Orlando Vacation Day 6 ~ Car Drama

For New Years Eve, we didn't do much besides swim and hang out by the pool, so this seems a reasonable time to talk about our car drama.

When we were first booking this trip, I looked into renting a car for the first half of the trip, car rentals were crazy expensive.  So, on the recommendation of a friend, I tried out Turo, it's like AirBNB, but for cars.  People rent out their personal cars and it's way more affordable, and often you get a way better car than with Hertz or whomever (just not in our case).

The way Turo works is that you book ahead of time and then the owner leaves their car somewhere at the airport for you to pick up.  We found our car, but when I tried to buckle Cecily into her car seat, we discovered that the rear passenger seat didn't have a seatbelt.  We managed to cram the two kids into the middle & driver side seats, but with two booster seats, it was super inconvenient.  Buckling in involved buckling Parker in, shoving him against the car door as hard a possible, then shoving Cecily's booster in and buckling her in.  It was do-able, but still super annoying.  I contacted the car owner, and got this response:

Silly me, apparently I should have requested that all 5 seats come with seatbelts.  Thank goodness I thought ahead to request she includes the brakes and two headlights.  Actually, about the headlights...

At this point, the car seemed unsafe and I was tempted to just return the car & get a total refund, but it didn't seem worth it to devote a whole day of our vacation to returning the car, plus then going through the hassle of finding a new one for our last few days.  So, we kept the car, and on the return day, I asked for a discount, and received this almost incomprehensible response:

Whatever.  By this point, we'd returned the car and were safely checked-in to our Disney resort, quite happy to be free of that piece of garbage car.  

Orlando Vacation Day 5 ~ Universal Studios

We made it!

The Knight Bus:

Visiting 12 Grimmauld Place, I couldn't get a photo of it, but you can see Kreacher's face poking out the window from time to time.

Waiting to meet Ollivander.

This is about 30 seconds before everything went sideways:

So, this dragon was amazing.  Unfortunately, it took us all by surprise and Cecily was NOT prepared.

Afterward, any time we suggested going back to Diagon Alley, Cecily had a look on her face similar to this:

We got our magic wands!

Cecily couldn't handle being anywhere near the Gringott's dragon, so we loaded onto the Hogwart's Express and headed over to Hogsmead.

Parker wouldn't even talk about going on a roller coaster, so he & Keith wandered around Hogsmead while Cecily & I waited for the Flight of the Hippogriff.

Once we were done with the ride, the kids were ready for food, we headed over to Seuss-ville for lunch.

I'm pretty sure this is their favorite part of the day.

We took the carousel twice, and the Cat in the Hat story ride was hands-down favorite ride with the kiddos.

We needed a break from the crowds, so we went just outside the park for some sushi, it was a nice break from all the burgers and pizza we're having this trip.

8:30 pm - totally appropriate time for a doughnut

That's King's Cross station across the water.

Our kids know nothing about the Simpsons, but they still really wanted a photo with this guy.

One last ride on the way out of the park.

10:25 pm - Heading back to the condo, I think we might have killed them.

Orlando Vacation Day 4 ~ Kennedy Space Center

We're heading to Kennedy Space Center!

Why are the kids so crammed together in the back seat?  Well, there's some drama with this car, I'll explain in the next few days.

Clearly we spent over an hour in the car so that we could play with legos.

We're waiting in line to see the Atlantis Space Ship!

Okay, I was pretty skeptical about this whole space center thing, but this is pretty awesome.