Sunday, 24 November 2013

Off to Florida 2011

After 2008 my next trip to Florida was in 2010 but for now I'm going to skip over to our 2011 trip. Between the 2008 trip and the 2010 trip I discovered Disney online forums where people write up trip reports of their vacations with pictures of everything from hotel rooms to food. I started reading some of these reports and found that I was learning loads about the parks and Disney events that I didn't know so I wrote my own trip reports after the 2010 and 2011 and thought I'd carry them over to here. I'm starting with the 2011 trip because well this day two years ago I had just arrived in Florida.

Day 1: November 24th 2011

The night before a Disney trip it's always hard to sleep. I think I slept for about 4 hours before getting up at 5.30am to get the bus to the airport at 7am. The week before the trip I was sick with a cold so I tried to sleep a bit more on the bus but by the time we got to the airport I felt a bit sick. Dublin Airport had had a revamp and terminal 2 had just opened so this was my first time in the new terminal it was very mod looking but I was disappointed by the lack of Christmas decorations:
We checked in quickly before we headed in through the security gates.
I was very happy once we got through security to find some Christmas decorations:
I also found some cute Christmas cupcakes which I took a picture of to practice my food pictures for the trip.
We wandered around for a while looking in duty free and what not when an announcement was made that everyone on our flight should go immediately to the boarding gate. It must have been a mistake because when I checked the screens it just said go to US Customs area. It did get us moving a bit quicker though. Once we got through customs we did a bit of plane spotting near the boarding gate. This beauty was going to be taking me to my happy place:
I took a wander and left my mum sitting with the stuff. She left my trip mascot (a white teddy bear) on a chair beside her to keep me a seat. When I went back to her there was a small boy sitting on my bear. Mother said he just sat on top of him regardless of the fact the seat was clearly taken and she told him that someone was sitting there so the minute the brat got up to tell his mother something I sat down again. Of course the little brat then went and told his mother I took his seat. I didn't really care though cos I WAS GOING TO FLORIDA WOO HOO!!! The flight boarded shortly after that and we were sitting with a great view of the wing. Once we were on board I was just willing the plane to move quicker towards the runway:
For the safety instructions they had a little video with this little cartoon guy on it. I was a bit concerned for him because he had no mouth, how was he supposed to use the oxygen mask and blow the whistle if he needed to like?
Each seat had their own entertainment screen with movies, including Disney movies, radio, games, TV shows or you could just track the flight progress. Woo off to Orlando:
 
 See ya after Ireland:

The flight attendants served the drinks and snacks fairly quick. I still wasn't feeling the best so after the food I tried to have a little snooze but woke up with a choking feeling cos of my lingering cold. For the rest of the flight then I just watched movies, did some puzzles and started reading Disney after Dark.Somewhere in the middle of all that we arrived over America:
The flight was nine hours long but it passed pretty quickly. I got very excited when I finally got a glimpse of Orlando:
 
The flight was largely uneventful until we went to land and I got a big pain in my ears which brought some tears. My trip mascot got alot of compliments as everyone thought he was very cute. We landed half an hour ahead of time and the first thing I noticed about Orlando airport was THEY HAVE CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS:
 I also got my first sighting of Mickey Mouse:
I think we landed at 4.20 and it took ages for the luggage to come out, then the lady at the taxi desk was confused by our transfer passes so by the time we actually managed to get a taxi to our hotel and out of the airport it was 6.20! We stayed in the International Palms resort on International drive. They have a resort area and then what they call the Towers building. My mother didn't like the towers and when they put us there she wanted a different room in the resort area. I thought the rooms in the towers were bigger and because they were build more recently were alot cleaner than the resort area as well. I convinced her to stay in the Towers but she was never really happy about it. This was our room:


Once we had our room sorted we booked the bus for our first park day and I got a quick snack in the form of these:
We then had an early night, exhausted from all the travelling.

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