Leaving On A Jet Plane

I am now officially in Orlando! It has been an adventure getting down here, but it has all come together now! I will start my account of my flight on the night before.

My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30am in Toronto. You are required to have checked in a minimum of two hours before your flight (at least it was with Air Canada). As a result, we left for the airport at 2am on the 26^th.

By the time that I was fully packed and had everything ready to go for the airport it was 10pm. I only had four hours left until we were leaving for the airport. As was stated in my previous post, my suitcase was fully packed up and ready to go at 10pm. This left me four hours until we left for the airport. However, due to excitement/nervousness, I didn’t sleep at all during those four hours. Even though I had been up since 8am getting everything organized for my trip, I knew that I wouldn’t fall asleep, even if I tried. So I stayed up with my brother and his friend and watched In Time.

At 2am (with a quick detour for Kleenex packets and windshield wiper fluid) we were off to the airport. On the way, the song “Leaving on a Jet Plane” came on the radio. It really was fitting for the trip to the airport and, as corny as it sounds, I got goosebumps! Besides that it was an uneventful trip to the airport.

Once we got to the airport, I went to the kiosk to check in for my flight. I was flying with Air Canada and they charge per bag that you are checking (it was $25 plus tax for my bag). If you are going early in the morning, a credit card is the only type of payment that they can accept. After 5am they can take cash, but not before that time.

After paying for my bag and getting it weighed, I proceeded to wait in line for customs. For my terminal, the customs didn’t open until 4:30. With it being 3:45, I had a 45 minute wait. The family in front of me was heading to Disney World though, so I had a nice chat with them to pass the time.

At 4:30 I headed into customs and brought in my bag to be checked on the plane. I headed to the customs officer to do my visa. For people travelling from Canada to the United States, you go through customs in Canada. This included the processing of my visa. I approached the customs officer and explained that I was going to be working at Disney World for a year. He processed my visa very quickly and gave me back my passport. The process took about five minutes in total! This was what I was worried about the most, so it was nice to see that my worries had been so much less than I had assumed. At this point I went through security and headed to my gate.

The flight was over very quickly, probably because I slept through most of it! By the time I had boarded my flight, I had been up for 23 hours. I found it very easy to sleep through the majority of the flight and I was in Orlando by 9:05 because we managed to get there 20 minutes early!

After landing, collecting our bags and getting our rental car (my parents were staying in Orlando for the week), we went to Denny’s for some breakfast. After that, we checked in at All-Star Movies. We were in the Fantasia section. This was the view from our room:

We had a pretty relaxing first day. We hung around the pool for a while, did some shopping at Wal-Mart, had dinner in the cafeteria at All-Star Movies, and all went to bed really early because we were exhausted. The next few days consisted of several of the Disney theme parks and other fun!

Currently listening to: “Do It Now, Remember It Later” by Sleeping With Sirens from the album Let’s Cheers To This