Trip to USA East Coast May 2014- including Disney - Part 2

Situation till now -Trip planned, packing done, at the airport

We took the good ol Meru cabs to reach the airport and wow what a nice airport. I love India for the fact that for 70 million travelers (annually) all across India, we have spent in excess of $8 billion but for the , 8.9 billion train traveling people we spend nothing and literally each month we have a fatal train accident. Even after this, most upper / rich Indians keep cribbing how bad the airports are..One day, I hope in my lifetime, Indian train stations also become world class like Grand Central or Amsterdam or Tokyo or Shanghai.

Coming back to the trip (I touched a favorite topic of mine), we went to the Jet Airways check in counter, where Wifey gave the check in agents a piece of her mind and screamed at them for all the issues she faced. Agents were like "Whatever".. We briefly walked around the airport and landed up going to the Jet Lounge. Here we were joined by our Friends and the Friends kids. We had a blast in the lounge as we all filled up on food (not sure if Jet would provide food, going by the experience so far). Late in the middle of the night we boarded our plane, exhausted, kids tried and parents more tired.

Early next morning we landed up Brussels (airport much worse than most Indian airports) and our flight was late. We exited the plane and ran towards our connection (Traveller advise - if you can take direct flights, please do so). Somehow we made our way to the plane and plonked ourselves in our seats. Kids were least bothered as they had access to the TV screen in the flight and were not bothered as long as they were fed and entertained.

Mid Saturday our flight landed up in Newark, a airport which has not been upgraded since the communism fell in the Soviet Union. We cleared immigration along with gazillions of other passengers speaking tens of different languages and then took forever to clear customs as the luggage handling at Newark is not equipped to handle this kind of traffic.

From the airport we went to the rental where we picked up a Ford 350 (called truck).. it was like driving a milk van in India (temp traveller is smaller than this thing). Wifey and Friend were reasonable and we packed the kids in the car seats that had been bought from India (courtesy - Ms. Friend).  MapnyIndia GPS was implanted and off we went on our USA road trip to cover the eastern sea board from New York area to Miami in a white bodied white F350 people mover truck.. This would be our home away from home for many days.

Trip to USA East Coast May 2014- including Disney - Part 1

It started with the wifey asking if we should go to the US for a vacation. Now vacations have always interested me and I am the kind of person who likes nothing more than to do nothing. I readily agreed to her grand plans for a US vacation along with the kids, who are now aged 9.5 and 7.5 years each. The boy and the girl were both very interested. Wifey wanted to take the kids to Disney in Orlando, now it is a different matter that I hate theme parks but wifey had these fond memories from her childhood and she wanted the kids to have the same.

As we took our decision forward, we discussed our open ended thoughts with some friends of ours and as it came out, one of our close friends were also planning a similar trip but were not sure how to go about the same. We decided to do a joint trip as they also had kids in the same group and both our sets of kids are also close friends (helps if kids study in same school, classes and section). I made my thoughts clear to the Wifey, I ain't doing no planning but will be gracious enough to drive the troops (4 kids, 3 adults and myself) around wherever required. Wifey anyways had no expectation and went about planning the trip (she loves to plan all these itineraries).  The other family (I will refer to him as Friend and Ms.Friend), Friend is also someone who likes to delve into the details of all planning, so I was like great , now I really dont have to do anything.

Months passed and I totally forgot about the trip, but the Friend, Ms. Friend and wifey were regularly discussing the sequence of events and had more of less decided the itinerary. The plan was to land in New York, drive to Orlando (Florida), check out new places, meet up with friends and family in the US and then come back to New York. Our flight carrier was Jet Airways (more on that later) and we were to fly out of Mumbai to Newark (New Jersey) via Brussels.

Ms. Friend made sure we packed up all sorts of Indian foods for the trip, clothes were bought, hotels were finalized, car was arranged (here I stepped in), and all the usual routine was checked off. 2 days were left for the trip. Wifey being Wifey checked up on the seat assignments of all of us. She called the call center only to find out that the great Jet Airways (going the Air-India way), has reset all our seating arrangements because they had changed the plane configuration. All four of us were in 4 corners of the plane. Wifey was fuming as she had been planning for the trip for a long time. Anyways to cut a long story short, I was called into action to "Fix" things, which I had no choice but to agree to if I wanted to maintain marital harmony. Called up the Jet call center and threw my weight around (How I contribute lots of money to Jet via frequent flights etc), but all that was useless, then I came to senses and begged the call center agent who was kind enough to get us 4 seats together in the end of the plane. Advise to people on vacation - Please block seats way in advance and keep checking up on them, airlines have a way to screw up, nothing new in this

So we had not even started our journey but were already getting hammered by the airline company, I was dreading at the 20 day trip as itinerary was jam packed with no room for error (missed flights, weather etc). Anyways, we prayed to the Gods, packed the house and off we went to the new Mumbai airport.