Do They Know It's Christmas? Helen&Andy:Nov 17. Days 14&15 - Travelling Home

[HelenJNT]

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Days 14&15: Travelling home

Ahh you lucky people - the last of my musings on my odd sleep patterns. This really was an odd one though as I woke up at 11:00! Eleven AM! It was a good job we had arranged the late check-out the previous night otherwise we would have been a bit scuppered. Andy had actually been awake for a couple of hours already but had decided not to wake me as I was dead to the world and travelling home is always a long day.

I’m sure some of you think that we are quite mad, choosing not to go to a park or at least to Disney Springs on the last day and wring out every last drop of Disney magic, but we have quite a hard-nosed approach to going-home days. We are in the mindset of just wanting to get home and hate nothing more than late flights – we’re mentally checked out of the holiday by this point and so we just want to get on our way.

Showered and dressed, we packed the last of our things and then, weirdly, sat on the bed for half an hour or so and watched some of Stacey’s must-dos. We’d found the menus and remote control for the TV quite hard to navigate and so the TV had been permanently left on this channel throughout our stay. Whilst it was sad, it was also quite nice to reminisce on all the things we had done on this trip. I think we know most of the script for this show off by heart now.

We also spent a lot of time scratching our newly acquired mosquito bites, for we had both got bitten so badly at the party the night before. So strange as we were both pretty well covered up but we were riddled with bites, especially around our ankles. These must have been particularly virulent mosquitoes as well as it took weeks after returning home for the bites to finally go away. Ace.

We said goodbye to Andy’s now-sad birthday balloons and thank you to the room and were downstairs in reception by 12:30.

We’d seen on the Dibb and also on our Magical Express notification that due to the enhanced security measures at the airport, the bus was collecting us four hours ahead of our departure time so our pick-up time was 14:00.

We wanted to have our bags weighed as we were concerned about the weight distribution – we had purchased a lot of mugs again #mugsforthemugs – and so went over to Bell Services to have them weighed and stored until our pick-up time. As it was, my bags was dead on 23kg which was a fluke. Andy’s was a kilogram over, so we made a mental note that some of the mugs were going to have to come out of there and be squeezed into our hand luggage.

We then went over to reception to check out, which for some reason took a while and we weren’t sure why as we knew we had paid off all the room balance and there shouldn’t have been anything to take care of. We were served by a chap called Paul who had a terrible cold and kept wiping his nose on the cuff of his jacket so I can only think that he wasn’t firing on all cylinders that morning. Paul was shocked by the number of quick service credits we had left (I think it was 22 plus a few snacks?) and practically ordered us to go to the shop and get them swapped for things to take home with us.

First though, we were desperate for food as all we had eaten in the previous 24 hours had been lunch at Columbia Harbor House, popcorn, a bite-sized pretzel and a handful of cookies. We headed over to the Mara where we saw loads of people in the swimming pool. It was a scorcher of a day and we were pretty miserable at the fact that we were going home when all these lucky folks were staying put.

As ever, with every single trip to the Mara, the queue was out the door. We had one eye on the clock and knew we didn’t have long to hang around here. You’d have thought the family up ahead of us had never ever ordered a meal before as they had questions about every single thing and we were privy to an over-long conversation about whether grandma really wanted a burger or not. AAAARRRGHH.

Whilst I appreciate that it’s nice to offer a personalised service at a Deluxe resort, the Mara had been nothing but a source of frustration for us on this trip. We just want to get in, go to a counter, order our food and get our food. That’s not too much to ask of a Quick Service restaurant is it? The whole waiting for one server at a podium, getting a pager, queuing to pay and then going back again to queue to collect the food just didn’t work for us. The one bonus was that the food was always hot as didn’t have a chance to cool down when queuing for the tills but really, the whole experience took twice the time of any other food court in any other Disney hotel we’ve stayed at. Just have more people on the podium taking orders, that’d solve the issue.

Anyway. I had the crispy chicken BLT sandwich that I had had on arrival night, and Andy got chicken nuggets – I think the first and only ones of this trip? We gobbled the food down but despite being ravenous I still didn’t manage to finish the sandwich – that thing is huge!

