FOREWORD The song says that " 'Life's a journey, not a destination.'" Having spent quantity if not quality time in some of the more interesting places this planet has to offer I have to agree. However, many of those who look to me to provide the low-down on the "Worst Airports in the World" have expressed surprise when I assert that had it not been for an impulsive decision one summer day, my globetrotting would never have happened – but it's true… In their early twenties, my father and some friends decided to have a summer holiday in Spain. These were the halcyon days of the Swinging Sixties, when Angry Young Men like The Who, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Status Quo, Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac ensured that virtually every "twenty- something" human male was, simply by being "twenty-something", the height of hip and the king of cool. Serene in their superiority, this band of Merrie Olde England's finest arrived during a summer of unusually sunny weather. For a few happy days they chugged chilled beer, smiled at pretty Senoritas – and some Senoras – basked on golden beaches and learned how to say, "It's his round," in Espanola. Then, with the confidence of male youth, they decided to shake off the last shackles of the old-fogy Derbyshire doctor and stopped taking the water purification tablets he had instructed must be ingested on a daily basis. Within hours, all were struck down with severe intestinal distress requiring immediate proximity to the nearest toilet, their suffering made worse by the heat wave and the fact that in curing their problem of dehydration, they exacerbated their problem of Spanish Tummy. Unlike his compatriots, my father, whose half-Scottish blood made him, perhaps, a tad more "canny", had stopped taking the pills, but had not committed the tactical error of throwing them away. His intestinal equilibrium rapidly restored, my father completed his holiday reasonably happily (whilst fending off desperate attempts by his friends to nick his pills), but upon reflection decided that in future his holiday destinations would not include places where turning on a tap was a sort of aquatic Russian Roulette. Thus, by my early twenties I had never been inside an airport. I hadn't even been past them all that much. For me they were non modus operandi. That situation changed irrevocably in the summer of '95. In August of that year, I was invited at short notice to join a group on a package holiday to Florida, USA. Exotic words like Disneyland, Sea World, Miami, the Everglades and Orlando were tossed around wholesale. The plane would leave London at lunchtime on November 2nd, 1995. I was invited at the end of August, which gave me a little over eight weeks to sort absolutely everything out from scratch. I had no passport – apart from England and Wales, the only other country I'd ever been to was Scotland, and that for the first time only the year before. It would cost me £650 just to land at Orlando International Airport, before a fortnight of trifling expenses like food and fuel. I said yes. THE SUNSHINE STATE I - UNHAPPY LANDINGS As an airport, London Gatwick seemed to revel in the description "humongous". It was big – and unnerving. My previous experience of aeroplanes had fallen into only two categories: the first were tiny, silent white dots high up in the sky that left fluffy pearlescent vapour trails and occasionally reflected a golden glint of sun; the second were RAF fighter jets flown by testosterone-overloaded Tom Cruise-aping jerks that screamed past inches above my rooftop at six a.m., inevitably producing within me a deep desire to either purchase ground-to-air missiles or acquire the ability to teleport a large mountain range into position ten feet ahead of them. Added to that, unfortunate genetics had given me myopia as well as an obsessive compulsion to write. Being a writer working for hours in front of a computer screen, plus being a genealogist poring over old, badly written medieval manuscripts meant my short-sightedness got worse faster than normal. There was the world within range of my spectacles, then there was the Big Blurriness… By September 1st, I'd applied for a passport (in triplicate with Latin, including photographs of my house, my car and pet goldfish) and resolutely ignored the fact that if it didn't arrive by November 1st, I'd have forked out a mostly non-refundable £650 for naught. There was the plane ticket, airport tax, health insurance, holiday insurance, insurance against you ending up in Florida while your luggage took the slow boat to China, Tax Tax and all the little extras they bung on under miscellaneous. I had to buy a suitcase then things to go in the suitcase. I was English – I'd spent my entire life in a climate where suntan lotion was about as much of a necessity as an umbrella in the Sahara – when it came to "factors" I knew about the Krypton Factor and that was it. I had to acquire a new wardrobe, T-shirts, shorts and attire that had "sleeveless" in the description. Then I had to buy things that I needed to take but couldn't put in the suitcase. Aerosol deodorant? Don't even think about it. I was introduced to the concept of the "pressurised cargo hold" and a truly impressive list of all the items that had an unfortunate tendency to ignite, implode, explode or possibly all three if you put said items in the pressurised cargo hold. Thus it was that I stood at Chesterfield Bus Station1 at 3:00am on 2nd November, waiting for the National Express Coach that would take me to London. The temperature was the wrong side of O°, and I wore only the thinnest of