Walt Disney 2020
Day 1: Getting there and a knife
Any time that I can get a late day flight out of our home town, I'm going to take it! I just hate feeling rushed in the early morning and then factor in that it is frigid out enough to make a snowman's carrot nose break off at the slightest gust of wind. Warming up a car and defrosting can take a considerable amount of your "rushed" morning and again, I don't like rushed. Those are my requirements of flight and then Sakari's requirements consists of only 1 flight and no plane change. It's so hard to please everyone at the same time.
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We always try to arrive at the airport at least 1 1/2 hours ahead of time. This gives us time to park the car at the furthest lot and shuttle over to the airport, check in our luggage, and time for me to waddle over to security. Our flight was to leave at 3:35pm, which means boarding at 3:05pm.
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We were the only one's on the shuttle and they had plastic barriers to make sure no icky germs were coming my way.
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We checked in our luggage and headed for the security line....which was next to non-existent. However, even though there was barely a line, it still took us quite some time since Sakari's bright flip-flip psychedelic book bag grabbed the attention of security and we hear "WHO'S BAG IS THIS!!!" rumble, rumble, rumble, clear throat..."Who's bag????" and we look up to see they are dangling Sakari's bag by 2 fingers like it might explode. I looked at Sakari, she looked at me, I looked at the hubby and he returned the look...of course I'm the only one who spoke up...not claiming it of course and I immediately pointed fingers... "Her's, it's hers, she's the bad one, not mine". :D
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I thought maybe she had a drink in there or something but nooooooo, it was much worse than that. She had a weapon in her bag. She knew better than to bring her weapons...what was she thinking carrying a knife in her bag?????
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All joking aside, they seriously thought her ginormous eraser was a knife. We couldn't help but laugh about it but somehow I was replaying this scenario in my head and starting to wonder how exactly did Sakari know that it was the eraser they were searching for? I don't recall this happening before. But she quickly pointed it out to them when they told her what they were searching for.
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I also keep forgetting that we are in the middle of a pandemic, which means not many people are traveling and the airports are very "light" these days. I made the mistake of buying the "early bird check in" on our last vacation in July and swore I wouldn't do it again, but here I am, with my early bird check in that I paid $30 pp. Here is the airport:
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We had a total of 21 people on the plane (this includes us)....go figure. Also, a day before our flight I received an email stating that we had earned the A-Lister status, which gives everyone in our party priority boarding. So, I guess I wasted quite a bit of money this time around trying to get a good seat.
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We had an arrival time in Florida of 5:50pm and all I could do was think about warmer weather. I must have checked the weather 5x a day the week before we left. This was what we had to look forward to:
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The temps looked very promising for our (almost) 6pm arrival. However, that Thursday and Friday wasn't sitting well with me. :/ Florida has a reputation of warm winter weather that it wasn't upholding this trip.
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We boarded our plane, picked out our 1st class seats
among the rows and rows of empty seats and settled
in for our long 2 hour and 15 minute flight.
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As we neared the end of our flight, it was awesome to see the sunset in the distance. Sakari is a big sunset fan and she did a time-lapse of us above the clouds with the sunset coming down.
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Anyone who has ever flown into Orlando knows it's one of the busiest airports ever. We flew here in July and stayed over before flying into St Thomas and it was deserted. It would be the same this time around as well. There's always barely any room to walk or sit in this airport but this year it has been pretty bare.
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They have incorporated screens "THE COVID CROWD RADAR" in the waiting areas that tell you how many people are in the area (not an actual number, just the "amount" if it's low or getting crowded.
A beautiful Christmas tree had been erected since the last time we were there.
We caught the tram over to the baggage area and notice there wasn't one person on it with us in our section.
We ended up renting a car from Budget at the airport. I have to admit, it wasn't the easiest place to find and we walked all over the place trying to locate it. But, check in was simple and there was only 1 person ahead of us. We had rented a regular sized economy car (a size up from the smallest available) and they informed us that they had "upgraded" us to a bigger car at no charge.
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After checking in, we had to walk out of the airport, cross over and into the parking garage, then up stairs. There we had to locate our vehicle in the sea of cars and don't you know ours was the VERY last vehicle on the row and it.was.far! I was wore out by the time we made it there. We ended up in a Dodge Journey with 3rd row seating. Not really something we could benefit from unless everyone wanted a row to themselves and I knew that wasn't going to happen.
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Off we went to our rented home for the next 10 days.