Food done, we hotfooted it up to Zawadi Marketplace to exchange the rest of our credits for various items of rubbish. I forget what we got but it was the usual assortment of biscuits, trail mix, rice krispie treats and so on. I also realised that none of this was going to fit in our luggage so I begrudgingly spent $30 on a Mickey Mouse beach bag which was big enough to transport all this booty.

We went back over to bell services to retrieve our cases, and wheeled them over to a bench. We quickly repacked Andy’s case, putting some mugs in the Mickey bag as well as into his rucksack. This meant we had four bits of hand luggage between us (rucksack, my small Kipling handbag, wheely case and the new beach bag) but I was hoping we would get away with it. I didn’t want to check the small wheely case into the hold as it had all my makeup in it, which is probably worth more than my clothes and would be a headache to replace. It had other stuff other than makeup by the way, but yeah, mainly makeup. It also had two quite heavy books, neither of which I had so much as looked at.

It was really hot out there in the sunshine in front of the hotel. I got chatting to a man who had popped out to smoke his pipe and this turned out to be one of my favourite character interactions of the trip. He was wearing a string vest and had a tremendous ZZ Top style beard, and started talking to me about how he and his wife were goat farmers from New Jersey. Goat farming obviously pays well as they were DVC owners at Kidani and came to WDW four times a year for long weekends. He seemed stunned that we scrimp and save to come for a fortnight. We were chatting about the fact that Andy and I had visited New York in Dec 16 and how hot it had been, and he was teaching us how to tend to goats in unexpected warm weather.

Right on cue, the bus arrived at 14:00. There was a teenage boy in the queue in front of us who had a Mickey head balloon tied round his wrist and both Andy and I were wondering what was going to happen to the balloon at the airport – surely he wouldn’t be allowed to take it on the plane?

We made one pick-up stop at Art of Animation on the way. I know most people are usually saying that they can’t believe how quickly the holiday went and that it felt like no time since they were arriving but it genuinely didn’t feel like that for us. We felt like we’d had a solid two weeks away and that we had made the most of every moment, and as a result, we were kind of OK with going home. I think the only reasons for this were that we wanted to see our cats, plus we knew we were returning next year. There was also the happy situation that we only had nine working days left before finishing for Christmas too, so as far as going home blues, they weren’t as bad as in previous years. I’m not going to deny that there were a few sad pangs when we drove out from under the WDW entrance and back into the real world though.

The bus journey passed fairly quickly – always feels far shorter on the way to the airport than when you arrive - and we disembarked. There was some kerfuffle as a man dashed past us with a dripping bag full of what we thought was water, and also with a small child clamped in his other hand. Turned out the bag was not water, and the child was speedily taken over to a bin on the concourse to carry on throwing up. Got to say, we must have been in our own world on the bus to have not noticed any of this, and I am thoroughly pleased about it!

Reluctantly, we went into the airport and headed for the lifts to departures. A few of us piled in the lift, and the doors closed but much like the Gringotts ride, the lift didn’t actually go anywhere. Odd. There was a man in the lift who for some inexplicable reason, in lieu of a suitcase, was dragging a huge plastic box on some rope. Wish I had got a photo of this – so strange. Anyway, he got out of the lift to wait for the next one and that box must have weighed a ton as once he was out, the doors closed again and the lift did actually go up. Weird.

We can never find the Virgin departure desk at MCO – we always manage to get a bit lost, and this time was no exception as the whole area was chaos with construction walls, barricades and workmen everywhere. I honestly don’t know what poor Mr McCoy did to have such a crappy airport named after him.

Bag drop and check in were absolutely fine (yay for Premium Economy). My case was still bang on 23kg and Andy’s was 21, but we couldn’t be bothered to put a couple of the mugs back in so just wished the bags luck and watched them go.

After this we had a stroll round the shops as Andy was keen to see if he could get a Jacksonville Jaguars football shirt in the sports shop. He has adopted them as his NFL team as we have seen them a couple of times now and he really enjoys following them. However, they had every team shirt other than this one so it was not to be.
We don’t like hanging around waiting to go through security so even though we knew we had ages and there wasn’t much on the other side in departures, we got in the queue to go through anyway. The sign on the way in said it was a 24 minute wait but in reality, it took about an hour. This was a Wednesday afternoon and it was chaos so I can only imagine what it would be like now on a Saturday.

