Family First August 2022: Pre-travel Day 11.08.22 LIVE

[Em4owen]

My plan is to try and do this live. I always write up my trips afterwards, taking notes but I figured I could attempt to do this live or live-ish. I apologise if I don't quite manage!

My pre-trip report is here: thedibb.co.https://www.thedibb.co.uk/forums/sho... php?t=1156500

In a nutshell:
We are a family of 4 - myself, Emma, my husband, Owen and our two sons, Hayden, 8, and Ashley, 6.

This is us below:

We will be joined by my brother, Alex who is travelling with us for the entirety and my other brother, Peter and his partner, Rachel who are flying separately from us and staying in a different hotel.

We are flying into and out of Miami with BA from Heathrow with one night stays in Miami/Fort Lauderdale either side. We have a week booked at Caribbean Beach followed by a week in a villa. We have Disney and Universal booked, as well as an Everglades tour. We have several ADRs booked and tickets for MNSSHP. Owen and I went to Florida in 2007 for our honeymoon but haven't been back since. It is Alex, Peter's and the boy's first time and the boys have never been on an aeroplane before either. Everyone is extremely excited 😁

Okay, onto the actual day!

The day started at 5.30am 😴 as I had a workout session at 9am at the school where I work and we needed to get the bus there. I had barely slept as my brain kept reminding me of things I needed to pack. I still forgot some things which weren't on the list! More on that later. Plus between Ashley and the cata disturbing me, there wasn't much hope of me getting much sleep!

We did the usual getting dressed, breakfast etc so we could catch the bus at 7.30am. My school is in the next town from where we live so it's quite a long bus ride. A PE teacher at my school offers workout sessions each week and as I'm preparing for Tough Mudder in September, I have to keep up my fitness which I plan to do in Florida too.

After the workout, I did some work and Hayden did part of his homework project. Even though I had a lot to do, I was clockwatching and when Owen finished work at 11am and came to get us, I was ready! We picked up Alex on the way home as well.

For the next few hours, I cleaned the house, tried to pack, made sure food was consumed. Owen took the cats to the cattery and nipped to Aldi to buy some vegan croissants as we are hoping to save money and time by having breakfast in the room. Then came online check in at 1.30pm.

Well this ended up being a bit of a debacle. Our printer wouldn't work properly so we couldn't print off our boarding passes, we all had to have security checks and it said the boys were not entitled to check in luggage unless we paid for it! It said they were under a cheaper fare. We decided we would screenshot boarding passes for now and sort it out at the airport. Incidentally Owen discovered his print out of when the flight was booked which clearly states the boys are entitled to check in luggage so we'll show that as well.

By this time it was gone 2pm and I'd hoped to leave by 2pm to get to the Premier Inn at Heathrow. We loaded up the car and set off, squished in with all our bags and luggage. We bought the boys bubble bum car seats to save of space so we were less squashed and they worked fine.

The traffic was really good and we arrived after about 90 minutes, around 3.50pm. Check in was smooth and we went to our rooms. We've stayed in a lot of Premier Inns and this one is so much bigger and I couldn't believe there's even fridges in the room!

We chilled out, remembering what we had forgotten. The thing that's most gutting is we had gotten costumes with a Guardians theme and whilst Owen and I packed ours, we forgot the boys! 😭 We've decided we'll see if we can find some Halloween themed tshirts instead when in Florida and it will at least be less hot than what we were going to wear!

At 6pm, we headed to the Premier Inn restaurant for dinner.

The boys were given colouring to do which was welcome as they are both very excited and being a bit silly as a result. The boys and Owen chose pizza, I had a vegan chilli and Alex had a cheeseburger.

I'm a vegan and Owen and the boys are veggie so if anyone has questions about plant based food, hopefully this trip will help you.

After dinner, we showered the boys, read them their stories and got them to bed with the threat of no WHSmiths tomorrow if they mess about. This seems to have worked as I'm in the bathroom typing this and can't hear a peep. I'm going to finish painting my nails and read before I turn in too.

Tomorrow is travel day. Our flight is scheduled for 1.30pm and should arrive in Miami around 5.30pm EST. We are then driving the short distance to our hotel for the night, the Hilton near the airport. I hope I will be able to do a live update either tomorrow afterwards or the following morning.

I hope you enjoyed reading and will enjoy my trip report.

[JenD1]

Have a wonderful family holiday 😄

[Loobylou_82]

Safe journey. Will be following along.

[ClaireNJ]

Have a wonderful holiday

[Unicorn13x]

Hope you all have a great holiday 😎

[Em4owen]

Thank you everyone. The last two days have been hectic and will be uploading shortly 🙂

[mick]

Have a good holiday

Joan

[P&S]

A nice pre travel day apart from online check in

[Em4owen]

Originally Posted by P&S

A nice pre travel day apart from online check in

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The printer was the biggest issue but it was alright in the end. We just printed off our tickets at the airport.

[OB1LukeLucas]

A great start to the holiday, hope check in wasn’t too much of a problem once you got to the airport..I will find out in a minute!