04 Oct Thursday

[Last Updated: 2018-10-05 13:53 EDT]

The trip out this morning started off in the dark (as it will end tonight). We were packed and ready to leave a little ahead of expected time.

Driving down to Gatwick was OK, if a little foggy. We do the Premium parking thing when parking up at the airport, so we were met at our bay by someone scanning in the vehicles.

We had to look for the Virgin check-in and found them on the floor above us. We were through with the 4 cases no problem. All of them were on or near their 23KG limit :|

Security check was a first - my rucksack is stuffed full of cables, chargers, Kindle, Laptop and other bits and bobs and it always gets put onto the 'manual check' line as it never scans well through the x-ray. However, today it all went through without issue, so we were into the Aspire lounge 30 minutes ahead of schedule.

Quick drink and something to eat, then Linda popped off for her annual jaunt around the Duty-Free.

The board changed to show that our gate information won't be available until 11:23 am which is a bit close considering that we are supposed to take off at 11:35. I think we'll be delayed taking off.

I went for a quick walk around the duty free and marvelled at how Dixons are selling 1m HDMI cables for £25 and that's after £10 off! They must be awesome! :)

On returning, I looked at the board again and this time it was saying 11:15 Gates Close !!!! That was at 11:05 I noticed it. So we had to grab all our stuff (how we didn't leave something behind I don't know) and dash over to the gate, only to be met by half the plane who were under the same impression that they were about to miss their flight!

We were all boarded by 11:30 and at that point, the Captain announced that they'd boarded us all early so that we could get into a queue for a take-off slot.

The fog from the morning (we'd passed through a couple of patches on the way to the airport) had caused a big backlog and he was staking his claim to get a slot. He did say we are likely to be delayed for about a hour. So we sat there on the plane waiting for news. Finally we had the go-ahead, we pulled back and left the runway at exactly 13:05 UK time.

The flight itself was fine, as 8.5 hour flights can be. For once (and the first time for a few years now) I got my first choice meal served up. Usually, as we sit towards the back of the area (so we can be early off the plane) we find the favourite meal has run out. Not this time!

I watched a couple of movies: "Ready Player One" - OK. "Incredibles 2" - Not as bad as I thought it might be.

Eventually we started to descend through the cloud into a overcast and very humid Orlando. We landed at 16:23 EDT, so the flight took 8 hours 18 minutes, pretty good going.

We disembarked and immediately ran into a issue, we were about 5th off the plane and the route down to the immigration area was blocked off. It looked like they were still decorating the area, so I think we might have arrived in a different stand that was expected. We were soon let through the bare area to find ourselves at the end of a three UK flight queue to get through immigration checks. We were behind the Manchester Virgin flight and a Norwegian Airlines flight from Gatwick. To make the queue slower was the fact the electronic entry gates have all been removed, barring a couple for US residents. So we had to queue with the rest - it felt like 2010 all over again!

By the time we were through the checks (no Agriculture forms to fill out!!) we found all our bags had already been removed from the carouselle so we grabbed then and headed to the train, bypassing the usual re-drop off procedure. We could only do that because we've got a couple of new cases which have 4 wheels on them, meaning Linda can move two of them at the same time, whilst I move the older less mobile cases.

Thus we'd got the car rental (Nissan Rogue) and set off into the blinding setting sun.

We have a 2 hour 10 minutes drive along I4 and I75 down to the Gulf Coast near Sarasota. Here's a small island area calles Anna Maria. We'd booked our rental from a new company and fortunately, our keys were in the lock-box as promised, so no issue there.

After unloading, we even had time to pop back out to Publix to pick up a few bits and pieces for breakfast tomorrow. By the time we went to get in bed it was around 3:30am UK time, so we'd been up 23 hours today. Phew.