Thursday 6th
11:38
Sitting in a very busy No1 lounge at Gatwick. I'm pretty sure that when we first got here, there were more people in the lounge than outside - OK, maybe an exaggeration, but there were certainly more seats outside! We ended up sitting up at the bar until a couple of groups left for their flights, freeing up the room.
Our minds this weeks have all been focused on the hurricane currently in the Caribbean. Hurricane Matthew first hit the news as a force 4/5 storm which has moved through Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba and now the Bahamas. It's forecast to move along the eastern side of Florida and up into South Carolina.
This is the current prediction as shown on the BBC. We will be landing (hopefully) around where the 'D' is in Florida on the image above, so right on the edge. The issue isn't that the flight might be cloudy or bumpy, more that Orlando airport might be forced to close before we get there. Currently, the Orlando Airport website is reporting that it is making preparations for Matthew and is expected to close Thursday evening. As we are arriving there at an expected 5:25pm, that's cutting it really close.
However, we've checked in, have dropped our luggage and everything seems to be going ahead as planned. So fingers crossed that we can take off as planned.
Once in Orlando, our normal route is the 2 hour drive over to Anna Maria island. However, we've both agreed that if the rain it too heavy, then we'll stay in Orlando the first night and then head out on Friday morning. TV reports show planned evacuations going on from the eastern edge of Florida and we spoke with a couple in the Gatwick car park who had just come back from Orlando, they said that the traffic coming from the Cape Canaveral was very busy. We've stayed on that side of Florida in the past, but fortunately, we've on the West side this year, so well be driving away from it.
[11:53]
Our flight is at 13:15, so gate information won't be far off. Linda's off doing her best to wreck duty-free. We found a £5 off voucher for purchases over £75.... yeah right.
[12:12]
Linda's back from duty free, she happily informs me that she managed to get two lots of discount. Gulp.
Waiting for the gate to be posted.
[12:24]
Gate 19
[13:15]
Cross check and doors to automatic. We're off!
[13:25]
Ah, not just yet. Clean up on the runway after a bird strike is delaying take off for 10 minutes.
The captain announced we may "meet" hurricane Matthew at the end of the flight but he sounded pretty calm about it.
[23:05 EDT]
Just a quick note to say we ended up driving straight to Anna Maria. We've arrived safely. Lots to tell, but as I've been up for almost 22 hours now, I'm dead tired I'll update more in the morning.
[06:33 EDT +1]
As ever, jet lag means that we are awake early on the first day. Weather outside is still dark but you can hear a blustery wind. I don't think it's raining, or at least not hard.
So, it was actually just before 2pm when we took off. There had been a bird strike on another aircraft which then needed to be cleared up. It led to a long delay.
The flight itself was not too bad. They didn't run out of food before they got to us, as has happened before. Plus my headphones kept things nice and quiet - even with a grumpy baby somewhere else in the cabin.
As we flew over the top of North America, it was all bright and sunny.
That's Provincetown, near Boston in a glorious blue sea and sky.
As we moved further south, however, the cloud increased significantly and i could see the rain against the aircraft engines. There was a little bit of turbulence, but nothing much.
We circled around a little away from Orlando and then the Captain announced that they had clearance to land.
We were down on the ground at 17:36 - about 10 minutes behind schedule.
Orlando airport was pretty much closed down.
Only a skeleton staff seems to be left in the airport and looking at the arrivals board, we could see that we were one of the last few flights to land.
Our flight was one of the last in, the Dublin flight arrived 45 minutes after us and was the last flight in from what I can see.
We waited a long time for the cases to arrive (skeleton staff again I guess) and then we moved off to get the car. The rental desk was quick - 6 staff on there. Finally, we had to decide what to do: Drive to Anna Maria or stay local. We'd spoken to a couple of people who mentioned travel curfews at 6pm (it was gone then already) and massive traffic queues on the I4 heading westbound (as we needed to do).
... more to come. First things first - we need to get to the shops to get some food and drink.
have some photos whilst we go out..
[09:37 EDT +1]
OK, I'm back.
So, we were deciding how to proceed with our travel plans. I popped open the laptop and had a quick look on last-minute.com to see what hotel rooms have to offer. The list had rooms, but nothing below about $200 for one night - we'd normally go for a 3-star room, but not at 600-1200 dollars per night! This is likely to be because Orlando was one of the destinations for the evacuation of the east coast, hence every Bob and his dog are in Orlando at the moment.
So car it was! We went down to the collection point and... no cars of the type we'd ordered. The car park was quite empty - possibly the cars planned to be returned hadn't come back, but more likely it's the skeleton staff again. So the one remaining assistant at the booth looked around for us and found a new-ish Ford Escape (the correct car for our rental). We loaded up and I was ready to go, when we saw that the fuel gauge was under half full - certainly not enough to get us to our destination. So she just said, "mention this to the person at the exit booth and they will sort it". So we drove down and there was a single very abrupt woman on the booth exit. As soon as she heard about the fuel, she said that we couldn't use the car as we were likely to be left stranded on the side of the road. So she told us to look in a different area for something suitable. I found a Nissan Rogue (like a X-Trail) with a full tank so we unpacked from the Ford Escape and moved it all to the Nissan.
By then it was gone 8pm. The car park was almost deserted. Driving out onto the road it was like a Sunday - hardly anyone on the road. It was quite eerie.
Later I think the reason for the woman not being happy with the fuel situation seems to be that most of the fuel garages were closed along the route. So no ability to buy fuel would indeed have left us stranded.
What wasn't eerie was the incessant downpour of rain - it was dark by then, so we got our head down and headed west along the 417 and onto I4 west. Traffic was moderate in our direction but the good thing was that it was moving all the time - so much for the major traffic jams that had been reported.
The rain started to lessen by the time we reached the i75 heading south. By the time we crossed into Anna Maria it was just fine drizzle. We reached our apartment at 10:15 so overall it wasn't too bad a drive, despite the amount of water on the roads. One good point, we had our keys all ready for collection at the drop-box, and we also got into the apartment first time. It might sound odd, but it's taken us 4 years to be able to do that as the last three years, there's always been something amiss.
PHOTO ALBUM : https://goo.gl/photos/1o7eKPQNvvEn1YRN8