We would like to share our trip experience with rest of our group and also this way we will relive our memories when ever we read this blog – I hope.
Day 0 and 1 of our trip
There was so much excitement and extra pressure on our self’s to have good time (the only reason for the extra pressure is the amount of money we going to spend on this trip, to say the least, its beyond single paycheck and it’s the biggest we have spent on a single trip). So much research and planning for the trip and so much of time invested on getting “good deal”. So many twists on planning and finding the right time for park visits to accommodate all three parks. Plan for the adult and infant food, cloth purchasing. Hmm, I need to write a separate article about cloth purchasing to justify the time and “money” spent!! The infants will wear new dress everyday, that’s the initial plan, and ended up adults got some new dress too to pose for the pictures to show case the man made wonders to different parts of the world!
There were so many understanding needs to be sorted out before stating the trip, golden words (can be repeated often but very very hard to follow!!)
1. You get what you get, even though you plan for 6 days be satisfied with what you will be able to cover.
2. We are traveling with two infants and bound to loose precious time and bound to get into to rift and fight with even the closest relationship in the world (husband and wife)!
3. We are traveling with two families, if one family is taking time the other one has to go on to cover the trip.
Well did we follow all those, not sure!! After all we are common men and women!
The mis-understandings within family started before even starting the trip, as we always do get sorted out and move on for the next twist and turn the life has to offer – what a positive thought!
Raj A – agreed to accompany us in our car and be kind enough to drive back our car and drop it in our garage and give the keys to Raj G, who takes turn to pick us up after our week long trip. We were fortunate to have kind friends our group! As always Raj A arrived in time, we knew well in advance that Raj A will be here on time, so we decided to load the car with baggage’s last night itself and had hand baggage and the most important diaper bag to load when we load our self’s in!
Buckle up boys and girls – the journey start’s right here – all pre work has been done, now time to execute them, we all are prepared – well we can say the start rite!
First hurdle – the flight is at 8:05 p.m. we are starting around 4:30 p.m. – normal journey hour to airport is around an hour, so if we reach there by 6 p.m. is all that we were aiming, the traffic had other plans – we took some alternative route – Thank God – Raj G was not in the car, he would have killed me taking that route! – Even if we pay him 200,000 USD per hour (that’s the cost to pay off his current home loan!) he will not stay there, take my word! Well, coming to the point, we reached airport around 6:40 p.m. around not bad – in fact very good considering the circumstances. We bid good bye to Raj A and he wished us good luck – we promised him that we will give him a call, when we reach Orlando, did we do? – Does all of the men follow their word, the world opinion poll say – 99% of time men don’t! Can we against world? So we stick to it!!
Hurdle 2 – there was big line to even get boarding pass (we never knew, we were going to spend most of our trip time on the line/queue’s, Well we got glimpses of what we were going to get!!) We asked the lady over there, our flight suppose to start in about hour and 10 mintues, can we go in express line to get our boarding pass – She said, your flight is delayed and it can even get cancelled and we are canceling flights back and forth due to weather conditions!! Wow – what a start! – First they announced our flight will be delayed 30 minutes and it only went up from there (if that was the public trading stock, I could have bet “all-in” in that one, wow might have covered more than the trip expenses!) We went to the gate around 7:30 to wait more than 3 hours in the gate – my parents and wife would have been proud if I told them, I went to gate 3 hours in advance to its departure!! ( I have even caught a flight in MDW arriving 10 min’s before – best part is I went through the pilot and air host’s line and got to the gate 1 min before its departure and the lady at gate told me, they are going to close the flight door, run, well they did, I knocked they opened it, wow I made it!!) May be this time they made be pay for that (with my wife, sibling and even with friend’s family)! What ever it may be, glad they decided to fly us instead of canceling the flight. Before that we went thru couple of things, normally we don’t go through, there was airport shut down. They scared us saying heavy lighting coming to us and switched off all the lights in the airport. While all these were happening, we were taking mac’dee burgers!! They told us they are going to take a different route – where the lighting already traveled and filling up more fuel and additional travel time too. Kudo’s to Sothwest airlines for deciding us to fly! Lakshmi and Subha were too nervous and were not too comfortable to fly – Me and Ramesh told them, if they deiced to fly, it has to be very very safe measure so don’t worry. We started exactly around 10:40 p.m. CDT, that’s the time we were supposed to be landing! What an irony!!