On nearing the screening section I saw a notice that said “you will be asked to remove food for scanning” and tried to decide whether to get all the snacks out ahead of time. This would have been tricky as they were spread over two different bags so I decided to just chance it and see if they asked me to remove it once I was going through. As it was, they didn’t and all was well, but I have since read that all food items now need to be removed and swabbed separately so I think next year if we are in the same situation of having a load of snacks, we’ll just make sure they go in the hold luggage.

Straight onto the monorail, in what is always one of the most depressing parts about going home. Seeing all the happy people arriving, when you know you’re not only leaving your happy place but also staring down the barrel of a tedious long flight. I’ve never flown longer than the MCO/LGW trip and I don’t think going even longer haul is remotely appealing to me. This is what has always put us off going to the West Coast or even further afield.

We had about a 30 minute wait in the departure lounge where we just bought some water and a few savoury snacks for the plane.

I realised afterwards that I had meant to stock up on my perfume in the tiny shop there but it completely slipped my mind so that was a nuisance. We were a bit surprised that the four hour pick-up window had more or less been used up so it just goes to show that you do need to get to the airport early on the way home.

This made me laugh – I posted this photo on Instagram at the time, and said it looked like Armani man was taking the mick out of Boss man.

Our flight was at 18:35 and we were called through to the gate at 17:35 where they had already started boarding upper and premium economy.

This was a far cry from last year where we were a couple of hours late departing due to the boarding of all the Invictus Games athletes, or in 2013 where we had a four hour delay due to bad weather.

We were in the back row of PE on the left, seats 24 K&H. This was a strategic move as it meant we were able to recline as much as we wanted. As we went to take our seats, I noticed a washbag on mine, which contained all of the usual bits – earplugs, socks etc, and Andy was most put out that he didn’t have one on his seat. He was unusually vocal about this as didn’t want to miss out, so I got out of my seat and asked a cabin crew lady if there were any more as he didn’t have one. We heard her radio someone for a spare “amenity pack” and the next thing we knew, someone came bounding over with one. Not just any amenity pack though, oh no! They had rustled one of the upper class ones for Andy so not only was the bag bigger and better quality (with a zipped compartment on the side that mine did not have!) he also had an array of lovely lip balms, Rituals moisturisers and other fancy items that he took great pleasure in inspecting.

The plane was Ruby Tuesday, which I think we have flown on before, and it was quite empty and so an elderly lady and her teenage granddaughter had been upgraded to Premium to fill the empty seats across the aisle from us, leaving dad and mum back in economy. They couldn’t believe their good fortune….until the nan looked at the food menu and started grumbling, loudly, about how awful it all looked and that she simply wasn’t going to be able to eat a thing. Dear me – no-one flies for the food, you just pack snacks and make the best of a bad job – I’m not really sure what she was expecting. She then realised she’d left all her sweets in her original economy seat so there was some sort of drama about having to go back and retrieve them.

There was a little bit of excitement when an announcement came over the tannoy for a group of four to make themselves known to a crew member (two married couples) and then it all went quiet until the Captain came over the tannoy to announce that these passengers had been removed and we were clear for take-off. Absolutely no idea what was going on there and we are super beaky so would loved to have known. Either way we were reassured that whatever the issue was had been sorted.

We recognised a few people from our outbound flight – the golfing couple from Birmingham who we had chatted to in immigration and also the harassed and knackered-looking mum whose kids were boomeranging in and out of the loos every 30 minutes for the duration of the flight. Someone we did not recognise but quickly grew to resent was the man in the first or second row of economy who had a particularly booming voice (like Lord Farrow in Blackadder, hehe) and proceeded to chunter on ALL the way through the flight. Luckily both Andy and I had our noise cancelling headphones which went in straight away and only really came out when we landed but even these were doing a poor job at fending off his drone.

The meal on the way home was significantly better than on the way out, despite the chagrin of the nan across the aisle. The starter was a tomato and mozzarella salad, and for mains I had the sticky ginger chicken and Andy had beef curry, neither of which were brilliant but were edible enough. The dessert was a chocolate orange mousse dome which was lovely but too sweet for me so Andy polished both of them off. We washed it down with a couple of Tiger beers – I never like the plane wine very much.

