Things did not get off to a great start. The night before our flight I received a message from Tui saying that our In-Flight Entertainment would not be working, but fear not, we could claim £30 compensation…EACH….if we wished.
Louise was less than pleased. As a nervous flyer, this distraction is key to her surviving a flight. Trying very hard not to let this darken our mood we pressed on with final preparations and went to bed around 11.30.
I set my alarm for 4.30am, but Louise was up and about well before that ensuring that I was too. I had not had the greatest of sleeps. I found myself anxiously pondering all the things I had not done, feeling massively underprepared for this trip for some reason.
With the broken IFE thing on my mind I put my ear bud things on to charge for an hour before we left just in case I might need them. I had discovered late last night that inexplicably, despite owning about 723 of them, I could not find any UK to US power adapters. This had also kept me awake and with my last search now also fruitless I was resigned to buying a couple at the airport at vast expense. We had a 4 way extension each packed in the luggage so two would be enough.
There was a sweat-inducing fifteen minutes of weighing cases and redistributing weight (TUI only give you 20kg each and I was trying to get both cases around that figure) and Ryan had to step up and take three pairs of Louise’s shoes to get us under 40kg combined.
We said our goodbyes to Emily and Mikey, inflicted the dogs upon them and left the house our customary fifteen minutes behind schedule at 6.15. It took fifty minutes to get to Manchester airport which wasn’t too bad considering it was mid-week rush hour around the M60.
Upon arrival at the airport we parked in our customary T2 West, having to drive all the way up to level 7 to find a spot my car might fit into. Once at TUI’s desks there were kiosks to use to avoid the (small) queue but they involved having a boarding card already. I had checked in online and I know I downloaded/saved them somewhere, but could I find them now? Nope. So we trudged over to the desks and after a few minutes we were checked in by a surly young chap who’s attitude was inexplicable. Despite me entering our US address on the TUI website, he still insisted on not only entering it again, but he would not trust me to read it to him, no, he had to see it himself on my phone, having googled it. Weird.
Security was a “walk on” to use theme park parlance. I don’t know if they have new equipment and/or processes but nothing needed to come out of bags and we retained our shoes. We walked through the scanner and we were done in under two minutes. Such an improvement on recent trips.
We were drawn automatically to our usual breakfast joint of San Carlos and again it was really quiet. Ever since Covid we have had to queue here for quite some time to get a table, but today it was half full and we were seated immediately by the window.
What a view.
As I fired my camera up for these first pictures I discovered some pictures taken by Freddie last Christmas. I had handed him my camera and told him to capture the day. There were some belters.
We had a good chuckle over those whilst we looked at the menu. As we waited for our food (and you may not believe this), we saw a few small flurries of snow outside the window…in May. Honest!
We were so distracted (and out of practice) that I only remembered to take food photos after we’d started eating. I had the Bacon and Egg on Sourdough….
and Louise a full English of sorts…
We both had tea and Louise added a Mimosa. It was £43.
We wandered the duty-free spraying ourselves with every sample on offer. How lovely we must have smelled. Tragically, Louise could not find the one she felt compelled to buy.
I got a US adapter from Boots and then a few minutes later I got another from WH Smith.
For those of you paying attention, towards the end of our last trip in November, with about two days to go Louise spent almost $200 on a new pair of sunglasses. Yeah, I know.
Still, with us having two trips booked for this year, they would get some use.
She had lost them. So now we found ourselves shopping for some more. Safe to say they did not cost almost $200 this time.
We moved on to the book shop where Louise bought one she wouldn’t touch for the entire trip and then we had a coffee, waiting for the gate info to appear. We moved to the gate at 10.30 and waited for everyone else to queue up to board before we did so last.
We Facetimed Rebecca whilst boarding happened and I squoze in (or is it out?) a last minute pre-flight wee.
A couple of weeks ago, I had changed our seats to row 10 as I noticed that of the three seats in that row, none were taken, whereas our selected seats had us and someone else in them. My plan worked and it turned out that we had that row of three just to us and along with them being extra leg room we also had extra width too, which despite my pre-holiday diet was very welcome.
Much to our delight, and the cabin crew’s surprise, the IFE was working. We pushed back bang on time and took off at 11.50 through some pretty bumpy clouds.
Drinks were served and I watched three episodes of Two and A Half Men that I had only watched a few hundred times before.
The food was perfectly edible and not as blurry as it looks when it came.
That’s better. I devoured everything and anything else put in front of me. For some reason, I am always inexplicably ravenous on a flight.
