I'm Here!

As of last night, my mom and I arrived in Florida! Yesterday was pretty long and stressful so hopefully from now on it'll go smoothly!

I had emailed our airport and called the TSA on Wednesday asking about a gate pass for my dad so he could sit with us at our gate before I left. Both the TSA and airport said we could get a gate pass upon arrival. Well, upon arrival we were told by the man checking us in that we had to specify we wanted a gate pass when buying the plane tickets. That was the first little bump. After going through security a second time (went back out to say goodbye to my dad), one of my bags was stopped going through the scanner. The TSA agent asked if it was my bag, I said yes, and he pulled me to the screen. He was smiling as he said, "Well, that's either an apple or a peach" and I was confused at first because I thought he meant my Apple phone. Turns out, round fruits look suspicious in baggage! My mom, the agent, and I all started laughing when we said it was an apple and he pulled out the bag with my food in it just in case. I got my apple back (and I have yet to eat it) and had a good laugh.

For some reason there was no non-stop flight options from Detroit Metro to Orlando International so we had to stop in Chicago Midway. I was expecting our first flight to be about an hour and ten minutes but not even twenty five minutes after taking off in Detroit, we were landing in Chicago! I was amazed by how close Lake Michigan was, it was an amazing sight seeing it from the plane!

After an hour and a half in Midway, we took off for Orlando. My mom and I watched Now You See Me and the plane landed before we could finish the movie. There was a little turbulence on this flight, but nothing big. We had to fly over the storms in the South!

After landing we had to face getting all of our luggage (about eight bags combined) to the shuttle to get our rental car. My bags were NOT light! One of them even had a caution tag put on it! After taking the shuttle to the rental car place, we realized our car is TINY. The trunk fits one bag and the other ones are piled to the roof in the back seat! Thank goodness it's only the two of us!

Our next little bump came when we tried to get to the resort. It turns out that when you type the address in the GPS, it takes you to some spot in the middle of LBV that doesn't exist. So I tried again but typed in the resort name and it worked. We took a lot of wrong turns but finally got there. We were intrigued in finding out that you can make U-turns on freeways in Florida!

I think this next part was the worst. It was almost 8 p.m. when we finally got to the resort, we had been up for over 12 hours and most of those hours we were on our feet carrying a lot of luggage that was 20-45 pounds each. Resort check-in. This took what felt like forever. We were probably in line for 35 minutes, and there wasn't even that many people in line! There were probably only 5 parties in front of us in line. And there were only 3 people checking people in. It was frustrating.

After parking the car in a different lot, we had to get all of the luggage to the room. This was hard. I'm not exactly the strongest person and my mom doesn't like lifting things. After getting all of the luggage in the room, we immediately went to get food from the resort. After eating we went and watched the end of The Princess and the Frog (I didn't understand what I was watching at all) and went back to the room and ended the day.

Let's hope we have better days!