Monday 20th December 2010

[23:52 EST]

Today's entry is brought to you by the letter Q.

We started the day well enough. Checking out of the (quite nice) Crowne Plaza, we packed all our stuff into the back of the car. It all fitted - just.

So we drove down to Downtown Disney to take advantage of the early check-in. The woman on the counter initially didn't have any record of us on the original flight. Our initial expectation was that everyone was simply transferred to the new plane, seat for seat. However, what appears to have happened, was that they were only moving people when they booked themselves in. Luckily I had our original booking ID and we were re-booked to fly tonight, well actually tomorrow morning at 00:40.

That sorted, we stopped at a nearby Perkins for some breakfast then drove on to Walt Disney World for our final day. Here's where the Q took over as we queued to get the tram into the park. Queued for the monorail to the entrance. Queues were EVERYWHERE in the park.

Now we've been in the Magic Kingdom on Thanksgiving, but today beats that busy day hands down. The place was heaving and it was impossible to actually do any ride without queuing up for at lease 40 minutes.

I mean, come on! 50 Minutes for 'Small World' is just crazy talk.

We spent most of the day in WDW and only did 3 rides. Jungle Cruise was a 2 hour fastpath. Pirates was done immediately after the parade and we were lucky to only wait 20 minutes. We also did the people mover ride in Tomorrow Land - but that doesn't really count ;)

And the winner for wasted time goes to...

It was almost 7pm as we left the park - queuing for the monorail and tram again. Moments before, we'd been sent a text from Shirley who was monitoring our flights departure time on the web. She said it had now been moved to 5pm later in the day. To confirm this, we went to a nearby Starbucks and logged onto the web to double check. It was true!

So we drove to the airport and parked the car in the short term parking for a moment. I didn't really want to give up the car just yet if all Virgin were going to say is "go find yourself another hotel". However, on arriving at the ticket office (another, shorter, queue) we were called over and given some vouchers for the Hyatt hotel, attached to the airport. We also got some vouchers for meals up until lunchtime tomorrow.

The issue appears to be that the flight VS115, that arrived in Orlando sometime around 9pm, is to be our VS116 for the flight home. However, it's illegal to have a crew turn around and fly straight back to the UK without a rest. Hence the delay in our departure. News reports from the UK show Heathrow in turmoil still (it's making the headlines over here on the TV) but Gatwick is open, even though there's some more snow on the way.

We went downstairs to reclaim our luggage which had been sent back to the terminal.

Fortunately, we got all our bags back.

Next stop was to get into our room and here we have to take our hats off to the staff of the Hyatt, who came down to the terminal level to issue people with door keys. It's quite a nice room too.

Our final task was to go back to the car park and take the car back to Hertz.

There was a tear in the eye as we gave it back - it's been a good car!

Now back in the hotel room, we're going to unpack some bits to get a change of clothing for tomorrow. New check-in time is 14:30 tomorrow when it'll all start again!