again. It disappeared on a conveyor belt and it was about 15 minutes before I saw it again. We had to travel on a monorail type train (rather like the ones at Gatwick Airport) to the main terminal building (apparently we werent there already!). Got off the monorail and followed to the signs to the baggage reclaim area. Went through a security area where my passport was checked and hand-luggage went through an x-ray machine. After turning left into the baggage reclaim area, discovered I needed to be 100 yards to the right instead and found my case pretty quickly. I was done and finally felt I could sit down for a few moments to put away my passport and find my car hire documents before making my way outside and across to the multi-storey car park opposite to collect my car.
No problems finding Dollar. As soon as I walked into the building, there was a Virgin office with a Virgin Rep greeting passengers and she collared a Dollar man to help sort a car out for me. I must admit to being a little apprehensive about getting straight into an unfamiliar automatic, left hand drive car and driving straight off onto unfamiliar roads! I had geared myself up to having a little drive around the car park to get used to it, but the car park didnt actually lend itself particularly well to doing this and I decided I would actually be ok. The important thing was not to rush off hastily before I knew where all the important controls were (including windscreen wipers and lights).
This is my car parked in my resort car park (but not the day I arrived) ....
I had a brief look at the map I brought with me and off I went! My main objective was to drive safely, never mind the navigating, just get used to the driving first! If I end up in the right place, that would be an added bonus!
I half surprised myself in getting within spitting distance of the Pop Century Resort before going wrong. Pop Century is a very new resort (open less than a year) and seems to have far fewer signposts for it than any other place. If you miss one sign for it from any direction, you are unlikely to see any more! It seems the Caribbean Beach Resort has more than its fair share of signposts and its next door! Anyway, as it happened, I just didnt take a right turn when I should have done and did a u-turn shortly afterwards, turned left and voila found the Pop Century.Parked the car, left most of the luggage in it and just took in my wallet and hotel confirmation voucher with me to the check-in desk. Luckily the queue was short and I was seen very quickly. A nice young man with an accent similar to Mexican I think (but not Mexican) checked me in and seemed to take an inordinately long time in doing so. Very pleasant, but all the while it seemed like he was chatting me up
(). I was now getting visions of scary knocks on my door late at night! He was almost certainly just being very pleasant and trying to do his job well, but sometimes its difficult to tell the difference between a man trying to be very good at his job and a man trying to chat you up! I made quite a thing of the fact that it was my birthday in three days time and I had specifically asked to be upgraded to the 1960s buildings as that was the decade in which I was born. I must have made several references to this during our ten minute chat and he finally gave me a map showing which building I was in, which car park is nearest and the direction to go from where I was currently parked. He asked for my first name and made sure he has spelled it correctly and made some relatively pathetic reason why he needed it (I knew it was probably for the birthday card!). He seemed particularly pleased with the fact that he got me a room at the top of the building facing Epcot which would give me a great view of the parks evening fireworks.So, off I went with his map back to the car. Drove round to my building, unpacked the car and traipsed up to my fourth floor room. It was now 6.27pm (Florida time) according to the time on my mobile phone. I was a little disappointed that the room smelt of stale cigarette smoke. I couldnt quite understand this as I thought all Disney rooms were no smoking. The chances are, previous occupants had stood at the doorway and lingering smoke would leave their remnants in the room. It was quite a marked smell and I was worried this would be too much for me to put up with for whole week. I then noticed the message light was flashing on my room telephone, it was from Trevor and I had only missed him by two minutes! He said he would call again tomorrow. Anyway, I was now tired and needed a bath, so I decided to think about this smell problem while having a soak. I only unpacked a few necessary items, stripped off and got into the bath.
Just as I was doing so, something about the location of my room struck me as rather odd. The Pop Century Resort is actually only half built. The place was conceived several years ago but was postponed when there was a lull in the tourist industry after 9/11 in 2001. The current site has buildings dedicated to the 1950s decade, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s and are arranged along one edge of a large lake a little like the Caribbean Beach Resort with a bridge crossing over the middle of the lake. Buildings on the other side of the lake are currently being erected, but you honestly wouldnt really notice it and I never heard any noise. In fact, I dont think any construction work was in progress during my week there. The buildings will be dedicated to the other decades of the last century. Anyway, enough of P.C.R. history! I was now wondering why I should get such a good and uninterrupted view of Epcot if I was in one of the 1960s buildings, I should be seeing a side of one of the other buildings, the flower pool or the lake from a 1960s room! I had now run the bath and there was nothing to do but hurry with it and pack my bags up again!
Yes, I had been put in a 1950s building!
: I didnt understand it! After all my waffling to that poor guy on reception, he must have been very confused or just didnt understand my accent! But, I had given him my special accommodation voucher which showed the upgrade. Thank goodness for Vals organisational skills, it was this that was sent to me by special delivery to my home address yesterday and the only proof I had that Id paid for an up-grade. It was just a shame the guy on reception didnt read it properly when I checked-in and I was too disorientated to notice anything was amiss at the time! I remembered commenting that it was strange he was showing me the location of the 1950s car park when I would be staying in a 1960s building! I was now on the phone to the front desk and the woman found the voucher (which she told me should have been returned to me) which confirmed my upgrade. I was advised to come back to the check-in desk again so a new room could be allocated. I was about to complain that someone should just come and collect my baggage and take me to the new room when I thought it would be better if I just packed up my car and go as it is a fair distance and I wanted my car parked in the right place ready for the next morning.Car up the car again, back to reception, new room card issued and into my new room which was lovely. No strange smells, ideal location up only one flight of stairs (safe from flooding!), facing the other side away from the pool (so no echoing noise) and less than two minutes walk from the main building. I phoned Trevor and told him everything I have just told you!
I was now a little peckish and made my way to the food court, bought a refillable Pop Century Resort mug and filled it with ice and diet coke. Also got myself a tuna and salad filled baguette, took them outside and sat at a table eating while watching some people use the flower shaped pool. Back to the room and spent an hour or so writing up my trip report notes. To bed and head spinning with ideas for tomorrow. Shall it be MK, Epcot, MGM, AK, Universal Studios or Islands of Adventure? Decisions decisions decisions .... and I had nobody to disagree with my final choice!
Shame about the first room you had, but the second sounds much better. I love Everything Pop 
I hope you managed to try the frozen strawberry daiquiri from Classic Concoctions during your trip 
