Today marks the 30th anniversary of my first ever visit to the USA. I fell in love with America on that trip and it’s no wonder as it was to the theme park capital of the world, ORLANDO in the sunshine state of Florida.
In the early 1990s, when I was 12 years old, and was told I would be going on vacation to Florida with my 60 year old grandfather, sister and cousin, I ran down the street singing: “I’m coming to America” over and over! If I’d realised then it would be a sluggish year or two later I don’t know if I’d have been quite as ecstatic!
This was to be “the trip of a lifetime” for us and we needed enough time to save up. My mother and four lovely grandparents chipped in every week with our pocket monies and I’ll always be forever grateful for what they did to get us to Florida.
The Orlando Holiday Boom of the 1990s was in full swing and free promotional VHS cassettes featuring exciting montages of the Orlando thrills fuelled our excitement as we literally counted down the hundreds of days.
It felt like departure day would never arrive. But it did - Saturday June 4th 1994 - and we were soon jetting off from the northeast of England to the northeast of America: our flight to Florida was not direct!
We had to land and refuel.
So my first ever taste of America was Bangor International Airport in Maine.
While I was bemused that you could buy a newspaper from a vending machine just like in the movies, that boring layover was a very underwhelming welcome to the USA.
The Orlando theme parks were of course the opposite: they literally blew our minds! One day we were being attacked by our favorite movie monsters - Jaws, Kong, Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters - and the next we were seeing real-life monsters: awesome killer whales and fearsome alligators.
We spent an exhausting 2 weeks at Walt Disney World (Magic Kingdom, EPCOT and Disney MGM Studios), Universal Studios Florida, Sea World Orlando, Busch Gardens Tampa, Gatorland Florida, a night time visit downtown to Rosie O’Grady’s and Church Street Station, a day at Kennedy Space Center, plus the many delights of International Drive: tourist stores galore (Bargain World and Disney collectibles) and the famous eat all you want restaurants.
We ate loads.
We walked miles.
We laughed of heads off.
And we all got sunburnt, despite our mothers having dozily packed jumpers and pants for us. It was frequently 100° and lethal in sun as my poor ginger cousin discovered. But who covers up in sunny Florida?
All good things must come to an end and we said a sad farewell to our hotel, the Quality Inn Plaza on International Dr., when we travelled west to Clearwater Beach for a final week of sun, sea, sand, stingrays and some kind of spiky seed pods that stuck in my poor sister’s butt (what a way to celebrate your 7th birthday!).
Clearwater was sedentary compared to Orlando and the fishy smell of the pelicans is the memorable highlight. There was a little excitement when we watched live breaking news on the TV in our hotel room - actor OJ Simpson was being chased down the freeways of LA wanted for murder! We watched while tucking into our dinner: a giant bag of salted Lays and a bottle of Snapple, for that’s what you’re often fed when you holiday with your eccentric grandfather!
But our mothers mustn’t have been bothered by the American junk food diet he gave us: they allowed us to go back to Florida again and again with him.
We were very lucky indeed.
30 years later I’m still visiting America and still having my mind blown by the adventures I have there. Here’s to the next 30 years!
