Thank you for choosing Magic Carpet for all your travel needs. Don't stand till the rug has come to a complete stop. - Genie from "Aladdin"

Hi all, it’s Tan here.  I’m currently writing this blog entry from about 20,000 feet in the air over somewhere between Dallas and Orlando.  I was going to jump online to do the usual things I do to waste time, but I’m not paying $14 for 30 minutes of wifi.

I’ve been trying to get to sleep with limited success.  Each time I fall asleep, something random happens and I’m awake again.  Random things like a woman falling over her husband and landing on me because she didn’t want to wake him.  Seriously, leave the ninja-ing to real ninjas.

But I digress.  We’ve been in transit since 7AM AEST (5PM EST on January 31).  We’ve flown from Melbourne to Sydney to Dallas with layovers of four hours in each city.  By the time we land, it will be 9PM EST on February 1 – a grand total of 28 hours in transit.  OMG – it’s been February 1 for the last 35 hours!! 

You just gotta love traveling halfway across the planet (Jennie nods in agreement).

The trip has not been without incident thus far.  We have managed to misplace a pair of reading glasses and only discovered this thirty minutes before boarding the flight from Dallas to Orlando.  We think it was left on the plane in our haste to get off.  We tried to contact the QANTAS service desk, but they won’t be able to do anything for at least another 24 hours.  So now we play the waiting game…

We are undecided on whether to go to a theme park as soon as we check in, but I think common sense is going to prevail here (as much as we’d love to go to Magical Kingdom for thirty minutes, I just don’t think that’s wise!)

We will most likely go shopping to get supplies for the next two weeks and have dinner at Downtown Disney!  We’re not addicted to all things Disney…

UPDATE: We have arrived safely in Orlando.  Everything was going so well until I realised that I didn’t bring my navigation unit and none of our phones had a mobile data connection active.  This means that there was no real way of navigating to the hotel other than some hand scribbled notes that the car rental chick wrote for us.

The result?  We followed the notes to the letter, got into the general vicinity of the hotel, but kept making the wrong turn at crucial times.  The bad part was that each time we took a wrong turn, it would mean that we’d get stuck on some turnpike that took us miles away from where we needed to be.  One time, we got so lost that we had to pay a toll to get back to where we needed to go.  I guess we were fortunate to have been able to find a Target during our (mis)adventures so we stopped there to pick up supplies.

We eventually got to our hotel after a great team effort.  We checked in, got our awesome magic bands, and then headed out to get some food at IHOP. 

Not one of our best ideas, but at least we are now full.  I’m going to go shower now.  I smell like the feet of a thousand tennis players after a 45 degree (Celsius) day on centre court…  I will post some pictures as soon as I can!

Tomorrow we will get paint chips to help with the wedding planning and commence our shopping adventures!!  We have a rental car for the next day, so we intend on filling it up with lots of goodies from the outlet malls.  Jennie was smart enough to pack light, but spread it across our maximum baggage allowance.  At this stage, we have an additional 60 (SIXTY!) kilograms (132 pounds) of allowance left.

Hopefully we finish everything in time for the Superbowl.  Not so we can watch the game rather, so we can take advantage of the fact that everyone else will be watching the game so we get the whole park to ourselves.  That’s the plan…  I’m not sure if it is going to work.  For what it’s worth, Go Broncos!

One handy hint we’ve discovered for our Australian guests coming to the wedding; don’t exchange AUD for USD here.  There is an eight cent difference.  In Australia, you can buy USD for 85 cents.  Here, it was 77 cents.  I’m glad we exchanged the bulk of our money in Australia.

Well that’s enough from me.  As always, thanks a lot for reading!

Note: Apologies for the lack of visual aid to help you through this blog edition, it's currently 4am in Orlando and we're desperate for some sleep!  Oddly enough our sleep won't last long as we're hoping to wake at 7-8am so we can make the most of our day.. Yes.. we're slightly insane, but sleep is for the weak!  Plus we can sleep at home, but we can't Disney at home. - Jennie