Friday 20th April

GIT !

The previous occupant of the room left the alarm clock set for 04:15. Git.

Having gone to bed so late, to try to get onto US time asap, I was not amused!!

Still, gave us time to prepare for today.

Forecast is warm / slightly cloudy. Interestingly no rain though - we are in a prolonged dry spell at the moment and there's nothing anticipated for quite a while. Apparently it's been going on for a while now and is even on the news. Can't complain! ;)

Sea World

Spend the majority of the day at Sea World. Very hot weather, clear skies. Not yet burnt though (thankfully).

Lots of dolphin feeding, walking, Killer Whale watching, walking, gift show browsing and, did I mention, walking. Linda's step counter measured over 17,000 by the end of the day!

Linda and I also had a go on the Escape From Atlantis !! Neither of us got wet. I then went again on my own and sat in the front seat.

Needless to say I didn't get off scott free this time...

Still the weather ensured I didn't stay wet for very long.

Linda bought some fish to feed the dolphins with. She gave most of it to the dolphins, all except one which was whipped from her fingers by a speedy heron laying in wait nearby (in fact there were loads of them about).

We left around 14:30 just as it was getting really hot.

Topless !

In an attempt to not waste too much petrol on the car's air conditioner, we decided to go topless and put the roof down!

Once down it was reasonably cooling. However, with the sun very strong, it's lucky we didn't sunburn at all.

Detour!

Well, not exactly a detour, more correcting a mistake.

We decided to go up to the Belz Factory Area this afternoon as we drove home from Sea World.

I've got my TomTom Sat. Nav. with us and, so far it had been a big help. However, the POI (point of interest) I used to get to the Belz park turned out to be set against the edge of the I4 expressway. I could indeed see the shops, however, as we were travelling at 65MPH and I happened to be on the I4 at the time 'I had reached my destination' there was no way to actually get into the shopping area. There was no slip-way exit on I4 at that point.

Some berk had loaded up an incorrect location on TomTom for the Belz shops. :(

Anyhow, we had a long (read 25 mile !!!) drive to try to get us back to where we needed to be. Damn those long long stretches of motorway with now exits on them!

At one time we were going through a very leafy suburb of Orlando, Windermere. You can see here just how far out of our way we went to get to a place which was at the top of International Drive! One main issue was that at one point, I got onto a road that TomTom had no knowledge about (it was another 60MPH road) so every few seconds I was getting told to 'turn around when possible' not very easy on a motorway!

Needless to say, I've changed the POI to the correct location!

Found that there is a Starbucks on the hotel complex. It stays open until 10pm. That'll be helpful of an evening when we can't be bothered to make any coffee in the room (not that it tastes too good either!)