Saturday 13th December 2008

Check out and check in

Well, the time arrived. We cleared the villa and waved goodbye.

Linda had her normal worries when she couldn't close the cases properly. Fortunately, a bit of weight on top did the trick!

Our first stop off was at the Downtown Disney area where we got rid of our cases. It was there that we learned there was a long delay to our flight - caused by icy conditions at Gatwick on Friday. Originally, we were supposed to leave at 20:15 but we were told we wouldn't start boarding until nearly 23:00 that evening.

The queue at the check-in was quite long

One person I heard talking later said they were in the queue for one and a half hours. Fortunately, one of the benefits of flying home premium economy is the speedy check-in service. We were on our way out of the car-park within ten minutes!

We decided to head over to Universal Studios for our final hours. As it was a weekend, the crowds were a little more than the last time we were there. However, it was managable.

We arrived at US just after noon and headed straight to the Simpsone ride - this was something we'd not been able to do last time as the queues were too long and the parade was going to start before we'd finished the ride. As we arrived at the gate, the wait time was 45 minutes. Not too bad, but certainly longer than we'd waited for anything else. However, it soon turned out that the 45 minutes was rather optimistic. It turned out they were only running two of the three shows so by the time we were doing the ride itself, the wait time was over a hour.

Linda had been very pensive as we waited, she wasn't looking forward to it (as it was the first time she'd done this ride - despite my re-assurances). However, it did seem to be sort of a hit - in that she didn't sit there with closed eyes for the complete ride - just the first few moments.

By the time we exited the ride, the wait time said 75 minutes - much more accurate from our experience!

Having spent all that time queuing, we were both hungry so we walked over to the main street area for some lunch. A quick slice of pizza and an ice cream later and we were back outside.

The temperature today was a little warmer than yesterday, but the cloud cover kept the sun away for long periods during the afternoon. Just before the parade started, Linda wandered off to see the blues Brothers show whilst I queued 30 minutes in the single rider queue for the mummy - again they were running below full capacity - this time just one car instead of two.

We watched the parade from near the start of the route - it was interesting to see the controllers trying to wrestle with a twenty foot high clown balloon when the wind started gusting!

We walked out and down city walk to the Starbucks for a coffee and a cake then moved back to the car.

We still had a couple of hours to kill though. So we drove back to Kissimmee to a place called Celebration. This is a small town on what looked like a lake. It is mainly residential, but has a main street that is decorated at Christmas and holds an event each hour during the evening where it 'snows' for a short while. When we'd managed to find somewhere to park, we walked over to the main street and arrived just as the snow (really just foam) started falling. There were a lot of people there actually and the place was festivly decorated with a nice looking tree.

Walking back to the car allowed us to look at some of the residential homes' decorations too - quite lovely some of them.

Arriving at the airport, we first had to return the car - getting charged extra for keeping hold of the car for a few hours into the next day. Bah.

Out flight had been expected to start boarding by 22:40. However, we weren't even on the plane by 23:15.

We actually left the ground a few seconds after midnight, a seven and a half hour flight ahead of us...