Hurdle 3 – The enterprise – rent – a car will close at 12:00 a.m. at the airport, We knew if the flight gets delayed we will get problem in renting the car, so we called up enterprise and told them, they said get the keys from their neighbors – Alamo rent a car. When we landed at Orlando, with our car seats and baggage’s went to claim our key to car. Surprise everyone!! The Alamo was not able to locate our reservation; we called all the available 24 hour numbers, no use!! They help line said, they open at 5:00 a.m. The time was around 4:00 after all the call’s were over, so we thought we will wait for another one hour – at least by then we may try to get a sleep at airport – it was very spacious and clean. The only option is to sleep on the floor. Kids were sleeping in their strollers. When I try to sleep on the floor just remembered, when did I slept on the floor last time, long time back, at least had a comforter or a sleeping bag for my support. God has been so kind to me – not today though!!
Hurdle 4 - 5:00 a.m. no one opened the enterprise door, then we learnt actually they open at 6:00 a.m. 5:00 to 6:00 a.m. is only exclusively for rental return’s. They say information is handy, well you know that now. And around 4:45 they started the clean the airport – full vacuum sounds and all lights were switched on, even sleeping on the floor is also not an option. Time and again thoughts crossed about renting vehicle from Alamo or some other vendor who is open at that time, they are asking for more money, well we decided to wait so lets wait for one more hour, we did the lady turned up at the counter was so rude, they only word she said, we apologies, that’s all. Frankly we did not have enough energy to fight too, time was 6:15, and we had to be at 8:00 for the property presentation to attend to claim our tickets to universal studios. We thought we look very bleak first we need to put our baggage’s in the villa (we rented 2 bed villa) and fresh ourself’s up and go to the presentation. After we went to the car outlet, they gave as choices.. we were very greedy and picked the latest model 2011 – which had very low mileage it was town and country model mini van. And after we put the car seats and pushed the baggage’s thru and pushed the strollers in, it was jam packed like peak hour city bus in Chennai. Subha said, lets all be silent and pray before we start the van, we did, I remember the one she said to Ramesh, “vanduma, remember goddess Durga”. Well the Goddess listen to us after 12 hrs exactly. (May be Ramesh prayed towards India, and the temple over there was closed and when it did open and ours was the first request on table and it was honored, it was evening time for us!) After we hit the highway’s, we learnt that you need to stand on the gas and it will react after 5 minutes. In the essence of time, we cannot go back and change our vehicle and change car seat and baggage, instead take that for pick-up! There is a old saying.. Beggars cannot be choosers, true isn’t! Thought came in the middle of trip to change the van.. same reason.. no time to do that either.. And the van was drinking the gas at its will, throughout the trip.. we did a rough calculation, it came about 10 to 11 mpg – when the gas prices are at 4$ - any takers ? (Remember when we traveled in 15 seater for tulip show, it gave more than this one!)
Hurdle 5 - By the time we found the route and got our keys from the box and try to search for the rental property, we were not able to find it, time was 7:45, so we decided to go to the presentation, well we tried to reschedule by calling different numbers available to us, no one picked! Lakshmi was saying from the back, can you drive like this, we will sleep, well that was one of her wishes we turned down! Finally one person picked the phone, time was 8:15, we were half the way thru to the presentation place, he helped us reschedule at 10:30 and we decided to go back to find our villa, we did and loaded our baggage’s in the villa around 9:00 a.m. Lakshmi had made lemon rice mix prior to trip, Subha and Lakshmi made lemon rice with that and kids routine started and we took bath and refreshed our self’s time is 11:00 a.m. and take various route and finally reached the place where they going gyan us about the time-share property buying.
