Flight to Orlando
Boarding was called at 09:20 and we got on board ‘Mademoiselle Rouge’ shortly afterwards. We instantly regretted it as it meant 40 minutes sat waiting with a two year old, but hey, it made it seem more real!
On every seat was a pillow, blanket, headphones and a hygiene pack which had a mask, rubbish bag, hand sanitiser and wipes in it.
As a disclaimer, our son has a medical condition which means under UK guidance he is exempt from wearing a mask. It was all prearranged with Virgin’s special assistance team ahead of time and had a note added to our booking confirming so. At no point in the airport or on board the aircraft were we challenged for why he wasn’t wearing a mask - the airport and ground crew weren’t aware of the exemption and it’s your guess and much as ours whether the cabin crew had seen the note on the file or not.
Doors closed at 10:02, safety video at 10:05, Captain announcement at 10:10 confirming it was the first Virgin flight to Orlando.
We pushed back at 10:14 with a camera crew recording us from the ground.
I’m going to put my street cred to one side and say as we starting pushing back, I did start to well up a little. After 3 years, hundreds if not thousands of YouTube videos and listening to Orlando podcasts every week, we were finally going again. Putting it into context, I’m not an emotional person in the slightest.
“Virgin 75L” (our callsign) took the skies at 10:30 - even now as I write this, it still doesn’t feel real.
Passing Liverpool airport in the initial climb.
Myself and wife agreed I could have the window for takeoff and landing as long as she had it for the rest of the flight, with my son going between his seat and our laps throughout.
Unfortunately for me, the passenger in front of my new seat decided they wanted to recline his seat pretty much straight away. Don’t be one of these passengers. Nobody likes you. For the 1% extra comfort you may get, you cause lots of discomfort for those behind you.
Now that our son was happy with his iPad (if your kids like YouTube, I’d highly recommend the 1 month free trial of YouTube Premium so you can download videos to watch offline), I decided to browse Vera, Virgin’s in flight entertainment system.
There were 114 films on board and somehow I ended up watching Fast & Furious 9. I wanted to see what was worse - the films or the ride. I had my money on the ride, but the film lived up to being an equally bad pile of… Probably a good job the guy in front had reclined as it made it almost impossible to pay attention to the film. I turned off after 30 minutes.
Drinks (for us at the back) were served at 11:30. It looks like the pretzel/crisps that you’d normally get with a drink has been dropped. Just a can of Budweiser for me, as Tiger has also gone.
Todays routing took us towards Dublin initially, before routing towards Canada and down the Eastern coast of America.
The children’s meals were served at 12:30 and this was mac and cheese. My son turned his nose up at it, however myself and wife agreed it was pretty good.
Our food arrived at 13:00. The options were chicken pasta or vegetable Thai green curry. We opted for the chicken and it was fine, nothing more nothing less. It seemed very much a ‘COVID times’ meal service, so hopefully it’ll improve back to the normal standard in the not too distance future.
Once food was out of the way and with 6 hours of the flight to go, I settled down to watch Black Widow, which was a good enough watched compare to F&F.
We managed to delay (well the sugar did) my sons nap time from his usually 1PM to 2PM, so hopefully this might make for a slightly less awful toddler later on tonight. My tip for any parents with young children, the toilet on the left hand side around row 50 is bigger than the others.
At 15:45, or around 3:30 minutes until arrival into MCO, shortbread biscuits were served. Shortly followed by drinks that were frequently served throughout the flight.
From this point onwards, I’ll swap to Florida time which is 5 hours behind the UK.
At 11:45, the cabin crew brought round some pictures to colour in for a children’s competition, however our son was more interesting in his new toy we gave him for the second half of the flight.
12:45 saw the arrival of snack boxes/afternoon tea. Again, none offensive, but not the tastiest.
At 13:55 we started our decent into the blue skies of Orlando.
We ‘kissed’ the Orlando tarmac at 2:18PM. We’re home!
Photo from Twitter.