We tinkered with the very cool dimmable windows for a bit.
I read for a bit and stared at the map too.
Louise bought some Back Opium (the perfume, not narcotics) and some Pringles. I was more pleased with one of those as you can imagine.
I watched two episodes of The Middle and some Big Bang Theory. By this point we were ninety minutes out and for the rest of the flight we listened to the family behind us argue constantly until landing.
Landing at Melbourne is a test of nerve for a nervy flyer like Louise as it is all sea until almost the last minute but the pilot managed and we landed on time. After the Premium elite de-planed we were the first of the plebs off, being in row 10. It’s just a short walk to the one and only baggage carousel and we had a bit of a wait for our cases being one of the last into immigration. The wait was only ten minutes though.
Another few steps to the car hire desks and with most Tui folks I guess being on packages, the majority went out to the coaches leaving the car hire queue non-existent and I was served immediately. I was just about to be handed the keys to some SUV when a manager walked behind my server and said “We have a Jeep Wrangler, if Sir would prefer?”
Well “Sir” did prefer and we walked over to the car park to be delighted by it. Here it is a short time in the future at our hotel.
We were delighted to be hit by that Florida heat as we left the building. It felt nice to be home.
Very pleased with the car and the ease of which we had got from the plane to it (Melbourne is very straightforward and easy compared to MCO), we spent a few minutes getting sorted in the car, connecting my phone to Car Play and setting the sat nav off and then we were away. The estimated journey time was two hours, which seemed odd as when I’d looked at it back home it had been ninety minutes but we would soon discover why.
For now, the mood was glorious and as I connected to one of my Spotify playlists, Happiness by McFly came on, and full of the “just arrived” joy, a lovely car and excellent weather we drove along on a cloud of loveliness and indeed Happiness.
It took a little while to make it out of Melbourne and onto the I95 (this road is horrible and makes the I4 look like a dream) and begin our long journey down south. The sat nav said go straight on for 120 miles, so we did.
The first hour was without incident and we were making good progress. Then, quickly, the rain came. We could see the other side of the I95 backed up coming towards us and above that queue a horrible grey hazy mess of stuff that did not look good.
What followed was one of the most stressful and unenjoyable forty minutes of my life, and I’ve had an office job since I was 17! These were some of the worst conditions I have ever driven in, and I’ve been through a good few Flordia downpours in a car.
This was literally the calm before the storm.
Once the rain started, I didn’t blink for forty minutes. My nails were dug deep into the steering wheel and if Louise spoke to me I could not afford the loss of concentration to even listen. I was glued to the two red dots in front of me that I hoped were a vehicle.
It felt endless and every time I thought it couldn’t get worse, it did. The wipers were just spreading water around the windscreen and we did not go above 20mph for a long time. What a storm!
We finally got some respite with about twenty miles to go and I could exhale at last. When we finally did arrive at our hotel it felt like every minute of the more than two hours it took us to get there.
We checked in around 7.20pm and after a little bit of unpacking and organising we were out looking for food.
This was the huge church right across from the hotel entrance.
We stood here waiting for our recently ordered Lyft. I had fired up the map and simply chosen the closest eatery to our hotel.
This was a huge source of shame when our driver turned up, circled the block and dropped us off at the Delray Hideaway about 17 seconds later. Look, we had no idea of the geography and we were tired! I tipped well enough to make it an apology.
Delray Hideaway was, it seems, the locals place, that not many tourists seemed to get to, judging by the stares as we entered. It was very “basic” but the food was decent, quickly delivered and the service was good. We declined to play the bingo that was just about to start.
We had some Mozzarella sticks to start.
I had the Chicken Sandwich
and Louise the French Dip.
With a couple of wines and beers it was $90 including tip.
Despite having been awake for far too long by now we had a short stroll around the place to get our bearings.
Even down to the beach which was a five minute stroll from our hotel.
On our way back, we spotted some lovely local homes.
Back at the hotel we found the second pool…..
and the whole place looked lovely in the dark.
Sadly we did not take photos of the room before we messed it up with some of our stuff but here you go….
Lounge
Dining Area (we did not use this)
Kitchen
Bathroom
For some reason, probably due to the mess we’d already made, I did not photograph the bedroom.
We fell into bed at 9.30 pm US time, 2.30am Uk time, having now been awake for 22 hours. The joys of travel day.
Sleep came quickly.
Till the next time…….
Mkingdon's Blog 
Looks like a good day apart from the rain. In the past I have felt like pulling over when it has been like that but not really an option in many cases.