jackets. A fortnight before I was due to leave, I met up with some family friends of ours, Lisa Watson and her brother Paul, respectively 18 and 14 years old, who had just returned from a holiday to Kissimmee, Florida. Informing them of my trip (assuming the passport came), I was promptly hustled to the boot of their car where flyers and leaflets were shoved into my eager hands. Paul's eyes gleamed in that way only teenage boys can manage as he explained the wonders of Disneyland's "Tower of Terror" and Lisa almost bounced as she described Sea World and close up encounters with a whale called Shamu. I accepted the leaflets and my standing orders – photographs by the cubic dozen plus video camera footage, for their delectation. I hung on grimly to that cheerful memory as I was introduced to a new "factor" – that of wind chill. In my pocket – checked and re-checked only a score times – were the all important tickets and above all the precious passport, without which the Americans were likely to get downright rude about my chances of getting in the country. Eventually I ended up in the departure lounge of Gatwick with my 29 comrades, watching the planes take off and land with a reassuring competence. I'd never travelled longer than six hours at a time in my car, never been on a ferry, couldn't remember the last time I'd been on a train, and now I was about to fly for twelve solid hours half way round the world. In a way, I was glad I didn't have a window seat, as the idea of watching the ground disappearing in front of me wasn't something I was sure I was quite ready for, at least not without a couple of vodka martinis to cushion the shock. In films, there was always plenty of space on planes. In everything from Die Hard 2 to Airplane!, those wishing to cause mischief and mayhem simply stood up and sauntered down wide aisles. It took about ten seconds for me to realise they must have been a feature peculiar to either American airlines or to movie-sets, since Economy class allowed me to experience what the inside of a sardine tin must be like, and not even the glimpses of First Class seemed particularly spacious. After working their way along the cramped seats, apologising every millisecond for treading on this toe, accidentally thrusting their posterior or bosom into that face and overbalancing enough to inadvertently place their hand on a highly inappropriate part of a complete stranger's anatomy in order to reach a beanpole-narrow aisle, anyone wishing to cause any bother would surely be too exhausted to make the effort. The flight also taught me something else about myself – I don't sleep when I travel; my insomnia flexes it's muscles and moves into high gear. We landed 1Chesterfield Bus Station strongly resembles the sets of Blade Runner, only worse. in Orlando at 9:00pm their time. I'd been awake for 29 hours straight and had never been so grateful for the advice to wear my spectacles instead of my contact lenses, since somebody had managed to distract me long enough to insert several sharp boulders in each eye. Just like Gatwick, the place was huge and badly designed2. Orlando International Airport wasn't even a basket, never mind a barrel, of laughs. Pondering why nobody had realised the inadvisability of making large numbers of exhausted, cranky people trek a couple of miles for their luggage, I trudged along, deliberately not looking at the airport guards lest my exhausted state led me to incautiously laugh out loud. My parents, for which I am eternally grateful, were red-hot on education. By the time we were each three years old, both myself and my younger brother were able to read, write, construct grammatical sentences and understand how to use a dictionary. My parents had taught us that there was no knowledge, no information that could not be found in books. Supplementing the copious information provided by Lisa and Paul Watson as a heads up, I had also read everything I could on the Sunshine State. I knew the total population, could name three counties and four cities, give an estimate of the average daytime temperature and at a push discourse on the state's annual crop yields - which was more than some of the locals. The literature I'd read had also touched on the airport workers, and not in a positive manner. "Airport security guard" jobs in the United States were commonly referred to as "McJobs" due to the low pay, poor training and poor "personality" quality of the applicants, who had a worrying tendency to be testosterone- hyped males of a certain age and mentality. They were big, beefy and each one swaggered past us cradling a semi-automatic AK-Guaranteed-Massacre with the tenderness of a mother holding her newborn. Since my reading up on America the Beautiful had informed me that these frustrated SpecWar Warrior-Wannabes couldn't have hit a barn from the inside, I kept my attention carefully upon them, aware that if anything "went down" - to use the phraseology of our cousins across The Pond – we were in far more danger of being hit by the guards' gunfire than that of the bad guys. Then we hit Customs & Immigration and I had to draw deeply on the well of my reserves. There are many ways to describe the United States Custom & Immigration officials, but rude, ignorant, paranoid and downright daft are about as polite as I can manage. U.S. C & I start with the assumption that everyone wanting to enter their country is a disguised drug smuggler/terrorist/criminal/general psychopath and work from there. They viewed all comers with the undisguised attitude that we were something nasty they'd just trodden in and each one seemed determined to wilfully