Andy passed the flight by intermittently napping and reading his Kindle. I wasn’t tired due to my mammoth sleep the night before, so I watched three terrible movies back to back – All Eyes On Me (a biopic of Tupac Shakur), The Belko Experiment (grisly and left me scratching my head a bit as to the point of it) and Mindhorn (British spoof detective thing which was simply bloody awful).

It was an uneventful flight, which we were pleased about. I passed on the breakfast, choosing only to have an orange juice – I can’t remember what Andy had and there aren’t any photos of it – sorry. Our upgraded friends slept the entire way through the flight and then moaned when they woke up that they hadn’t had any sleep at all. I’m not really sure what they were expecting from their free upgrade to PE but they spent the whole time appearing rather disappointed.

We landed at 07:55, 30 minutes late due to runway availability at Gatwick. Once again the cabin crew let all of downstairs off ahead of upstairs, so we were last off the plane again. Is this a new Virgin policy or something as it happened to us both times on this trip? So frustrating, although obviously we didn’t care as much on the way home as we know we can get through the immigration kiosks at LGW far faster than when arriving at MCO. One bonus was that our bags were already on the carousel so at least they still get unloaded first, even if we hadn’t been.

Bags collected and through Customs without incident, we stopped in arrivals for a quick safety wee, happy to be reunited with doors that go all the way round!

Valet parking was such a doddle. We walked out of the terminal and crossed the road where the bus stops are. On the side of the car parks is a little office where Andy went to collect the car keys, a map of where our car was, and the exit ticket while I guarded the bags.

Wow, it was chilly at Gatwick that morning and there was a tiny dusting of sleet on the ground. This was another bonus to the valet parking as the last thing we wanted to do after a long night flight was to have to de-ice the car before we could get on the road.

This whole thing was seamless and we were off the M27 and on to the M25 by 09:00 – not bad going considering it was only 90 minutes since we had landed.

There was a little bit of traffic that slowed us down here and there but we made cracking time and were home by 10:30.

The final 20 minutes of the journey were agonising as we were stuck behind a white van driver doing 30 in a 50 and there was nowhere to overtake. We just wanted to get home and see our cats!

Our cat sitters had done a tremendous job and all three monkeys were home and happy to see us – once they had got over the initial resentment. It was wonderful to be reunited and they always cushion the blow of coming back from yet another holiday of a lifetime.

<edited to add – I have been dreading having to post this section of the report. Some of you will know that we had a tragedy last week when our beautiful boy cat Hero was hit by a car, and he didn’t make it. He was only four and we had had him from a kitten. We are heartbroken. I have found it, and still find it, incredibly hard to look at photos of his beautiful blue eyes as it is still very raw and painful. I don’t want to put a downer on the trip report but I know that whenever I post photos of the cats so many of you kind people comment about how gorgeous he is, so I just wanted to put this here. He was my best bud and I miss him immensely>.

I immediately set to unpacking and commencing the EU dirty washing mountain. The washing didn’t actually seem as bad this time around, maybe as it hadn’t been 100f this time and so we hadn’t had as many changes of clothes.

Andy made the rookie jetlag error and went straight to bed, whereas I had determined that I wanted to stay awake for as long as I could. Due to my epic lie-in after MVMCP, I hadn’t yet been awake for 24 hours and I regularly pull all-nighters at work so I wasn’t actually doing too badly at this point. I spent the time while Andy was asleep by reuniting with the sofa, watching Strictly (as we had missed a few weeks), checking work emails, removing my nail polish, and wondering how I had managed to somehow lose half an eyebrow somewhere over the Atlantic.

I also dug into the Disney snacks and discovered that elderly mogs also love a Mickey head rice krispie treat…

I went for a shower once the hot water had warmed up, by which time Andy was also awake. At 3pm we made an executive decision. We’d managed to save, or rather, not to spend, a substantial amount of our allocated spending money for this trip. We’d debated whether to leave the cash dollars for our next trip, or covert the money back and use it for something else. Obviously the sensible thing to do would have been to lock it away but we aren’t always the most sensible. We had had our house redecorated earlier in the year and the one final thing that was missing was a fireplace for the lounge. The previous owners had done a terrible job of ripping out the fireplace and grate before they moved out so Andy and I had spent the best part of seven years staring at a very draughty black hole of Calcutta. By being careful with our spending and not needing the Universal FOTL passes, we had the rest of the money we needed to have a new fireplace put in, so we went off, dead with jetlag, to go and put down the deposit on our new fire and surround.

