£1 flights, Naples, Sarasota and 14 days in my favourite place - Day 1 Travel day

[Hodders]

Slept terribly, kept waking up and checking the time. Finally, at 4.50am the alarm went off, so I got dressed and made a cup of tea. Remembered in the middle of the night that I hadn't forgotten to pack a Florida road map that my inlaws had given us to use, so I managed to find it and pack it. It always amazes me the things that come to you whilst you are meant to be sleeping!

I went to wake the children up, I had told them we wouldn't be leaving till 9am as I knew they would be awake all night if I told them they had to get up early. I videoed waking them up which was rather funny as my daughter declared she wanted just a few more minutes sleep.

My father in law arrived on the dot at 5.30am to take us up to Heathrow. Journey was fine and we arrived at 6.15.

I had to go to check in booths as somehow when I booked our tickets I had entered my sons DOB in wrong. I was shaking and a bit of mess when trying to book the tickets back in October as they were cheap, I was convinced we would miss out on them.

Check in, bag drop and security all was fine and we went through and met our friends who had been there since about 6am as they were worried about security taking ages as the media had been reporting, but I think the issues were mainly at Gatwick, we didn't have any issues. I got called up for an extra security check before we boarded the plane so I had to have my bag checked and I was swiped for I guess explosives

Flight left on time. I was very impressed with AA in flight entertainment, it was so much better than BA who we have always flown with before. The kids have barely touched their own IPads.

First meal was a choice of cottage pie or mushroom pasta, so I opted for the cottage pie. That was ok and most of ate some of it. There was a cherry crumble, which my son loves so he seemed to end up with everyone's!

On the way I managed to spot the Bahamas out the window, so took this cool shot.

We had an ice cream pot mid way through the flight, then had a folded pizza with goats cheese and spinach, which is a lot nicer than it sounds. I don't like either and I thought it tasted ok.

When we got off the flight, we did all the faff with the new immigration machines, then went through the customs bit. First we got directed to a line to stand in with no officer, so everyone in our line eventually moved to another after we had been waiting for about 10 minutes.

Once we got to see him, he said my husband had been flagged for more security checks and we were told to wait! We then got taken off to the special waiting room which is when we started panicking! They asked us for our luggage receipts, which for someone unknown reason I had been tasked with looking after. We searched everywhere and couldn't find them at all, we thought they were with our passports but apparently not! My Husband got stressed with me and I got stressed with me, all I could think was that I must have thrown them away with the boarding passes as I didn't have those either. They said not to worry about the receipts, but didn't tell us what they wanted them for. We weren't sure if they were going to go through our baggage or what was happening.

15 minutes later, they handed back my husbands passport and said go to desk 9. We went there and they took all passports, checked them and then we left.

We rushed through to find our friends as we hadn't seem them since the queue for immigration and we thought they might have been panicking.

Our luggage had been loaded off the belt and been abandoned by the side of it, our friends were waiting for us and as they had been waiting for so long in their queue they had only beaten us by about 5 minutes.

We rushed out as I was worried the transfer I had organised to take us to Naples wouldn't still be waiting, but luckily lo and behold there he was waiting with a board with our name on it!

We had uneventful trip to Naples, except I got lots of ribbing about losing the luggage receipts! As we were getting off the minibus, what did I find in the back of my jean pocket, yep you guessed it luggage receipts and boarding passes! I didn't lose them after all!

We are staying at Hyatt house hotel in Naples and we managed to book a suite for the same price as a normal room. Here is a picture of our room for 2 nights

We unpacked and kids went for a swim and ordered some fries. Lewis was flagging at this point and hardly eaten anything, but he declared he wanted to go to bed, which I don't think has ever happened, so I left the others to it and took him up to bed. It was 1am at home by this point so he had done well.

I also decided to go to bed as I knew the kids would be up early in the morning!

Boat day tomorrow!

[Hodders]

Ah, I have posted in wrong bit. How do I move it to a Trip Reports?