ignore that America had: a) the longest undefended border in the world (Canada), b) the most poorly defended border in the world (Mexico), c) the highest number of serial killers per square mile than many comparable 2 We shall return to this topic anon. countries due to the bureaucratic inefficiency and glory-hogging screw-ups of the United States' Alphabet Soup (CIA, ATF, FBI, NSA, NSC, etc). In short – the bad guys weren't coming in off the planes, they'd already been in the country for months or even years. The utter ineffectiveness of their obvious xenophobia was to be tragically proven seven years after my holiday by the henchmen of a lunatic called Osama bin Laden; at the time, though, it was just deeply offensive and pathetically laughable. Once we got past the Gestapo, we had the fun of persuading the Hire Company to release our car, and when I say 'release', I mean it – these people wanted DNA tests. One hard slog later, we were finally able to step outside the airport building, were the humidity hit you so hard you automatically looked around for the prankster with the bucker of water. Our total group of thirty had been divided into groups of eight; each group of eight would occupy one holiday "villa", (they were actually bungalows, but the word doesn't exist in American English3); I would share a twin room with my friend Mary White, while Brian & Mary Taylor from Rotherham would have the room directly opposite us, John & Shirley Nixon would take the double bedroom and their sons Tom and Tim would have the last twin bedroom. We quickly divided into two cars of four, the Nixon family in one and us four – Mary & Brian Taylor were a married couple, Mary White was a widow, I was single - in the other (an actually pretty decent Toyota Corolla) and sped on into the night. We stopped only once so we could nip into a local all-night convenience store [off-licence] for bread and milk, or rather the two Marys nipped while I sat in the car, strongly resembling something conjured up by the witch-queen of New Orleans4. My body was there, but my mind had put out the cat and was hugging the Sandman. We pulled into the drive way of 2928 Paddington Way, Kissimmee, Orlando, Florida, USA at 1:00am British Time. I couldn't care less. Dragging my suitcase down the hall to mine/Mary White's twin bedroom, I collapsed face forward onto the bed and happily achieved my wish for instant unconsciousness. 3 American English is derived from 15th - 16th Century English as spoken by the original British Colonists to the New World. "Bungalow", the word used to describe a single-storey dwelling, is a Hindustani-derived word and was not introduced into British English until India became part of the British Empire in the 19th Century. 4 Marie LeVeau, "witch-queen" of New Orleans, celebrated voodoo priestess II – The Birds Eventually I managed to get both eyes to actually stay open, blearily focussing on the pretty pink pillowcase roses as I psyched myself up for the biggie – "gross motor skills". My bladder had long given up on polite reminder letters and persistent follow-up phone calls and was now banging loudly and aggressively on the door of my cerebellum. Twenty minutes later after my ablutions I finally felt confident enough in my ability to walk and talk at the same time even though thinking was a dubious part of the equation. More fortunately, the boulders in my eyes had shrunk to bits of grit and I decided the contact lenses could deal – the world is a much better place when you can actually see it. Foraging for food and the vital pre-breakfast (preferably whisky-laced) morning cuppa, I did a quick recon of the area. The villa was spotlessly clean and actually quite nicely decorated. Unlike British homes it was "open plan" and each room was large enough to easily hold eight people and swing a dozen clichéd cats around – the "double" bed in the master suite could comfortably have held about ten people, if that was your thing. The front door opened straight into the very large living room that was a sort of "?" design. Imagine that the door leading into the bungalow is here ? ? at the bottom of the "?" and as you enter you are facing the same direction as the arrow. See that little horizontal line? The "left" bit was big double bedroom with the en suite, while the right bit was the corridor leading down to the two twin bedrooms that me & Mary and the Taylors shared. On the right-hand side of the corridor was the door that led in from the garage. (Imagine a little square at the bottom of the "?" and that was the garage). The first horizontal line going right was the kitchen, and the vertical line going up to the top horizontal line contained the dining suite and also led to the last twin bedroom of Tom and Tim's. The top horizontal line led back into the kitchen and also out onto the sun deck [patio] where the swimming pool was guarded by a huge mesh-coloured frame designed to keep out alligators that might disconcert the tourists. I will say that all this spaciousness, however, led to certain lack of privacy because even if you were at one side of the bungalow, you could clearly hear anything that was happening at the other side, and the interior walls seemed to have been made of rice paper. At 0930 hours all thirty of the Horde reported to the villa of Gordon Earl and his family, who organised the trips and who had kindly invited me. Once outside in the blinding sunshine, I could see further reasons why sound- blockage was so poor. Most American buildings, especially homes and particularly in States with a lot of hot weather, are built partially or completely of wood. It's