I am not a morning person, not in a million years. For Disney, however, I can make an exception.

Alarm goes off 5.15am GMT, rush around doing the last of the packing and sorting the house before piling into the car for the 2.5 hour car ride to the airport.

Lots of waiting in queues and sitting around before boarding our plane at about 10.30ish for an 11.15 departure.

We felt pretty excited to be travelling Virgin Airways from previous experience well in the past, but man were they a let down! While the entertainment system was fairly decent and the films weren’t awful, the food was. I know plane food isn’t highly rated but this was a real poor effort..

With the majority of passengers being families travelling to Disney, you’d expect kid friendly meals, right? Nope. Beef chilli, chicken in some form of a sauce with liquid mash potato, or mushroom pasta as a veggie option. Our girls aren’t fussy, but the poor things hardly touched it.

But who cares?! Its Disney time!

Once past security, baggage claim etc, we simply skipped on down to the Magical Express bus terminal at the airport, hopped onto a bus, and about 25 minutes later arrived at our home for the next two weeks: the Caribbean Beach Resort!

For a big group of us, with some complex arrangements, the girl who checked us in was lovely; explaining everything clearly without patronising, got us celebration buttons and even arranged for our rooms to be moved closer to each others before bring out our Magic Bands..

From there we got dropped to our rooms, did some settling in and exploring before The Disney Fairy visited to deliver goodie bags for everyone (see here), and as our bodies were set to around 10/11pm GMT, while it was only 5/6pm EST, went to grab some noms at the resort food court and test out our dining plan!

Wow. Quick service meals are huge.

For one QS credit, I got:

8 large chicken nuggets and a decent portion of fries, a bottle of Fanta and a Monkey Cupcake, as well as filling up my refillable resort mug!

By this point the girls were itching for a swim, so after a quick twilight swim (the resort is gorgeous!) we called it an early night: 8.30 EST, 1.30 GMT and body clock, bringing us to the end of our 20 hour day!

To top it off, while I’ve been writing this I’ve been darting in and out of my room because you can see the fireworks from just over the pool 🙂

Tomorrow we hit the parks hard, starting with the Magic Kingdom! °o°