After many hours of traveling, beginning with our arrival at Gatwick Airport south terminal at 9am BST (having traveled separately) we ate a lovely breakfast and eventually boarded the plane around 12noon BST.
Upgrading to Premium Economy was a great shout, the seats are slightly wider, the backrests a little higher, more leg room (good for taller bears), and the food was yummy.

With flights of this length, eventually your numb bum and lack of really spacious sofa style seating causes you to fidget. Once you start fidgeting, the remaining flight time begins to drag and we found ourselves counting down the remaining flight time before we landed at Tampa International airport about 4:30pm local time (9:30pm BST). I guess the cabin crew’s feedback some time ago was annoyance around the volume of passenger queries related to “are we there yet”, they’d usefully added the remaining flight time to the bottom of our entertainment screen.
Unfortunately, once we’d landed and moved through border security it took ages for our luggage to be offloaded and the folk at AVIS car rental definitely weren’t paid by the customer. The queue crawled along, which delayed us starting the 90 minute drive to the villa (via Walmart) by about 2 hours (including the wait for our luggage). At 8pm local time we diverted into a services and dined at Denny’s – an American diner, kind of like Harvester but without the salad bar. 

Our journey from the airport was a little tricky as the roads were unfamiliar, the minibus automatic with the gear shifter on the steering wheel, other drivers on the inter-state under and over-taking which was quite challenging and needed maximum team collaboration and concentration. After a few teething issues, our collaboration was awesome and we navigated our way to the villa which is on a gated estate complete with main gate security guards. Having emptied the minibus, we collapsed into our beds at 10:30pm (3:30am BST)

Tomorrow we’ll visit Magic KIngdom, but due to jet lag we expect to be up about 3am local time as we’re all early risers in the UK.

Good night!