incredibly inexpensive – some of the villas were for sale for as low as $48,000 (£42,000) ranging up to about $95,000 (£89,000) – and it was quite common for foreign tourists to buy a bungalow in the area and then rent it out because for the price of what might get them a terrace or a semi-detached nonentity house in Britain, they could purchase a huge, four/five bedroom bungalow with a double garage and a swimming pool! Once we were settled, things were explained to us by the holiday representative, whose name was – honestly – James Happy. Of immediate import was his stern instruction that we must not use the inner door from the garage, but instead keep it locked and go outside. Due to the flimsy wooden construction of most American houses, these inner doors are particularly vulnerable to being used by burglars. Tourist complexes such as the housing estate at Kissimmee were particular targets for burglars who could pretty much count on the properties containing cameras, video cameras, money, jewellery, passports and other saleable goods. Once the bureaucracy was cleared up, we got down to the most important item – Disneyland. Disneyland is Florida's chief tourist attraction and it was our number one destination; going to Florida and ignoring Disneyland is like going to Egypt and ignoring the Pyramids, Sydney and not bothering with the Opera House, etc. It cost us, each, $249 (£163) for a two week "pass" that allowed repeated entry to the local "Big Three" tourist attractions: Disneyland, Sea World and Universal Studios. Disneyland, the biggest of the three, was comprised again of three major tourist parks – MGM Studios, The Magic Kingdom and Epcot Centre – plus several smaller parks. Once Mr Happy had departed, we decided to make an immediate start so after a quick lunch headed towards MGM Studios, the nearest park, a venture that introduced us to America's highways and byways – and not in a good way. The State of Florida seemed to work under the assumption that every road user psychically acquired the ability to know where they were going and how to get there as soon as they crossed over the state line, because the signage started at virtually non-existent and deteriorated from there on in. On British Motorways you have signs that indicate the slip-road is 1 mile ahead, then another indicating that it is ½ mile ahead; on the American Interstate (M-way equivalent) the only directional signs are posted actually on the off-ramp [slip-road] you need, by which time of course you've gone sailing past. Another fun feature we discovered was that traffic lights are not on vertical posts at the junction but strung above it on cables like telephone lines. Brian Taylor, who was driving, went through two sets of lights before he happened to glance up and proved to us how good the brakes were – I know I dented the back of his driver's seat headrest with my face. The entrance to MGM was pretty easy to spot – a pillar with Mickey Mouse (the cartoon character that turned Disney Corporation into a money-spinner) on top. Once inside, it became apparent after a few moments that separation would have to be our modus operandi. You were overwhelmed on all sides by bright colours, raucous sounds and waves of delectable odours – two people might just manage to see the attractions at a reasonable pace, but a group of eight was just too cumbersome a concept. Arranging to meet back at Mickey when the park closed, we each sallied forth to divide and conquer. MGM Studios was a Disney park, but it was (and still is) also a working movie lot. There were sound stages, scenery sets, movie lots and entire areas created to look like somewhere else – Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, New York streets, etc., around the tourist attraction and fun rides themselves, any of which could be closed to public access at any one time due to filming. Partially to compensate for this, the park offered a "Backstage" Lot tour that included a drive through one of the movie sets – an entirely artificial mock-up of an American residential street, that could double with only a few cosmetic changes for "Anywhere, USA". Of immediate note was that MGM was home to The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, so enthusiastically described by Paul Watson. This fun little ride is designed like a very large service elevator only with seats, but the "walls" are actually glass. The doors open and you walk on, sit down, strap in. The "elevator" then rises steadily until it is thirteen storeys [floors] high in the air. After that, not a lot happens for several moments and you can admire the panoramic view over the park, seeing if you can spot Mickey atop his pillar, the propeller-winged biplane on one of the back lots and the "haunted house on the hill" that should be to your left. If you tilt your head slightly you should juuust be able to spot the Haunted House in the furthest corner of the park at exactly the same time as the elevator suddenly plummets in freefall down eleven storeys before screaming to a halt in time to gently come to rest on the ground, about which time your stomach, heart, lungs and other internal organs suddenly realise they are still thirteen levels up and hasten to rejoin your corporeal form. It's the ideal way to test out any rubber underwear you may have treated yourself to. Moving on something a little less bracing, I explored the Studio Showcase, which was a lot more serene. Basically, it was a museum to MGM's historic movie glory, housing such memorabilia as the Ruby Slippers worn by Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz along with set pieces and props