The Adventure Begins

Well, I think we broke our own record - by arriving at the airport nearly 5 hours early! Now before you wonder if we are nuts, let me explain that we had budgeted 4 hours for the drive to Syracuse from Ottawa to include time to stop for the kids to run around and to allow for construction delays, border line-ups etc. and we wanted to be at the airport nice and early - i.e. at least three hours, due to all the increased security that we've all been reading about. And we added another hour, just in case we got lost or something, as we are quite famous for arriving at least an hour late for everything!

Of course the drive (at the speed limit) turned out to be less than 3 and a half hours - no construction delays, only 2 cars ahead of us at the border, and me hustling the kids back into the car after their bathroom stop "so we won't be late"...
Syracuse airport is ridiculously easy to find from the North. We couldn't have got lost short of being asleep at the wheel...
No-one was even at the airport check-in desks we were so early. Once we got to security, the line-up was... one person!! The whole process took precisely 4 minutes, including the time that it took to remove our shoes, empty our pockets, fold up our stroller, and then put ourselves back together again... Oh well. I was just following my own advice to my clients - "would you rather spend an extra hour in bed and miss your vacation, or spend that extra hour in the airport"? I just expanded it by 250%!!

As it happens, Syracuse is a nice enough airport to be stuck in with small kids. It is pretty kid-friendly, with interactive displays about flight (a mini "hands-on museum" almost), a large indoor play structure, and some full-size mockups of parts of a real plane that the kids can experience too. (This plug for Syracuse airport brought to you by Matt Driscoll, Mayor of Syracuse...)

Why Syracuse? Well in a nutshell - hundreds, (sometimes thousands) of dollars. Prices to Orlando are regularly half the cost of flights from Ottawa. And jetBlue airlines have a good reputation, a lot of direct flights to Orlando and very recently have become available in our airline booking system, making them a potentially very good option to lots of my potential Disney clients if they don't mind driving the 3 and a half hours... so I really had to see for myself.

So how was the flight?

Very nice. Uneventful - which is actually one of the best things you can say about a flight, really - and very quick, only about 2hrs 15 mins in the air. The live satellite TV (the type that WestJet have installed in lots of their planes in Canada) was great. My children were entertained with cartoons, my wife watched back-to-back "Trading Spaces" while I had my mind expanded by the Discovery Channel. Did I like my first jetBlue experience? Sure. Even including the ridiculously and relentlessly chirpy head trolly-dolly "Frank" and his "cheeky-chappy" comments. Another thing that WestJet seem to be emulating... good for them, say I.

So we arrived.

My first apology to my Disney clients. "Ah, yes, theMagical Express transfer desk. Go to baggage reclaim and you CAN'T MISS IT", is what I have been telling my clients for the last year (since Disney started offering this free service to get people and their luggage to Disney World). Well today I looked and I looked, and not only could I certainly miss it, I couldn't even find it when I was really looking for it!

Turns out I simply started looking in the wrong direction, and then as we weren't taking it anyway, we kept going in the wrong direction, and never did come across it. I did ask, and now I DO know where it is.

So, sorry. Here is my new, corrected, speech. "Ah, yes, your Magical Express transfers. Go down the escalators to the baggage reclaim. TURN RIGHT. Go to the end of the long, busy, bustling hall. And there at the end, in the corner is the Magical Express desk. YOU CAN'T MISS IT!"

But I digress...

We picked up our rental car (we are staying one night in Orlando, and then driving ourselves to the port tomorrow, dropping the car there), and got lost on the way to the hotel. Blatant bad sign-posting... nothing to do with dopey driving and negligent navigating. We arrived eventually and sampled some of the delights of the on-site restaurant at the Radisson Resort Orlando-Celebration

I am having a tour of the hotel tomorrow... and then it's OFF TO THE CRUISE.

Must get to sleep, then. It's been a long day.

 

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