How to get to Orlando via Bern, Geneva, Paris and New York!

Two days ago, the view out our hotel window was of the breathtaking Swiss Alps. It’s beyond us how the Tour de France riders make going up and down those mountains look so easy. Our journey to Orlando and 67 Days of Smiles started in Interlaken, Switzerland. It took us roughly 48 hours, two trains, three planes, five plane terminals and six time zones, but we’ve finally arrived... what an epic journey! Orlando wasted no time rolling out the welcome mat for us when we got here - 33C/92F! Thank you very much! :-)

We feel a little like we’ve missed the jump while we were in the air, being unable to get online. However, Katie and I will be catching up on some net time while trying to avoid jet lag tomorrow, taking it easy before everything really starts on Sunday.

Although our trip was long, it was one of the most talkative trips we’ve ever taken! We met an American family from Pennsylvania who were holidaying around Europe on the train from Interlaken to Geneva (Steelers fans), another American family who live in France and were on the way home to the States to visit family on the plane from Geneva to Paris (Raiders fans), and a Hungarian girl who is a skydiver photographer (what a cool job!) and was heading to see friends in Phoenix on the flight from Paris to NY.

Arriving into New York was awesome. I’ve never been to the US before (Katie visited the west coast years ago with her family) and to land in through JFK was kinda cool. As we changed terminals, we walked past the many, many TVs in the New York Sports Grill... so much sport!!! I was in serious danger of not making the flight to Orlando! :-) I’m a PE teacher and I love my sports... I’m a big NFL fan (go Eagles) although I don’t get too many chances to talk to people about it as it doesn’t have a huge following back in Australia. (Hence “which NFL team do you follow?” is one of my first questions to most Americans we meet while travelling!).

We’ve been reading up on Orlando and we’re getting ourselves more and more pumped as we go. Of course we knew Orlando was the theme-park capital of the world... Disney, Universal, Sea World and so on, but we’ve also discovered Orlando has a world-class philharmonic orchestra. Now while, I can’t claim a single musical bone exists in my body, I love live orchestra music, and I am always amazed at how many tunes I actually know once they’re being played!

Anyways, I’ve rambled on about not much for long enough; we’re ready to go this week, a little nervous, but absolutely buzzing with excitement! We’ll definitely be online tomorrow, so jump onto twitter and send us a tweet!

Cheers, Daz