Florida Guide > Planning your Trip
What should you do on the first day of your first trip to Florida?
The first day of our first trip was memorable.
It was March 1993 and a once in a lifetime special holiday. It was our first foreign holiday and the first time I or the children, then 9 and 11 had ever flown so to say we were excited is a bit of an understatement.
We were all up really early and headed for Denny’ s which was next to the hotel as we had been told it was a great place for a buffet breakfast. We soon discovered that Denny’ s isn’ t a buffet so we had to negotiate a menu with strange items such as " grits" and " biscuits" on it. We then sat in amazement as we saw people cutting up bacon, eggs, sausage and pancakes on the same plate and smothering the lot in maple syrup. During breakfast my son developed a headache and the waitress was great fussing over him and finding him some " acetaminophen" which I was a bit alarmed about as I had never heard of it but she assured me it was safe and I later discovered it was paracetamol and felt a complete fool.
Breakfast over we headed for our welcome meeting which was actually very well organised and very entertaining. It was led by a guy called Kevin Chippendale who was the same person we had seen on the rental car video we had watched on the plane. I often wonder if he is still working in Orlando as he was pretty slick. I did see him on a few of the satellite TV travel programmes a couple of times afterwards and his name will always stick in my mind. We booked various trips and bought our overpriced park tickets at the meeting before heading to Seaworld for the afternoon. They had assured us at the meeting that we could " do" Seaworld comfortably in half a day. Yeah right!
They threw us out of Seaworld at closing time and exhausted we headed back to the hotel where we decided to grab a bite to eat in the hotel cafe and were amazed to be asked how we would like our burgers cooked. The look on my daughters face when she said she just wanted some chips and they handed her a bag of crisps was priceless.
As you can see we didn’ t have the benefit of a forum like this to help us plan our holiday so things were a bit strange. We did make some mistakes, took in all the hype at the welcome meeting and booked far too many trips and park tickets, ended up absolutely exhausted at the end of the two weeks. But it was the best holiday we had ever had and we have been back at least once a year ever since. We well and truly caught the Florida bug.
Over the years we moved from hotels to villas and finally bought our own but our first trip will always be remembered as something special.
Whatever you choose to do I’ m sure you will have a fantastic time and will remember it for a long time to come.
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