Day 1: Start with a bang

Waking up at 5am is made so much easier by the knowledge that you will not be back in the office for almost two months… In spite of that, we still ended up in our usual pre-flight rush, throwing things in bags, double checking passports and running out to the taxi.

We arrived at Belfast City Airport with plenty of time to spare – although any chance of relaxing was crushed by the realisation that I had neglected to bring the correct debit card to claim our pre-booked foreign currency. This was a made it impossible to claim the money from Travelex, and as their information line was not open until 0900hrs we had to leave this problem until we touched down in London after a short 1 hour flight.

There we stopped for a hurried Krispy Kreme (very disappointing – no classic cream filled glazed doughnuts!) and then onto Departures where our flight was immediately delayed from 1130hrs to 1300hrs. Not a great start, but it gave us time to concentrate on the money situation – thankfully a few phone calls arranged for the original card to be credited, and a new card to be debited at the same advance booking rate. After a long wait at the Travelex desk (the situation seemed to cause a little confusion) we were finally flush with US, New Zealand and Australian dollars.

The flight left shortly after 1300hrs, and although we were a little cramped, the overall flight was fine. We had expected to be wowed by Virgin Atlantic, but the comfort level wasn’t the greatest.

The food was generally good – as well as lunch and dinner, we were given pretzels, a sandwich wrap and ice creams. That kept us quiet while we sat through Ratatouille (terrible) and Superbad (pretty good).

The flight yielded beautiful views of the icy valleys of Canada, and then – after hours of cloud – the hills and mountains of California, and finally the Hollywood sign above Los Angeles.

We arrived 70 minutes later than scheduled, which was not bad after the late start. Unfortunately we weren’t given an immigration form during the flight which delayed our exit from the plane and left us at the end of a 90 minute queue through immigration – top tip, sit by the exit on any flight to the US!

The next annoyance was that the expected $40 fare from LAX to Disneyland was simply not the case – perhaps we were looking at out of date information? $110 dollars later we arrived at Desert Inn and Suites hotel in Anaheim, directly across the road from the park.

We raced straight to the Disneyland half of the park (occasionally running the wrong way – well we had been up for almost 24 hours) and finally got through the gates at 1930. Had we not already purchased a two day pass, we probably would have gone straight to bed – but thankfully we persevered and managed to ride Splash Mountain, a couple of times round our old favourite Buzz Lightyear (Laura definitely the best!) and also on the Space Mountain which outclassed it’s namesakes in Paris and Tokyo!

We then grabbed a (incredibly lame) pretzel and watched a swing band and some dancers before finding a good spot for the fireworks. So glad we did as they were the best we had ever seen and really brought it home that we were starting out on this big adventure!

We then headed back to our £40 a night room, which was fantastic value and we appreciated being able to crash out in separate double beds after a 27 hour day.