WDW Trip Report 2015 Monday: The One With All The Flying

Monday: The One With All The Flying

There are only three acceptable reasons to be waking me up at 6am.

1) Air travel.
2) It's snowing.
3) Death. Either my own imminent one, or that of someone important.

Fortunately, in this case it was reason #1. Woohoo!!

There was too-early-in-the-morning bumbling about, getting ready and dressed, doing of make-up (me) and re-packing of cases (John) and all that other non-Disney stuff that no-one is really interested in.


Trundling off to start our long journey. This time tomorrow we will be in Walt Disney World!


I am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning. He is not!

We got a free shuttle mini-bus (mini-motor-coach?!) from the hotel to the airport, checked in our luggage, and headed for Duty Free shopping, where we bought a travel adaptor, having lost yet another one somewhere in our house after our last trip. Where do they all go?! I don't know. We seem to buy one every trip, I do know that. At this point we should have studied the packaging a bit more closely, as the adaptor we bought had a night light which was not only a bright neon green light, but also could not be switched off. Cue anxious nights falling asleep worrying that whatever we had used to cover the glaring light that night would catch on fire. Fortunately towards the end of the trip the bulb in the nightlight started to die so it wasn't on all the time. Unfortunately it was on intermittently, at its own choosing, so we had the choice of covering the light and fearing a fiery death, or leaving the light uncovered, knowing that at any minute we could be awoken by neon green rave lighting flashing away by the bed. Decisions, decisions!!

In an attempt to make our early morning airport excursion as easy as possible, I had booked the Fast-Track security service, and also booked us into the Escape Lounge. The Fast-Track was definitely worth it, at £3.50/person. If we hadn’t needed it I wouldn’t be bothered about wasting so little money, and if the queues had been massive, it would have saved us a LOT of time. As it was we used it, but it didn’t really make too much difference as we wouldn’t have waited that long anyway.


Personally, I don't think the Escape Lounge was worth £18.99/person. If you drink alcohol at 7am in the morning, then you would get your money's worth (and should probably also wonder about getting help for that breakfast drinking if it's a regular thing!  ) as it's a free bar for beer, wine, etc, but for us, we just had bacon and sausage sandwiches (which weren't that nice), apple juice that tasted like it had been watered down, and two small (glass bottle) Cokes. The staff weren't that nice either, everything seemed to be too much trouble and, with the exception of the guy checking people in at reception, I don't think I saw anyone else crack a smile! Next time I will save the money and we will just go to Starbucks instead! So much for our lovely VIP travel experience. I was NOT impressed.

"Hey, look. 'Esc-a-pay'. I wonder what that means? That's funny, it's spelled just like the word 'escape.'"



Behold! A very tired man modelling the most expensive breakfast sandwich in the world!!!!

We took a wander around the airport, did a little more browsing, and then set off for our gate.


Lovely weather, we were so sad to leave it behind...NOT!

I really enjoy flying. I love take off, I love landing, I even love the weird little bento-box-esque tiny portioned food, even though usually it's gross. What I absolutely cannot stand is the waiting to fly. That's when the thoughts of my possible demise in tin can of flames plummeting towards a shark-infested ocean creep up on me. I'm an excellent flyer...but I'm an incredibly panicky waiting-to-flyer. Fortunately there were no delays, and we were soon loaded onto the plane and settled in our seats. 

We paid the £4 to upgrade to the Premier entertainment package, and I watched random episodes of The Middle, The Big Bang Theory, and Friends before settling down to watch "Spy", "Inside Out", and "Jersey Boys". I was a little disappointed that there were no really new films on there, previously we've had films we've never seen before at all, but it was nice to watch a couple of favourites, and to see Spy as we missed it in cinemas.

During the flight, I started to feel really sinus-y and like a really bad headache was imminent. I took painkillers, tried to sleep, and used the forehead menthol stick I'd packed, but nothing seemed to help much. The landing was SO painful! I thought my ears would explode. But at least we were on the ground.

We made it through security relatively quickly, even though my picture is AWFUL because I laughed at the little machine squatting down so far to take my photograph because I’m only 5’2”, and then tried to stop laughing because it's an official government thing and usually you're not allowed to smile...So I'm just pulling a horrible face. Fortunately though the guard was really friendly and we got through pretty fast. For some reason, my case is always one of the last ones off the plane. I have no idea why! There were much larger/heavier-looking cases than mine that came off way sooner, along with all the pushchairs, golf clubs, car seats, etc. John Daly was on our flight too, with his partner, they were WAY more careful with his clubs than everyone else’s, I noticed! I was also really disappointed (a week after we landed at home!) when John corrected me that it was John Daly the golfer, who was on our flight, and not John (F) Daley, Dr. Lance Sweets from “Bones”. Boo! That’s nowhere near as exciting! 

I’d heard tell of the mysterious Fake-o-Rail, now I got to ride it! Last time we flew into Stanford, no fancy transport there. John and I have a thing where, whenever we’re heading to the Monorail, we quote the monorail song from “The Simpsons”. Not all of it, just the bit that repeats “Monorail!!” getting higher and higher until we run out of notes. Yup, we’re annoying. It changed nicely for “Fake-o-Railllllll!!” though, much to the confusion of all but one of our fellow passengers. High-five, fellow Simpsons fan!

As we trundled off to the main airport building on the Fake-o-Rail, John pointed out that a woman next to me was about to lose one of her out of control cases right into my foot as she played around with her phone. I may or may not have verbally encouraged her to pay attention to the job in hand rather than her FB account, and keep her luggage under control. Yup, I yelled at John Daly’s wife on the Fake-o-Rail. Whoops! Maybe next time she will not try to mow down random people with her luggage!