paul riley

The destination of our flight was Sanford Airport, just north of Orlando, which on first sight is probably similar in size places like Leeds/Bradford. It is obvious that this is not an airport with a vast amount of money, functional not flashy, so travelators do not exist here, although the walk along long and very wide corridors was quite welcome after 10 hours of sitting down. The first area you arrive at is immigration, a large room where the queue snakes it's way to an L shaped row of desks. The officials where just that, official, although I suspect that doing their job day in day out is not what you could call exciting. The queue moved relatively quickly and before you knew it you were standing at one of these desks, providing finger prints, photos, and NOT looking at the gun in the immigration officers belt.

After clearing immigration it's on to baggage reclaim, given the size of the airport it was not to surprising to find the luggage already going around the conveyer belt, then we on though customs, in our case straight though, and your out.

This is where the big difference between Britain and Florida first hits you, the heat, it's like walking fully clothed into a sauna, you at the same time notice another difference between the places, how cold the buildings are. I would guess that if you live in this part of the world and don't have air conditioning you could find yourself in big trouble health wise.

The layout of Sanford airport is a bit quaint, the airport itself has two terminals, number one for international flights and number two for domestic, the quaint bit comes with the chartered flights that the airport predominately serves, that's tourist to you and me. For these the airport provides a welcome centre which is located directly opposite the doors that you come out of when you leave the airport building. The main foyer of this building is where you find the holiday reps, at this point their task is purely to direct you to the coach you will take to your hotel, or the car rental company where you can pick up the keys to your car.

Because we had booked our holiday through Cosmos, our flights where with Monarch, and the car rental through Alamo. The Alamo car rental facility is located though the welcome centre, and all the way to the other side of the coach station. Alamo's has a close relationship with Cosmos to the extent that Cosmos have two of their staff based in Alamo's rental office.

On entering the Alamo office a Cosmos rep intercepts you as you join the queue and if you booked through Cosmos she points you to a colleague of hers who has a desk in the corner of the office. On approaching the Cosmos desk I joined a small group of other Cosmos customers who were given a group briefing, the two key items I discovered as a result of this briefing was firstly you had to go to a welcome centre on highway 192 (just south of Orlando, and north of Celebration) to be given details of the villa, and that a recently introduced law would mean that guest registration takes place the day after you arrive, giving you about 12 hours to identify anything you are not happy with.

Once the villa briefing had been given I rejoined the queue to collect the car we would be renting for the holiday. Back when we booked the holiday we had decided that we would go for comfort over cost and so had chosen a 'full' car over a 'compact', and listening to other customers it soon became apparent that this was a good idea as, almost without exception, those who had chosen a compact were given the hard sell to upgrade the car. My passage through picking up the car was very swift, and soon we were back outside in the heat being introduced to our trusty stead, a Chevy Impala.

Now my knowledge of American cars is very limited so before picking up the car I would not have been able to tell you what to expect from an Impala, but as we drove via the I-4 we quickly realised that both the car and driving in the States were going to be a breeze. As I understand all cars hired in the US, in particular to tourists, are automatic, the only differences to automatics in the rest of the world is the parking break (head break), on American cars this is a small peddle in the foot well were the clutch peddle usually resides, and a release handle under the dashboard. These differences were second nature to us as the same layout is found on the Kia Sedona we have at home, a car that interestingly seems very popular in the US as well.

As part of the preparation for our holiday, I had purchased and installed a sat-nav package on my phone, which also acted as our contact with home in case of emergencies, and we found out quite early on that this was probably a very wise purchase for two reasons. Firstly it appears that maps in the US are only there to give you a rough idea of where you want to go, they are rarely to scale, so turnings either end up much further away than you though, or you shoot pass then before you realise. Secondly, another money spinner for the car rental industry is the renting of sat-nav systems to their customers, this is not always a great help as their sat-navs are rarely up to date, a situation not helped by the speed at which roads can change in the US.