Orlando

After our journey to Toronto, we were expecting the worst from our travel plans to Orlando. But as it happens we had a perfect day... Two on-time flights, luggage first on the belt at the airport, and we were even the first drop off from the airport shuttle bus.

Orlando was a busy nine days, mostly spent visiting Disney theme parks - Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom and Downtown Disney. Getting to and from the parks on the buses seemed to take forever - usually 2 hours or so each way. I was surprised that there were only really a couple of headline rides in each parks, but I guess the Disney parks are really for kids. As you might expect in mid-summer, the queues were horrendous, and I'd have to say the 'fast-pass' system of booking a time to return to a particular attraction made things worse, since you'd normally get a return time 6 or 7 hours later. In one case, the queue time was shown as 40 minutes, and we were still not on the ride 2.5 hours later! But the bigger rides were good - Space and Splash Mountains, Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and Expedition Everest all ridden with glee :-)

As well as the parks, we also did a lot of shopping in the outlets - it was so cheap it would be daft not to... We were slightly worried about fitting it all in the cases, but we managed somehow! Food was also cheap and unavoidable - I seriously lost count of the number of 'all you care to eat' meals we had. I can actually say I was getting sick of food by the time we left, though we did have a nice meal at Planet Hollywood.

The temperatures were HOT - 32-35 degrees in the daytime, 24 degrees at night, and very, very humid. Almost every day had a thunderstorm - usually incredibly forceful rainfall, but short lived.

We went to Typhoon Lagoon towards the end of our trip, where we got sunburnt again within about 2 hours. The water slides in there - ouch! I managed to hurt myself on both the ones we tried - one from my shoulders bouncing over the joints on the slide, the other from landing awkwardly in the pool at the end. But I guess we fatties build up more momentum on these things, so it's the price you pay!

A good trip, but now I'm all Disney-ed out!