Sorry - busy and tired, but here is day 1!
Day 1 – Wednesday 23 January 2019. Sydney – Dallas – Orlando
So today is our travel day for our quick trip to Walt Disney World and Patti’s retirement party. She’s been with the Disney Company for 32 years and it is now time to move on and she invited us to her party on Friday 25 January. We thought about it for a few minutes and then decided – why not? You only live once so travel while you can!
Our flight today was scheduled for 2:40pm so we had a leisurely start. We chatted to the neighbours and did a final check of the packing. I rolled all the suitcases to the front door and grabbed my phone to call at taxi at 11am…that’s when I saw a message from Qantas to say our flight had been delayed to 5pm! The new flight was now scheduled to arrive in Dallas at 3:00pm – and we were on the 2:50pm flight to Orlando. So I got on the phone to Qantas and they rescheduled me onto the 4:55pm flight – that gave us two hours to clear immigration and customs and get to the gate for the flight to Orlando.
At 1:30, I rang the taxi and we headed to the airport. We arrived around 2pm and it was very quiet in the departure area. We breezed through the check in and immigration formalities and headed to the shops and Qantas Club to wait the remaining hour and a half to boarding.
The actual flight from Sydney to Dallas was uneventful and was on time as far as the rescheduling was concerned. We got on the ground at 5pm and headed to immigration. We knew the US shutdown would reduce the number of border inspectors and we were right – the queue was quite long despite it being a quiet part of the day, but the line kept moving. I kept watching the clock as it got closer to our departure time. We got through immigration with about 40 minutes to go and ran to pick up our bags. Luckily there was no customs inspection because of the shutdown, so we went straight to the bag drop for domestic flights. We then had to go upstairs to catch the Skytrain to our next terminal and discovered we had to go through Security again – and this is where it became really tight as the queue was long. A security guard suggested we head to the other security station near gate D30 so we ran down there and it was quieter but still busy. Our flight was already boarding at that stage and we hurried through as fast as we could given we had to take off our shoes etc. Once we were finally through, we ran to the Skytrain and jumped on the first one heading to Terminal A. Our stop was the third and it seemed to take forever. Our flight was due to depart in 10 minutes and I had basically given up. When the Skytrain stopped, we were first off and running to the escalator and then to the gate. When we got there, we were one on the last people to make it! Yay!
Of course, in the end, the flight was delayed (probably so they could get our bags on board) but we were grateful to be on that plane. Again the flight to Orlando was uneventful but we were pretty tired by then, having been up 30 hours. Once we arrived at Orlando, we were thankful to see our bags come off the carousel. We picked them up and walked to the Magical Express Bus pickup for the trip to Saratoga Springs Resort – it was around 9:30pm. Our bus departed the airport just after 10pm and we arrived around 10:45pm. Patti was there to greet us with name tags like limousine drivers have at airports, it was very funny! Brian couldn’t be there as he had to work tomorrow and needed to get to bed.
After we dropped off our bags and had a chat, Patti took us to the food court for a bite, however it was closed, so we went to McDonalds instead – yum after a long flight. Patti then took us back to the hotel and we finally got to bed around 2:30am!