Florida Trip, Part 1: Breaking In is Hard to Do
I just got back from Florida, so I am going to do some posts listing what I got up to.
We stayed at a hotel the previous night where we ended up having a buffet dinner where the plates got whisked away the moment we finished (this proved to be a trend throughout the holiday).
The flight to Florida was good fun, but waiting in line for Immigration was not and it took about two hours; we had to wait in a long, winding queue, watching one mother run off with her very smelly baby, clearly to change his nappy, and when we got to the end, we found that we needed an extra immigration form because I live in a different house to the other family members I was in. The people on the plane had asked if we had the surname and said we only needed one form. Luckily they didn't make us go to the back of the queue, since by this time it was very late in UK time.
We finally got the rental car; the guy was insisting that our somewhat big car was "very small", but compared to many of the cars we saw in Florida it was quite small. We noticed later in the trip that some parking lots had spaces intended for compact cars, but people had parked their massive cars in these anyway.
We finally got to the hotel and had a pizza by the pool; I was very tired by this point.
The first full day was spent at Sea World; most of the usual stuff was there, though we skipped Shamu this time. I loved the new penguin exhibit, where you went through a freezing environment where they kept the penguins. Most of the day revolved around looking at fish/bird related stuff, and while waiting for the people I was with to come out of a shop, I started watching some lizards; we don't get them in the UK (wrong climate), but I was interested in the swelling that was coming out of their necks, which I thought must be a mating thing. Then, some random American came over when he saw me watching them and asked "What's going on here?", and then asked me where I was from, before asking if I had any cigarettes (I didn't). First example of an American being friendly and chatty on the trip, and I've noticed that things are a lot different than in England where most people won't talk to each other and keep themselves to themselves - we're odd like that.
Dinner was in Red Lobster, where I had a good view of the Interstate.
We stayed at a hotel the previous night where we ended up having a buffet dinner where the plates got whisked away the moment we finished (this proved to be a trend throughout the holiday).
The flight to Florida was good fun, but waiting in line for Immigration was not and it took about two hours; we had to wait in a long, winding queue, watching one mother run off with her very smelly baby, clearly to change his nappy, and when we got to the end, we found that we needed an extra immigration form because I live in a different house to the other family members I was in. The people on the plane had asked if we had the surname and said we only needed one form. Luckily they didn't make us go to the back of the queue, since by this time it was very late in UK time.
We finally got the rental car; the guy was insisting that our somewhat big car was "very small", but compared to many of the cars we saw in Florida it was quite small. We noticed later in the trip that some parking lots had spaces intended for compact cars, but people had parked their massive cars in these anyway.
We finally got to the hotel and had a pizza by the pool; I was very tired by this point.
The first full day was spent at Sea World; most of the usual stuff was there, though we skipped Shamu this time. I loved the new penguin exhibit, where you went through a freezing environment where they kept the penguins. Most of the day revolved around looking at fish/bird related stuff, and while waiting for the people I was with to come out of a shop, I started watching some lizards; we don't get them in the UK (wrong climate), but I was interested in the swelling that was coming out of their necks, which I thought must be a mating thing. Then, some random American came over when he saw me watching them and asked "What's going on here?", and then asked me where I was from, before asking if I had any cigarettes (I didn't). First example of an American being friendly and chatty on the trip, and I've noticed that things are a lot different than in England where most people won't talk to each other and keep themselves to themselves - we're odd like that.
Dinner was in Red Lobster, where I had a good view of the Interstate.