We then had a trip to Tesco to stock up on food and carpet cleaner – the cats had, erm, had a few accidents while we were away. Once home, we cleaned, hoovered, washed and did all those annoying chores that still need doing when you get home, even though the house was spotless before you went away.

Purchases. Look, the Banshee and MVMCP tree decorations!

Elbs approves of the Starbucks mugs (actually I think this is a 2016 one though – she’s so retro).

Our usual home-day tradition is to get a Chinese takeaway but for some reason we just weren’t feeling it this year. Even though I don’t think we ate that much junk on holiday, we were both hankering after something fresher and less greasy so I actually managed to get off the sofa and cook one of my favourite dinners – salt and pepper chilli chicken. My Instagram followers will be very familiar with this dish as it gets cooked and posted a lot! We devoured the lot and it was much nicer than a takeaway, even if I do say so myself!

After this, we settled in for a movie – we didn’t want anything too hard going so we selected Baywatch (oh how I adore The Rock).

This, however, was hard going for a different reason as the film was fairly awful – we didn’t really enjoy it, which was a shame. I fell asleep after about an hour…I think I’d have tuned out of the movie even if I hadn’t been awake for 28 hours by this point) but Andy managed to make it to the end.

We finally called it a day at 9pm and went to bed but we had a pretty restless night as the cats were using the bed as a trampoline and were shouting at us all night for leaving them, plus I had work in the morning so obviously my brain was refusing to switch off. Gah! This time I actually found the jetlag coming home to be worse than ever before…no idea why. An age thing? Who knows.

So that’s it – home safely. It’s always hard to wrap up a travel day, isn’t it, as they just end with you being knackered and generally fed up that the trip is over. There are no essential stats for this day as the Fitbit went a bit funny with the time zones and going over two days but I can’t imagine the step count was very high.

However, that’s not all, folks. I’m not going to end this trip report here – I want to milk it with one final instalment with some highs and lows and general musings. I did this for my last trip report (some of you may remember the excitement of our finding Spaceship Earth curtains for the spare room) and I enjoyed writing that so I should have my final instalment up imminently. I’ve also got to get cracking on the 2018 PTR as so much has happened with respect to this trip that I actually regret not starting it back when we made the booking last summer.

To be concluded... here

[MrsSilverStar]

So sorry about Hero

Glad your travel day went smoothly, looking forward to the final wrap up and the start of the next one!

[emmabanana]

So sorry to hear about Hero.

At least your travel day went smoothly, the flight home is always the worst 😒

[pinktraceb]

I've loved reading your trip report. Thanks so much for sharing. So sorry about your beautiful cat.

[DISNEYLIZ]

I am going to miss your reports. We usually have the same PE seats as you, but always get off the plane quickly. Sorry about your lovely cat.

[Inky]

Sorry about your beautiful cat .

[i love jack]

That was some lie in -11am!
You got home bought a fireplace, went shopping, cooked and watched a film that is very impressive! I have to say I loved baywatch! I loved the synopsis on the plane that said you have to take your brain out to watch it
Such ungrateful people not appreciating their upgrade!
Very sad about your cat

[moosha]

I’m so so sorry to hear about your beautiful Hero, how awful for you both. As a fellow cat owner and lover, I shed a tear reading that .

Glad to hear travelling home went well and that you didn’t have to endure a third long delay at boarding.

Had to laugh at you watching three terrible films in a row on the plane. It’s funny how we will sit and endure them when stuck in a seat in the air like that, whereas at home you would probably just turn it off. I’ve watched about six rubbish films on planes in the last couple of years. Why do we punish ourselves like that? Although in my defence, BA’s selection of films is pretty dire so it’s not like there were plenty of better choices to make. Funny that you then came home and watched another pants film too .

I love the Christmas tree decorations .

Looking forward to that final post .

[mick]

A good travel home day well as good as they can be☹️

Thank you for taking the the time to do your trippie I have really enjoyed reading along

Joan

[Guest]

A really good trip report , enjoyed it immensely.
I’m so sorry about your gorgeous boy ,Hero.
Sadly I know all to well the sadness of losing a furry best friend .
Looking forward to your next trip report x