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I don't know what it is about long haul flights but they don't half make you constipated. Good news is that I've checked and we've got an all clear.

However talk about coming back down to earth with a bump, let's just say my experiences after landing in Orlando were less than upper class.

Before I go into that, let me tell you, you've got to try upper class at least once in your life, jeez, food you can eat, served on proper crockery with metal cutlery, none of this plastic trays and plastic forks and plastic food business. Plus the leg room and the fact that they take time to learn your name, ok so there were only the 14 of us in upper class, but it's a nice touch.

I do have a couple of disadvantages being a lone traveller and a shy one at that, I rarely get engaged in conversations with anyone. Obviously it's easier if you are in a couple as you can talk to other couples. Anyway, I have to make do with listening in on other people's conversations to get my entertainment. Funnily the guy behind me came up with a corker of a Freudian slip, he was in upper but his travelling companion was in economy, he referred to her first as his girlfriend and then quickly corrected himself and said daughter. I think he was on the level and it was his daughter, but that's one hell of a Freudian slip. (And yes Dan, you would have)

Anyway, the flight itself was uneventful, just 9 hours of tedium interrupted by food. It was when we landed at Orlando that the problems begin. It didn’t help that it was 28 degrees and humid out when we landed, always makes for frayed tempers. So we pull up to the gate, get up and head for the door and nothing happens. I look out of the window and there’s the sky bridge thing, not quite bridging across the sky. It was stuck, a guy comes out with a hammer and taps a few things and it starts to move up and down but not forwards towards the plane. Another guy comes out and takes a look and shakes his head, it was only when the third guy came along and kicked something did it jerk into life and connect up, for a short while I thought we were going to have to jump for it. That was a nice 15 minutes standing in a humid plane when the last place you wanted to be was on a plane.

Next came my favourite part of travel to the US, immigration, made worse by the two groups in front of me being extended families, it took bloody ages in the non air-conditioned immigration hall to clear. Fine I thought, not knowing the set-up at Orlando, I quickly grab a trolley and identify my bags (another advantage of upper class, a separate conveyor belt) head through customs only to be greeted by a set of escalators and a couple of old Doris’s telling you that trolleys stopped there. Apparently we were in terminal B and the baggage pick up was in terminal A, so I had to dump them on another conveyor belt and wave them goodbye whilst I got the unmanned train to the main terminal.

After searching for 10 minutes to find the right carousel (fortunately near the car hire desks) another 10 minute delay whilst I waited for a second time for my bags. By this stage I’m pissed off, tired and gently perspiring. So I queue for the car hire, and I queue and I queue. I had enough time to switch on the blackberry and wade through all of my e-mails and then some before getting served. Of course they didn’t have the car I’d booked and tried fobbing my off with something much smaller to which I pointed out that there’d be 4 adults with luggage to last all 4 adults for nearly 3 weeks and I’d need something bigger. So the guy calls up and arranges a Chevy Aspen which he told me was much bigger. Well it was, it had a step to get up into the drivers seat. The only problem was that there wasn’t enough room in the back for my luggage let alone that of anyone else’s, my case ended up on the back row (of three rows) of seats. The car is perfect if you’ve a family of two parents and 5 kids and are just heading to Disney, it’s not going to suffice for four big blokes for 3 weeks doing a road trip. Plus it has a 5.7 litre engine which will be a tad thirsty methinks. So I am discounting this vehicle as the Muppet-mobile or the mystery wagon depending on what we decide to call it. I don’t think we can call it the mystery machine only because I wouldn’t like to assign the four characters out of Scooby-Doo (excluding the dog) to the four of us, so the muppet-mobile will have to suffice for now. I’m hoping that when I pick up John and Ivan and add them onto the car hire, we can exchange for something more suitable.

To top that I had the fun task of trying to find the hotel from the airport with no map and only a two line description of how to get there. Amazingly I managed it, otherwise from reading the first line of this entry I may be faced with an unwanted cleaning bill.

I can say that the hotel is not the best I’ve stayed in, but not the worst either, and the reviews on trip-advisor were a little harsh, however I did turn up at night and things could look very different in the morning.

Plans are for an early night, breakfast and shopping in the morning. A polite conversation with the rental company and then a mission to Daytona to see if my ticket for the trucks really is at the pick up window, if so an evening of motor racing is on the cards, by which time intrepid traveller number 2, Rag himself will have arrived on scene.

Happy reading.