Devall Travels

By the time we got up at around 8am the rain had stopped.  The puddles in the car park looked to have been kept topped up during the night. Breakfast at Rodeway Maingate is included. Don't expect a luxury experience though.  With the room rate of $31.99 plus taxes a night you can't really expect free/included anything. The room was decent.  Two large beds. Aircon. Hot water. Free wifi. After bagels and coffee we packed up and let TomTom take us to Silver Lake.  Really just hoping to get access to storage for our cases. In the end unit 236 was ready and so we checked in early. Plenty of time before the football to do some shopping, food, and maybe get lunch. There are only so many times to eat out.  We like to eat in and watch TV.  A chance to unwind and maybe gave a beer. We did a Publix shop and unpacked that. The 3 in 236 denotes 3rd floor.  Luckily in the US ground is 1. So only two flights of stairs to lug everything up. Next we went to lunc...

By sheer fluke I went onto the Sunrail site to show someone at work how convenient it would be and that's when I noticed the "not weekends" banner.  I'd not seen it before! With all the talk of pollution in the world having a light rail system that doesn't work at weekends and holidays seems like a very bad idea.  As I said that I pursed my lips and paused for effect.  :) So it was back to the drawing board. Parking! In the end I got onto the City of Orlando local government site and found the parking they control. I had emailed a while back as to book online it needed a US address and phone number, or at at least one that would wedge into the pre-formatted boxes on the web page. They suggested using the resort address and phone.  So I have. MasterCard seems to have accepted my new temporary Kissimmee address. In the end it was $11 and I have a pdf with a ticket to print out and put in the car window. The route from the hotel and then back to the ...

Google is a marvellous thing. So after much googling I ended up asking a friend that went a few weeks ago for tips. Her daughter is a travel agent or was, and she gave me some links to check out and then I saw the prices.  A two day Disney ticket came out at £189!! Each. Whilst I liked the idea of a visit to a park, paying that kind of money to stand in lines for hours to get on a ride and then repeat at the next one seems too ridiculous. Another link took me to a site to get entrance tickets to Kennedy.  The official site is $50 each for the day. The link was £29 or about $35 at the current exchange rate. Booked. I saw on Facebook that the Ace Cafe in London had some franchises opening up in Beijing, Barcelona and Orlando , so I guess that might be a drive out one day too. Plus the almost obligatory HD shop! I can't say that I have been a great fan of the Ace in London, but have been there a few times since it re-opened.  It's become a tourist haunt...

The problem as I see it is the large area around the stadium that it closed.  There seems to be ample parking and apparently you can book in advance.  I have tried all the links and none of them seem to work. Then I saw a link for the Sunrail system. It looks like that would suit us alright.  There looks to be a lot of parking at one of the terminals and then it is two stops and a ten minute walk to  the stadium. The train journey is $2 each way and about 11 minutes.   As kick off is at 4pm we need to be there in good time and with so many food outlets there is plenty of opportunity to have lunch between the hotel and the parking.  The drive will be about half an hour if we avoid the toll roads. After the game it's back to the station car park and off to the resort we are staying in. At last a plan seems to be coming together. I contacted the resort as the game kicks off at the same time that resort check-in opens. They can check us in a...

Entry to the stadium is with an e-ticket. Having read up on it I spent my lunch hour getting my Ticketmaster US login to sync with a new Orlando City login. Then I could view the tickets. These are by QR code on my phone. On the day they need to be shown and so the LionNation app needed to be downloaded. This uses a different login to the ones above and links to them. Now I can see the QR codes but they are greyed out until 72 hours before the game. It's early but my attention will next be turned to parking. ...

When away from home I always have a look to see if there are any football (soccer to colonials) clubs nearby where I can visit and add another stadium to my bucket list. I've been to games across Europe as a  neutral more times than I have been as an Arsenal supporter, in Scotland, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy and Spain.  So as we will be based in Orlando for a week, I had a look and saw that Orlando City are playing at home and tickets at a very reasonable price. They use Ticketmaster which should be no problem except that it doesn't recognise my Ticketmaster login and so I had to create a new one. On the other hand. Football of the NFL kind is played at Tampa Bay.  Logging onto their site was easy enough but tickets for the game on October 1st against the NY Giants started at $168 each.  What?   Isn't this the working man's game.    So I decided to do the Orlando City visit at $36 each. Cur...