. It's hard not to feel a little strange starting such a long-anticipated trip with a leisurely walk to the station and nothing but a backpack to show as luggage. We made the ten minute walk to Three Bridges station around 745am, having made a last call to my mum before we left. Hopped on a train and we were soon at Gatwick.I worked at the airport for twelve years and the place has never seemed finished, and sure enough more work has been, and is being done at the moment. We made our way past the hoardings on the upper floor to have breakfast at the Giraffe Cafe. Pancakes for Maddie (she didn't like them!), muesli for Carly and a Sunshine Burrito for me, which was yum. Made our way through security on the upper level, which was pretty quiet and were soon in the departure lounge. We made the obligatory trip around the shops and Carly picked up a great sun hat in Accessorize which you'll see in most of the photos. Really suits her and she was very pleased to find it. Picked up a pile of stuff in Smiths for the flight, sweets, magazines and the usual. Our flight flashed up as boarding at gate 23 and we made the looooonnng walk through the terminal. Ironically this was only one or two gates up from the one we left twenty two years earlier.
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We boarded pretty much on time and were soon seated. The plane was an Airbus A330 and we were in row 58, in the middle, so pretty far towards the back. This aircraft has brand new entertainment systems fitted with touch screen seat back panels which allow you to choose the movies you want, along with plenty of tv and music to choose from. Also have a pretty good gaming system built in, with a controller which pops out from the seat. This system was exdellent, so good in fact that I didn't touch my ipod during the flight, and more amazingly Maddie left her DS in the bag. For the record, I watched Tron:Legacy (dull), Carly watched The King's Speech (excellent) and Maddie watched Tangled (laughed a lot). So two out of three Disney movies, right?
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The flight passed pretty pleasantly, actually. The food wasn't bad (chicken, beef and vegetable chilli, I think?). We had sandwiches as well later in the flight, although the bread was pretty stale. Still, by this point we were nearing touchdown.
Landed pretty much on time at Orlando. The sun was shining although it was pleasant rather than hot. Local time was around 345pm, I believe. Despite a long queue, we processed through immigration pretty swiftly. Our immigration official wasn't that interested in speaking to us, but despite some confusion with fingerprinting, we were soon standing on US soil for real. First point of thanks to the Dibb at this point. We were expecting the whole two stage baggage thing thanks to reading the forums and so passed through without a hitch. Having reclaimed our bags, we went to the Travel City desk to pick up our hire car from Dollar.
I'll save this experience for another post as this was a big deal for me.
Thanks for reading !