Hurdle 6 - The sales person who is Peru-Indian came about 12:00 p.m. and told us straight to our face, you guys are come here for free tickets, I know, I will try to go thru them as quick as possible, we believed. He was rude at times, he blamed his limited English fluency for that and we are not bothered about at all, since all of us were at half-sleep. To be honest, that is the first time, I learnt about timeshare property logistics. Not sure who invented that, sure its genius concept, one property will be sold to at least 150 families – the best part is they take turn and they can sell / exchange their turns to others too. Everyone pays tax and maintenance every year. There is only one winner in this! Time flew like anything, we were not thrilled with the concept and our eyes were pleading for sleep. He kept on giving gyan and showed his photograph’s of his various vacations and his property photo’s. Surya and Lochan were running around the place like anything. Finally Surya decided to take his things and started to tear them apart – he had enough of it I guess. He even pooped and started to give a nasty small, then that guy decided to stop and he said, I will finish my presentation here, and he did not showed the property at all, and he said he will call his manager, can you please change diaper for your son, we took that offer!! We met his manager and gave worst rating for the sales person!! He took our feed back and he said your tickets are waiting the gift area, we ran over that to cross another hurdle!!
Hurdle 7 – The lady over there took all our names to print our tickets to Universal studio’s (it’s a 7 day multi pass ticket – this is the best ticket available – we get 4 of those for 1 day ticket price in turn we obliged to attend the presentation and our villa price will also come for lower price – that’s the deal!) Things were going smooth until she clicked print e-ticket button – the system panicked and our transaction was complete but the system was not printing e-tickets. The only good thing happened over there was a lady who works for universal marketing team was present at that location, was very very helpful, she called their technical team and people were started debugging code (wow how many times that happens!!!) we could have gone with resume to get a technical team member job over there I guess, we were giving enuf tips of what we known. Nothing worked finally, they found out that our transaction actually hit the database and they had different application to re-print the ticket, they used that printed out tickets around 4:45 p.m.!!! We shared our entire day story to that lady over there, she was so kind and she offered free 5 entry fast passes for each one of us and wished us good luck! – We needed that very very badly. She was an angle sent from heaven, I guess – that worked wonders for us.
After we came out from that place, we had a thought of going back to villa and sleep early and call it a day.. Then $2000+ dollars came write across the eyes and we told our self.. we will go to universal and see the park looks and try to go to one part and see how we do, if we feel, we need to then we will go back.. – This is perfectly Raj A’s method of positive thinking.. It worked wonders!! Then we eat the lemon rice with Uma gave home made “chilly dried with fried”, we felt the heat.. Man the sun was beating as down at more than 100 deg F and we eat dried fried chilly as side dish, we are proud Indians you know! After we entered Universal park, we carefully got 2 fast passes each on Thursday and remaining 3 each for Saturday. First show we went was Spiderman 3D (without knowing at the end of the trip we each had 3 feet spider man as a memory of this trip!! ). We used our first fast pass and skipped the line and finished the show by taking turns.. And we went around the park and we had real good time as the evening greeted us with gently breeze and we did cover more than what we thought, we went a train ride which goes at 25 feet above the ground level in a slow speed (say about 5 to 10 mph) and goes around the fantasy part of the park. Which was pretty, the time was around 9:30, the park close time and body cannot take any more, so we have to call it a day, we ended with panda express amazing food!! We went to villa and put our feets up!! There is only way this trip can go.. it cannot go any worst, and everyday will be a better day here after.. we went with lot of positive thoughts..
I will continue to share our rest of the trip memories in my next parts.. will try to share them with pictures as much as possible. till then.. happy reading, do point out mistakes, no one is perfect!
- Lakshmi and Meiyappan
Good one and great start.
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