My Trip of a Lifetime....
A lot of saving and planning and we finally booked our dream family holiday. The excitement and anticipation lasted for months and as the weeks slowly whittled away, it gathered pace. We had booked a villa with another family that we had known for 15 years and as they had been to Disneyland before, it was great to get their insight and some tips on how everything worked.
Of course, I could talk for hours about our two weeks in Florida on our holiday of a lifetime, but the point of the blog is to give the reader an insight rather than writing a small novel. The best thing for me to do then is to talk about it in sections, so hear is part one!
As we were travelling with another family, we had decided that we would book a villa so we could all stay together and also reduce the cost of accommodation. Our friends had previously stayed at one of the Disney hotels so they were looking forward to experiencing something different. We flew from Manchester and although it’s a long flight, the kids loved it choosing which movies they wanted to watch and enjoying the airline dinners. Our youngest son (7 years old) had never had a meal on a plane before and couldn’t believe it – he even wanted to know if my husband could cook the same meal for dinner when we got back home!
Although the queue can be quite long when you arrive at Orlando airport and it can take quite a bit of time getting through customs, we didn’t have to wait too long and the queue actually moved along pretty well. So we got through, collected our luggage and went to find our hire car. We had pre-hired an SUV so completed the paperwork and went to collect it. Rather than being allocated one, we had a choice of all the SUV's available so I had to choose a nice big red Dodge!
So off we set to find our villa, all excited to be on the road in America. It took my husband a little while to get used to driving on the other side of the road and sitting on the other side of the car. Because I was sat on the right-hand side, I kept thinking I was driving and kept going to put my left hand on the gear stick, very strange! It took under an hour and we arrived ready to explore our home for the next 2 weeks. And wow, what a place! We had a 9 bedroom villa with a games room, cinema, room, pool and jacuzzi – amazing.
Having settled in to our villa, we then prepared to set off for our first trip to a Disney park. Before we went, we had got together with our friends to plan what we would do and when we would visit each park. You can purchase tickets for groups of parks around Disney and we had booked tickets for Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom on one group ticket and Volcano Bay, Universal and Islands of Adventure on another group ticket. There is so much I could tell you about each one so as I said at the start, I will post a blog for each set in the future to save you sitting and reading for hours!
We had to start somewhere though and of course, we had to visit the iconic Magic Kingdom first, more to follow in the next blog.
Of course, if you would like to hear about our whole experience or ask me anything about any of the parks, accommodation, flights etc then please get in contact with me!