A few key points in summary:
- For the most part, everyone wore their makes on board when they needed to. I didn’t spot the crew once telling people to put them on (probably because they didn’t need to) and there was a little girl sat behind us, who I’m guessing was aged 2, and she had her mask on and off throughout the flight and it wasn’t an issue for the crew or passengers a like. Likewise the children in front of us were certainly over 2 and I didn’t see them in a mask at all.
- The aircraft was cleaned to a good standard, but not perfect, albeit the high touch points like screens and remotes all seemed clean and ‘safe’.
- The seats were again, fine, but not the most comfortable for the 9 hour flight. The cabin felt much older than that of the 747’s that left the fleet over a year ago, but it did the job.
- Crew were friendly and seemed happy throughout which is usually our experience when flying Virgin.
UPDATE: Flying with a two year old - Our experience
As requested, here is a bit more about how we tackled the flight with our son - the last time he did a long haul flight, he was a 6 month old baby, so this all felt a bit new, but thankfully a 2 hour trip to Spain helped us.
Without even realising it, we split the flight up into a few sections, but I’ll add as much detail as I can below about his trip onboard.
- The excitement of getting on board. Initially, this was enough to keep him busy and occupied. Make the most of this time. No toys, no entertainment, no snacks - keep those for later.
- Once we were airborne (having already been on the plane for an hour), we tried to distract him with the inflight entertainment, watching Luca and later in the flight Toy Story, films he’s seen before, and again, we knew looking up at the little screen wouldn’t last forever.
- Snack time… Pringles. Between him and my wife, I didn’t get a single one.
- Next onto his iPad, something he loves and as mentioned in the original post, he spent hours watching downloaded YouTube videos on - the same videos he’d watch at home, so this familiarity helped kill a lot of time. We bought him some child sized headphones (from Amazon I think) a few months back which he was used to wearing. When he was fed up with these, we just let him watch his iPad with the volume low as to not disturb other people.
- More food/snacks. As long as you’re not going to create a disaster that needs cleaning up, it seemed to help. Of course, lots of water too. It meant lots of trips to the toilet (again, near row 50 on the left hand side is the biggest) as we’re doing his potty training, but again, it was another thing that killed his time. We took a portable toilet the with us on the flight for him that we’ll be taking with us to the parks. I did clean it with the soap wash provided, but I still felt like passengers won’t have loved me walking down the cabin with it!
I always let him walk out the toilet first and then pressed the flush as I was walking out to avoid scaring him with the noise.
- I’m sure this one is a no brainier, but do whatever you can to make nap time comfortable for your little ones and hopefully as a result, they sleep as long as possible.
- Upon waking up, the iPad disappeared and we gave him a brand new toy. He loves his Car toys and this kept him entertained for pretty much the rest of the flight. He played with it on his seat, our laps, the floor, driving it up the cabin, as long as he was safe and wasn’t annoying anyone else, we just let him do whatever he wanted to keep him happy.
- Probably some more food/snacks in here somewhere.
- The only bit he wasn’t a big fan on, probably through tiredness at this point as much as anything, was having his seat belt on for landing. We dealt with it the best we could, and whilst waiting to get off the flight, he had a few tears.
Overall, he did amazingly on the flight. So much better than we would have wished for.
In the airport, we pulled his own suitcase (Cars themed of course) which gave him a little job and distracted him. At this point, he wanted to be carried more often than not though.
On masks, as I’ve already mentioned, on medical grounds, he didn’t wear one, however at both airports and on the flights, parents just did the best they could. Nobody said anything, so please don’t worry and stress about this! Some children who I saw wearing them in MCO didn’t wear them at all on the flight and again, nothing going said. Maybe they were also exempt, but something tells me that wasn’t the case.
We just let him stay up, playing with his new Cars Mac toy until he crashed. At times this meant he wasn’t his usual little happy self for being overtired, but he stayed up until about 7:30PM EST which is 00:30AM BST, or about 4 hours passed his normal bed time, so hopefully this will help with the jet lag and time difference.
I hope this is a useful overview of what we did. If you have any more questions about this side of things, feel free to message me or comment below.