PeanutWood

Apocalypse Now

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Last night we saw probably the biggest storm we’ve ever seen in Florida. We both love thunderstorms (unless flying) but this one was frankly scary in places.

The storm kicked off at 8pm while we were on International Drive enjoying the fine Mexican cuisine provided by Don Pablos. The drive home was fun, with visibility reducing to almost zero in places and the sky flashing continuously. Once home though all went relatively calm, some good lightning but nothing special. We sat on the lanai and watched the lightning until about 10pm when the sky cleared. That’s it then.

Or so we thought. At 1am we were woken by almost continuous lightning flashes, and some of the biggest rumbles of thunder we’ve ever heard. On and on it crashed with the rain hammering the windows, and strong winds. A tornado watch was in force as well which gave further cause for concern.

Eventually it started to move away again and we finally got back to sleep just before 3am. The morning started grey but the sun is out again now and its going to be warm and sunny all week, with low chances of rain. Good thing too – after the rain last night the pool is full to the brim, and the lake behind the villa is also rather fuller than it was yesterday afternoon!

Here is a video we took. The killjoys at Facebook managed to wipe it off immediately because we’ve used third-party music on it. I’m sure James won’t mind, it seems very appropriate really…

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Magic Kingdom rope drop

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

Friday saw us spend another day chilling and relaxing by the pool, recovering from the shock of actually getting here. We also spent all day waiting for UPS to deliver, but seems they couldn’t get through the gate at the front of the estate. Whoops.

So today became our first day in Disney of the holiday. We haven’t even been to Downtown yet, most unusual for us. We decided to get up early and head into the Magic Kingdom and witness the opening ceremony that is held every day at Main Street Station.

We probably arrived a bit too early, we expected we’d be allowed onto Main Street – after all, there are shops there and Disney exists to make money. Nope, we we all held in the area between the station and the turnstiles. We got there at 8:20 so spent 30mins milling around waiting for something to happen.

Eventually the Mayor of Main Street arrived and greeted everyone, before the first train of the day brought Mickey, Minnie and the rest of the gang onto the station for the welcoming ceremony. In all the times we’ve been to Disney, this was another first for us and we are glad we got the chance.

We spent the morning in the park – the first couple of hours were very quiet and we got quite a few rides ticked off without any queues. It started busying up at lunchtime, which was when we dived out of the park – and straight back into the pool. Its good to be lazy on holiday!

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Top secret launches

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Yesterday was the quietest day we’ve had on a holiday for some time. Neither of us slept particularly well despite being absolutely shattered from the travel, so we had one aim for the day – get supplies. Once that task was achieved and the villa in order we retired to the pool and lanai and did bugger all for the rest of the day.

In the evening we ventured to TGI Fridays just down the road, home to the most delicious pot stickers and a menu which allows you to eat enough food to feed an African village for just $16. TGI’s also has free wifi, and while sitting letting the pot stickers go down we received a tweet from NASA saying an Atlas rocket was slated for launch. Great news, be good to see another launch.

Problem was, the launch was about an hour away – and we’d not had our main course yet, let alone the slab of cheesecake promised. So we decided to box up the cheesecake (take-out is great in restaurants!) and headed east to East Lake Tohopekaglia, where we figured we’d get a good view of the launch which was slated for 7:52pm.

Arriving on the west shore of East Lake Toho we found way too many rich people with houses which were blocking our view east, so we carried on round, looking for somewhere to stop and watching the clock march towards the launch time. Eventually we came to the town of St Cloud which is on the south shore of the lake, and as we pulled into a car park saw the glow in the sky of the rocket.

Out we jumped from the truck (you can’t call it a car, its huge) and saw the rocket burn skywards leaving a trail of smoke/vapour. The sky was perfectly clear allowing us a view of the rocket for about 5 minutes including seeing the external boosters drop off and fall back to earth.

But why hadn’t we spotted the launch before? We are normally pretty good at checking things like that and would definitely have headed to Space Coast to watch it. It turns out this was an Atlas V rocket on a classified Pentagon mission launching an unmanned space plane, so maybe thats why we didn’t see it on the launch schedules.

Turning back to the truck once the rocket had gone from view I spotted a sheepish looking Linda. It turns out that when she jumped from the car she also managed to kick one of the cheesecakes out, and the box popped open. What a terrible waste of a cheesecake.

Still, I’d recommend St Cloud and East Lake Toho to watch a launch if your in the Orlando area and NASA spring a sudden launch on you.

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Travel shock

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Well, we didn’t see that one coming. Normally we head to Florida in the depths of the UK winter and have to contend with travel chaos such as snow or fog. Little did we know that we would this time be stitched up by clear blue skies and a light northeasterly wind. Unseen to most people that clear blue sky contained volcanic ash, something I’ve never seen in 16 years in aviation in the UK.

Our travel plans started to look shaky on the Thursday they grounded all flights in the UK – but it couldn’t last until Sunday surely? Apparently so, because on Saturday morning Virgin cancelled our flight and rebooked us onto a flight on Wednesday. It must be OK by Wednesday? It looked very doubtful right up until 10pm on Tuesday evening when the government jumped in and said it was suddenly OK to fly. Commercial pressure anyone? Probably the right call but a couple of days too late really.

So Wednesday morning we headed on down to Gatwick. Rather than braving the M25 we took a train from Milton Keynes and changed at Clapham Junction. Dead easy, we’ll do that again – 2:15 door to door. We already knew our flight was delayed and tried everything to get on the earlier flight to no avail. Virgin, bless them, managed to get 5 of 6 aircraft back to Gatwick before the ash closure. Typically the one stuck in Barbados was our aircraft. The VS15 is the last flight of the day out of Gatwick and is renowned for being the one that is shafted, today was no exception. Beardy did give us £20 towards a meal while we waited in a deserted Gatwick terminal for 5hrs.

Eventually we got airborne and landed at Orlando at 10:20pm, arriving at the villa at midnight local time – which is 5am UK time. Given the lack of sleep we’d both had Tuesday night and the early start we’d been on the go for almost 24hrs, and being on the go doing bugger all hanging around terminals and sitting on aeroplanes is hard work – we walked through the front door of the villa, dragged the cases upstairs and went straight to sleep. Unpacking could wait.

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Times are changing!

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Well, we can release the secret now. Linda is currently expecting our first child, we had the first scan today and so far so good. We even had a little wave from the baby when the ultrasound first showed up!

Bump is due to arrive on 21st October, although knowing our timekeeping is likely to be late! The next 6 months are going to be busy, with a bedroom to turn into a nursery, new windows, and lots of other work in the house to get it “finished” while we’ve still got free time!

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