Saturday 13th February 2016

Eating sandwiches because there
 was no McDonald's.

The journey reminded me of the downside of going to Florida. It's a blinkin' long way away! We left home at 6.30am and arrived at the resort at 5.30am according to our body clocks - half-past midnight local time. Highlights (or not) included:

• Trying (and failing) to find a McDonald's at Heathrow and Philadelphia airports. 

The contraband.

• Finding that the "Movies" section of the in-flight entertainment included six episodes of Foyle's War. Gosh, that series is good! Yes, I did a "Netflix" marathon at 35,000 feet.

• Having to go through the tightest security screening I've ever encountered, at Phily (I can call it that now that I've been there) despite having already been screened going out of Heathrow. Seriously, I was swabbed and x-rayed. But the tiny sniffer dogs were cute, and I still got my contraband through.

• A guy playing Il Giorni on the grand piano in one of the airports a week to the day (almost to the minute) since my daughter walked down the aisle to that same song played on a piano.

• The car rental desk trying (and failing) to persuade Roderic to pay an extra $15 a day to upgrade from the midsize we'd ordered to a bigger car, only for the guy in the garage to invite us to take any car we liked at no extra charge. We selected the Chrysler minivan, and it's a bit impressive. I've counted eight cupholders in it so far.

Forgotten your mascara?

• Vending machines. You can get everything in the universe from a vending machine in America. I rather liked the Ben & Jerry's one, and there was one for electronic gadgets too. (There's also one right outside our kitchen window at our apartment. It's almost like it's saying "Don't bother cooking tonight! Give the kids $2 each for a bag of Cheetos instead.)

• Traffic jams! We queued for ten minutes for the single open toll booth, and then we sat in a very frustrating 20-minute queue for the exit to our resort. We could see our resort right there at the side of the road, but couldn't get to it. Then when we did get to the resort they were doing a lot of building work (building a multi-storey car park and shops) and with it being Valentine's Day weekend the place was packed so we queued to drive round to our apartment. My poor husband spends a lot of his time in traffic jams during his working week, and we don't need any while we're on holiday. Please sort this out, Florida. Thank you.

• Finally stumbling into our lovely apartment in the wee small hours after 23 hours of travelling and ordering the kids to bed, only for them to insist on hooking up their devices to the (temperamental) wifi before they'd so much as take their shoes off.

I think calling this a "food court" was stretching it a bit. Those two eateries you see were all that was available.
(Courtesy of my new least-favourite airport, Philadelphia.)

Hari met an M&M