First week: Orlando — Shay Farrelly

It's hard to believe we are here a week already today, the time is just flying by. The flight with Aer Lingus was grand though the poor guy next to me was a bad flyer and didn't like the turbulence but he was a lovely guy to talk to and the hostesses were very nice to him. I love driving these big American cars, we got a big white Cadillac which is just lovely to drive but can it drink, 17 miles to the gallon!!! I hope US gallons are smaller than ours, must check that out! Well they are but not much 1 US gallon is about .83 imperial gallon, still doesn't make it much more economical to run.

Anyway our first week was in a timeshare in Sheraton Vistana Villages. A nice resort but our condo needed a little tlc, not too much it was still very nice and spacious for us all but I think they keep all the nice ones for owners naturally enough, and it had free wifi, very nice pools, a shop, and a decent enough restaurant. I don't know why we agree to go to their free breakfasts so they can try flog you another timeshare as another couple of hours of your holiday disappear, but I suppose it can be interesting to hear how the different schemes work especially one involving the Sheraton and all its hotel brands. It's nice to have really good accommodation but the reason to come to Orlando is the theme parks and the shopping and we have done a fair amount of this.

Seaworld is literally around the corner from us and Eimear did her first ever roller coaster the Kraken and she loved it. The great thing is that we were early enough, here in time for the National Anthem, took us a moment to work out why everyone had suddenly stopped and stood motionless!! Being early meant we walked straight on to the Kraken and then a second time. Next was Atlantis and from there on a bit of a blur as we did the other shows and rides though we've left the Shamu show for another day.

Our next park was Islands of Adventure in Universal another early start and we headed to Harry Potter land which is very good. It's laid out as a winter scene in Hogsmeade but not many rides the best one had a queue of 90 minutes that we decided to skip the rest is shops where they flog you all sorts of Harry Potter stuff, though we did buy the butter beer. We headed off to Jurassic Park where we actually did our first rides, then to toon land and here we got absolutely soaked on a flume ride and the Popeye boats. We were wet through and didn't dry for hours. The great thing here was that the queues were short I don't think we queued for more than 30 mins and we got on all the big rides. Mind you the older you get the less you like the big roller coasters like the Hulk which I did but Sharon skipped. We had a good lunch in the NBA restaurant before heading in to The Studios for an hour. We came back a second day to do the studios and started with my favourite Terminator "I'll be back!". We had another good day.

We met our friends Richie and Linda and their two kids, in Disney World's own ideal town, called Celebration. We had a great meal and headed back to their villa. Another lovely night.

Shopping was the other main activity and we did plenty of this too! Today is Eimear's birthday, now we have another teenager, so she wanted to go to the cinema after we moved to our second timeshare. We headed to Disney Down Town to catch Pirates of the Carribean. After eventually getting a parking spot we booked our cinema tickets for 9.30 and had time for a meal first. Now the meals in the US are huge you could not eat all the stuff they give you. But Disney of course is different, expensive and smaller portions, but this was just as well as we didn't realise the cinema we booked was a diner cinema. I've never seen anything like it. You have table tops in front of you and servers bring you food and drinks during the movie and not just popcorn and sweets but a full dinner, great but a pity we had eaten though I did manage some popcorn!