Day 2: Wednesday - IRMA & Disney Magic Kingdom
Day 2 dawned to a thrilling situation when the speculative news on IRMA had become concrete that it was going to hit Florida for sure.
We had our return flight booked on Saturday evening and the forecast indicated that the hurricane will hit Orlando only on Sunday evening.
Aloha army did not want to take a chance so we decided to advance our tickets to Friday and head home. Geetha had become a CCH ( Customer Care Handler) - an expert negotiator with the customer care reps by then ( spending long hours with customer care with Allegiant, Spirit, booking.com, etc etc).
Our CCH Geetha started making calls to Spirit airlines to check for an earlier flight to Boston on Friday. There were no direct flights available so we looked for the next option of flying out via atlanta or any other city which connects to boston. The answer was still no such connection. we went to the extent of looking at the Spirit service map and asking them to find flights from all their cities closer to florida - no availability..
since the weather forecast indicated that the storm is hitting us only on Sunday evening, we thought we can wait out and take the flight on saturday evening. Meanwhile as a third option, i booked a rental car with 7 seater ( we were 8 people) in case we had to drive up..
with these initial assessment and set-ups complete, we headed out to Magic kingdom.. you could never guess what could impress a 3 year old.. from the moment we got into the car, Arnav started shouting "Trucks".." yenakku truck pakkanum".. "Truck yenga poguthu"... he was so excited to see trucks that he never slept in the car. and when we took the exit to get to the park, he wanted us to drive over the bridge always.. "Bridge mela poganum".. it was either trucks or bridges..
We reached the magic kingdom parking and were about to get into the monorail service to reach the parks. As karma would have it, the monorails stopped working and all the crowd was redirected to the ferry line. after waiting for close to 45 mins, we finally took the ferry line to reach the park.
The magic kingdom was really a dream come true place. A fantasy land.. we covered a few rides like pirates of Caribbean, Aladdin and finally got into the jungle ride in a boat.. as luck would have it, it started raining heavily and the place where we were sitting in the boat did not have any roof.. we all got completely drenched while having to look at toy animals..
Then we had our lunch at a mexican shop, witnessed the amazing characters through disney parade , took the mine train going in loop( seriously - the train never stopped).
Took a few snaps, covered a few more rides and around 8:30, we assembled in front of the castle to witness the all amazing shows displayed over the castle.. that was followed by 18 minutes of fireworks display - worth every penny. All we could say was Awesome..
with heavy heart and weak legs, we bid adieu to magic kingdom and reached our hotel. By then we started receiving advisory email from the airlines stating that our return itinerary might be in trouble.
CCH Geetha started calling the customer care team for flight options while Sponsor Saravanan also booked a large SUV to be picked up on Thursday evening.
While we were struggling to get our return plan finalized, IRMA was inching closer to south Florida gearing up speed and becoming a CAT5 hurricane. Mandatory evacuations were in place for Florida Keys and Miami and the traffic in I95 NB and I75 were increasing steadily.
Aloha army retired to bed unaware of what was coming the next day...
Day 2 dawned to a thrilling situation when the speculative news on IRMA had become concrete that it was going to hit Florida for sure.
We had our return flight booked on Saturday evening and the forecast indicated that the hurricane will hit Orlando only on Sunday evening.
Aloha army did not want to take a chance so we decided to advance our tickets to Friday and head home. Geetha had become a CCH ( Customer Care Handler) - an expert negotiator with the customer care reps by then ( spending long hours with customer care with Allegiant, Spirit, booking.com, etc etc).
Our CCH Geetha started making calls to Spirit airlines to check for an earlier flight to Boston on Friday. There were no direct flights available so we looked for the next option of flying out via atlanta or any other city which connects to boston. The answer was still no such connection. we went to the extent of looking at the Spirit service map and asking them to find flights from all their cities closer to florida - no availability..
since the weather forecast indicated that the storm is hitting us only on Sunday evening, we thought we can wait out and take the flight on saturday evening. Meanwhile as a third option, i booked a rental car with 7 seater ( we were 8 people) in case we had to drive up..
with these initial assessment and set-ups complete, we headed out to Magic kingdom.. you could never guess what could impress a 3 year old.. from the moment we got into the car, Arnav started shouting "Trucks".." yenakku truck pakkanum".. "Truck yenga poguthu"... he was so excited to see trucks that he never slept in the car. and when we took the exit to get to the park, he wanted us to drive over the bridge always.. "Bridge mela poganum".. it was either trucks or bridges..
We reached the magic kingdom parking and were about to get into the monorail service to reach the parks. As karma would have it, the monorails stopped working and all the crowd was redirected to the ferry line. after waiting for close to 45 mins, we finally took the ferry line to reach the park.
The magic kingdom was really a dream come true place. A fantasy land.. we covered a few rides like pirates of Caribbean, Aladdin and finally got into the jungle ride in a boat.. as luck would have it, it started raining heavily and the place where we were sitting in the boat did not have any roof.. we all got completely drenched while having to look at toy animals..
Then we had our lunch at a mexican shop, witnessed the amazing characters through disney parade , took the mine train going in loop( seriously - the train never stopped).
Took a few snaps, covered a few more rides and around 8:30, we assembled in front of the castle to witness the all amazing shows displayed over the castle.. that was followed by 18 minutes of fireworks display - worth every penny. All we could say was Awesome..
with heavy heart and weak legs, we bid adieu to magic kingdom and reached our hotel. By then we started receiving advisory email from the airlines stating that our return itinerary might be in trouble.
CCH Geetha started calling the customer care team for flight options while Sponsor Saravanan also booked a large SUV to be picked up on Thursday evening.
While we were struggling to get our return plan finalized, IRMA was inching closer to south Florida gearing up speed and becoming a CAT5 hurricane. Mandatory evacuations were in place for Florida Keys and Miami and the traffic in I95 NB and I75 were increasing steadily.
Aloha army retired to bed unaware of what was coming the next day...
No comments:
Post a Comment