Only Orlando?

Another week of crazy from over the pond and I have seriously started to look into what alternative options we might have for our summer trip that didn’t involve the lottery of US airspace.

A “quick” web chat with Virgin (nope, there was a huge wait of course) and it seems whatever we do, it’ll cost us £250 each to amend our flights, plus any fare difference so it’s not something to do lightly.

Ignoring the cost for a second (and I really never will), we face the challenge of the limited options that Virgin offers for flying from Manchester. If we stick with our original dates, and we really have to due to the enormous amount of time it took to identify a suitable window for Louise and me plus Emily as our house and pet sitter and then get Louise’s time off approved, then there is almost nothing they can do directly.

Caribbean options would seem to make the most sense, but to get to somewhere like Barbados or Jamaica on our dates, flights are indirect and a lot more expensive so it becomes prohibitive. We can’t go to Dubai in July as we will melt in the 40-degree-plus temperatures and I really don’t fancy Mumbai or Johannesburg, as lovely as they may be.

Cancun would be somewhere we’d consider but again on our dates that is indirect via Atlanta, although at a similar cost, so in effect that looked like our most likely or only option.

Then we would get into the doom loop of scrolling through endless hotels and their reviews trying to overcome my aversion to unfamiliarity to try and find somewhere affordable, clean, and maybe even impressive to stay for the same budget as Drury Plaza.

However when taking that option a little further, for some reason the return flights have two changes, so that is blown out of the water too.

Again, indirect, but Toronto is within the same price range that we paid for Orlando (plus the £500 admin fee of course) but that’s a very different holiday and I know zero about Canada, other than having friends who know a lot about it. Perhaps one to explore further as a plan B but I’d be starting from scratch with no idea where to stay, what to do and how to do it. Maybe some people find that fun? 🙂

Sigh. I’ve written some first-world problem blog posts in my time, but this one takes the biscuit, dunks it into my tea and then drops it down my shirt.

So we may be “stuck” with flying into Orlando. That is a sentence I could never have predicted typing. Maybe I am being very stupid anyway as I would imagine flying to any of the other destinations involves US airspace so it does little to remove that risk however real or not it may be.

Then we only have to worry about things like hyperinflation, civil unrest and white supremacists.

On the bright side, at the rate at which the US is collapsing into chaos the orange turd may be flushed by July. You can live in hope.

For now, we sit in suck-and-see mode I suppose as swallowing the loss of the monies paid to Virgin already is not an option I’d like to consider.

If anyone who has perhaps changed their Virgin flights similarly in the past has any ideas I’m open to them of course, as well as any tips and info on Canada or other alternatives?

I suspect the most likely outcome is we stick with the plan as is, have a problem free lovely holiday and you can all shake your heads in disbelief at the nonsense I spouted in this post. Of course, none of this solves the real problem that Jellyrolls is closing/moving from the Boardwalk which is an issue much larger than the US descending into a fascist dictatorship.

In other news and in an attempt to end on a lighter, less ridiculously overreacting type way, when I inflicted one of my musical projects on you recently in the form of the video of the Pink tribute band I’m in I hinted that there may be another project in the works. Well, it has arrived!

Alongside the Pink tribute and Mustard (our main function/wedding type band), we have just launched an 80s tribute too. I of course am far too young to remember any of the songs from that era (honest) but thanks to YouTube I was able to learn them.

So I will leave you with the brand-new, Neon Vortex and the video we recorded live on one of the coldest days in January in one of the coldest rehearsal studios on the planet.

Till the next time……