I'm Steve, my wife is Caroline (she prefers Carly) and we have an eight year old daughter called Maddie. As per the title of this thread, our last visit to Orlando was in 1989 and as you can imagine, there has been a fair bit of change since then. Not least in the amount of day-glo coloured clothing in my wardrobe. We visited Disneyland in California in 2000 and took Maddie to Disneyland Paris in 2008. All of this was but a warm up for the big event, the return to Orlando which we had promised ourselves since becoming proud parents in 2002.
Also with some relevance to our tale are the following facts. We have a 2 year old labradoodle called Logan and two cats called Jeeves and Sweep. I drive but Carly doesn't. We live in Crawley, West Sussex and are literally five minutes drive from Gatwick airport. I'll add a family picture to this post later and hopefully through my write up as I move on.
As with most people, we'd talked about going to Orlando since the little one came along, but it was a matter of sorting the finances and waiting until Maddie was old enough to stand up to the trip and the walking and so on. So, we booked last year with Travel City Direct and have been saving up since then. Special mention to Carly who did all of the planning, including creating an amazing spreadsheet with our itinerary and predicted attendances for all the parks which meant we seemed to avoid the worst of the crowds.
More to come later on today but that's it for now.
