Let’s try this again! - Part 2

The flight was mainly uneventful and about two hours before we were supposed to land we were served dinner.

Again it was a choice between chicken or pasta and again we both chose the chicken dish, which was

Grilled Chicken Breast with Barbecue Sauce accompanied by Pumpkin Stew and Sweet Corn Mash and Fruit Salad with dried Lingonberries for dessert.

We had made up about an hour of flight-time and were approaching the Florida Coast and were happy to be able to get out of the plane soon, when the captain came on again, telling us that we were redirected as there was a thunderstorm approaching the airport.

So we went all the way down to Lake Okeechobee.

We went all around it and back up to Orlando and when we finally had made it there we had lost all the time we had made up.

The plane finally landed more than two hours late and while rolling to the gate we were told that we might be stuck on the plane for another hour as the immigration hall was full.

Can you see a trend here?

But at least this delay did not go through as we were directed to our gate and within five minutes the doors opened and First and Business Class passengers started to get off.

Soon it was our turn and we hotfooted it over to immigration where the lines were ever so long and it took us another hour to go through, even though we had a very nice officer, who even spoke German. Good thing when immigration takes that long is that your luggage has already been delivered by then. So we went around the belt and collected all four pieces we had checked in, left through customs and stopped right before we hit the elevator to pack one of our carry-ons into our half empty suitcase and off we went.

We hauled all our luggage down to the rental car counters, walked over to Hertz, preparing ourselves as every company had a long line and finally got to ours, where we were surprised by each and every station being manned and it was our turn within a few minutes.

We had a voucher and everything possible had been paid for, so it only took us about 5 minutes and we were told to pick any car we wanted in a particular row.

Now, I hadn`t noticed that we were way off from where we needed to go and once we got outside the humidity hit both of us and our steps slowed down and it took us a bit to make it across the street and up the escalator and over to our row. Tom went ahead to check out the cars while I slowly crawled over, pulling two of our four pieces of luggage.

When I finally made it there, Tom had narrowed it down to two cars and we finally agreed on a blue Hyundai.

All of our luggage fit into the trunk and only our carry-ons had to go on the back seat. Tom fixed the GPS and adjusted his seat and then we finally left the airport. It was now way past 9 o’clock and it had been a long day.

It took us about half an hour to finally drive underneath that welcoming Walt Disney World Arch and on to our first resort, Bay Lake Tower. Once we made it to the Magic Kingdom parking area, we missed some of the signs and went into the Magic Kingdom parking lot instead of taking the new road to the resorts. S

o we wasted another 10 minutes going around the parking lot and back to where we had been supposed to go.

We made it to the resort at 20 past 10. There was a parking space close by the entrance, which was lucky, so we just took a suitcase each and the carry-ons and headed inside. Since we were a day late we had been assigned a room the day before, so we knew which one it was, the only thing missing were magic bands.

So we headed to the front desk, found a Cast Member and she was quick to check us in and go get our magic bands. I told her that there should be a second set, our annual passholder ones and she promised to bring those back as well. When she finally came back, she only had the regular set as the passholder ones were nowhere to be found. They tried to order us new ones but we never received them during our trip. Once we were checked in, we headed to our room

and as I had suspected our standard view room on floor 3 had both, a water and a theme park view.

By now we only had little time left to head over to the Contemporary and get a few nibbles, so we parked our luggage in the room and headed over to the Contemporary where we did a little shopping for some drinks, Tortilla Chips, some salsa and a cupcake from the Contempo Café. And while I returned to the room with our shopping, Tom went to the car to pick up the rest of our stuff and bring it back to our room. Finally we had arrived. It was past 11pm when we finally sat down, had a drink and snacked on

some chips and salsa and

the cupcake. We finally went to bed shortly after midnight.