"Disneyworld: Day One"

10/18/2001

SUNDAY: The Leaving
Due to some last minute packing and major tossing and turning the night before, I didn't sleep much Saturday night. I always worry that I'll forget something important. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't, but I always worry about it. I had checked on the flight times already so I knew they were confirmed. Although they did change my original non-stop flights to ones with a layover in Charlotte on the way down and Pittsburgh on the way back. That's understandable though, so I didn't whine about it too much.

My brother and his fiance'e came and took us to Dulles airport. We arrived three hours early like the good little tourists that we were. I was surprised to find that they still had curbside checkin for luggage going on. We checked in 10 bags and with our receipts in hand boldly strode inside to wait in another line at the US Air counter.

Once we got to the counter, we find out that our flight is overbooked by 50 people. That's right... 50. When a flight is overbooked by 15, there is usually widespread panic and chaos in the streets. They offered to change our flight to a non-stop one on United leaving in an hour. They swore on their virgin mothers that they could transfer our luggage over too. We took the United flight and went looking for our new departure gate. If I had been more awake, I would have been more suspicious.

This was CL's first airplane ride so he was all about seeing out the window. When we took off, he was all excited about how small the cars looked and kept asking if we were flying over our house. *g* Then we passed through the clouds and he exclaimed, "Daddy! The clouds are made of cotton!"

Isn't that just precious??!

Anyway, we finally land in Orlando and what do we find? Not our luggage, that's for sure. We do however find the Dollar Rent-A-Car line and a lot of heat and humidity. It seems everyone is used to it or the A/C isn't working or something because I appear to be the only one on the verge of heat prostration. Once we get to the Dollar counter and try to get our car (which I reserved in 4 freakin' months ago!) we are informed that they have no more full-size cars. The girl did try to give us an upgrade.... to a PT Cruiser.

I don't know if you're familiar with these retro-style cars, but they have no trunk. Okay, technically they do have a trunk, however it's less than half the size of a normal car's trunk. I informed her that this was not acceptable and she freakin' argues with me! Besides the fact that we could never have fit our stuff in that trunk, I didn't feel comfortable driving that type of vehicle in a city that I had never been in before. So we waited... and waited... and finally got the type of car (Dodge Intrepid) that I wanted.

The whole thing reminded me of that Seinfeld skit: "I know you know how to take the reservation. You just don't know how to hold the reservation. And frankly the holding is the most important part of the reservation."

Once we left the airport, it was a short 25 mile drive to the Orange Lake Country Club and Resort. 25 years ago, my parents bought a couple of timeshare properties and my family has used them to go to places like the Poconos, Hawaii and Branson, MO. This is the first time I've ever been able to go along. Orange Lake is very nice with two full golf courses (the reason Mawk and Sharon came), seven pools (two with waterfalls and one with a waterslide) and oodles of wildlife (patience, I'll explain this one later.) We got checked in, thankfully without incident and went to find our new home. Since we didn't have any bags to unpack, we went grocery shopping. After procuring foodage, we called the airport again and found out our bags had been picked up by the delivery service and should arrive in two to four hours. Needless to say, we went to bed Sunday night without our luggage.

I think that http://www.macdobhran.org/images/disney/PA060032.JPG doesn't exist is what I think. ~ S'tan @ 11:31 a.m. EST on 10/19/2001