It's the day before our big holiday, that has been in the planning for over a year. In the morning we're off to Orlando, leaving here about six thirty. I'm not publicising all the details here until we get back so you don't rob my house! I'm writing this now just in case I have any profound thoughts today, but won't publish until our return...
I've been willing people to ask me "are you doing anything over half term" as there's always someone from school who is doing something fancy in this break, but usually we are just working and the kids are doing nothing interesting. This time we're taking the offer of some extra days (on top of the bank holiday half term and a couple of inset days) and are doing a week in Orlando, followed by a week in Mexico. The Orlando half is for the boys and for Clare and for Jim, and I added on the Mexico half for me. It's a super inefficient way of doing a holiday, but then everyone gets a bit of what they want. I'm not so interested in the USA or theme parks but am keen to try new places. We used http://www.travelplanners.co.uk to put together a trip for us and it looks fairly bargainous compared to some we had seen. We considered other places for the second half of the trip. It would have been easiest and cheapest to do somewhere else in the USA but I really wanted to tick off another country for spending this much money. We considered Cuba and Jamaica and even a mini cruise for the second week, but this worked out the best times for us. The cruise would have technically ticked off three carribbean countries, but would have been a real rush in each of them. Cuba we have done before, Mexico fitted the bill for us. All inclusive, access to ancient ruins, plenty of good found, sounds great.
Our USA half of the holiday is going to have a real Universal bias (rather than the mouse). We're staying at Saphire Falls Resort 1 which is in the Universal area and have tickets for Islands Of Adventure, Universal Studios, and Volcano Bay. Again we have done it quite inefficiently, our tickets would cover us for two weeks of theme park action, and we'll only be able to realistically do one day in each. Two of these theme parks have Harry Potter parks inside them and we get to go on the Hogwarts Express between the two. We have a hire car for the week though won't be using it much as we get free boat transfer to the parks. We are hoping to also get out to Kennedy Space Centre one day though.
Our second week in Mexico is at Occidental Xcaret something or other. I'm not quite sure what's the resort name and what's the hotel but we'll find out when we get there. It's connected to a big eco park and we should have good access to some Mayan ruins. We may not go to Chichen Itza as we have our eye on Coba which we can still be dreadfully non-eco-tourists and climb on.
We have a bit of a road trip between the two as there are no direct flights from Orlando so we're heading down to Miami.
Our security measures are all checked and double checked, so if you do rob my house I will at least get a notification about it. I'll be thousands of miles away and unable to do anything about it but I will get nice video clips of the burglarly in action. I should not be focussing on this sort of thing.
Turns out I did not have any profound thoughts.
Happy holidays!
Paul Clarkeʼs weblog - I live in Hythe, Kent. Wed and father to two, I am a full stack web engineer, + I do js / Node, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, running, eating, home-automation + other diy jiggery-pokery, history, tree stuff, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, + TIME TRAVEL.