from other famous (and infamous) movies. I found it very good, besides being a way to get my seriously traumatised internal organs settled down again. Although I loathe this cliché, the Showcase did provide many interesting instances of "the story behind the story". Not quite ready for any more thrills just yet, I saw the Special Effects and Production Tour, highlighting a lot of the behind-the-scenes grunt work that goes into the two-hour fiesta of explosions, shootouts and fast-car chases adorning the big screen in whatever movie you happen to be watching. Deciding to venture once more into active ride participation, I briefly considered Superstar Television, where you could be chosen to have a "bit" part as an extra or be among the "studio audience" as in "filmed before a live…" for a wide variety of MGM produced TV shows, including amongst others Home Improvement, The Tonight Show and Cheers. Unfortunately the current crop jostling for their fifteen minutes of fame seemed to be comprised totally of five-year-old blonde banshee brat divas who made Mike Tyson look like the epitome of genteel etiquette, their tow- haired freckle-faced budding-sadist ten-year old brothers whose gaping maws relentlessly inhaled endless greasy, unidentifiable clumps of pure cholesterol, backed up by entire platoons of brassy, blowsy, screeching mothers and massive, podgy fathers bellowing like bull moose across the tundra, whose ranked masses of overhanging beer guts made each and every one look like Alfred Hitchcock suffering from severe constipation. Feeling suddenly fragile, I headed instead to the Monster Sound Show, starring Chevy Chase and Martin Short, an "interactive" short comedy film followed by an explanation of how sound effects were made in a movie, and followed that with Jim Henson's Muppet Vision 4D interactive show. Finally I finished off with "Honey, I shrunk the Audience" a 3D/interactive attraction that was so hilarious I went round a second time and which was way, way funnier than any of the actual movies it was based on. The Indiana Jones Stunt Show and the Star Tours Star Wars Thrill Ride were both jumping up and down yelling, "Me!", "No, me!", but if I was going to do the Backstage Lot tour it was going to have to be now. If you're a real movie buff, or if TV watching is your main way of entertainment, you may often get a vague sense of déjà vu as you watch certain TV shows or go to the cinema and see certain movies. Take it from me – it's not your imagination. Both movie and TV "sets" are very, very, very, very expensive to build, especially in view of the inescapable fact that quite often the whole point of their construction is so you can blow them up, set them on fire, flood them, batter them, or at the very least dismantle the whole lot again. Therefore "permanent" soundstages and back lots, for example those used in long-running TV shows like Star Trek or ER, are always designed to be used over and over as often as possible, which is where your – and my – nagging sense of déjà vu often kicks in. On open carriages to give us full benefit of the glorious sunshine and humid 80°F temperature, the little shuttle of the Backstage Lot Tour trundled us along. The first backlot was an American "city block", the façades built in 1920s – 1940s style; that particular lot had been used for a plethora of movies and TV shows done in the "Little Italy" genre, such as The Godfather trilogy, The Untouchables and episodes of spy-spoof The Man from U.N.C.L.E. We were allowed off the shuttle and encouraged to walk along behind some blue wooden barriers, at which point an old, battered brown car came screaming down the road to judder to a halt in front of a "bank" that I would have sworn I had seen in every cop show from Starsky & Hutch through Hill Street Blues, T. J. Hooker, Nash Bridges and NYPD Blue. Out hopped an actor who proceeded to do an "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" sketch, apparently seeking a missing parrot. Unfortunately he didn't use a microphone, so unless you were right at the front of the blue barriers, you couldn't hear a thing that was going on. The best part of the Backstage tour was Catastrophe Canyon, the lot where they created all those "disaster" effects – remember all those action movies where an earthquake traps people in the subway, or a busload of people are swept away by a huge wave of floodwater that you see sweep right over them, or a high rise building that catches fire? We got onto a sort of train track, and as we trundled along, we could experience being the "actors" about to get drowned, burned or squidged and also see how they did the trick, like the way the water was made to "swell" as it surged towards us only to collapse down deep troughs at the point where the camera would cut away and the last part be done with SFX technology. The highlight of the Backstage Lot Tour was, unfortunately, that for MGM Studios – at least for this day; if I was to make the rendezvous with the other seven, I would have to move my posterior pronto, so the Star Wars and Indiana Jones attractions would have to wait till another day. So I hauled butt back to the gates, unaware that the adventure rides for the day hadn't quite finished. In order to understand the following "Saga of the Blue Swans", it is necessary to know that: 1. The Disneyland complex is a one-way road system, so you EXIT at an entirely different point to which you ENTER. 2. Added to this of course is the fact that Florida roads (or at least in Kissimmee) are very poorly signposted, the municipal authorities seem to operate on the idea that tourists have some innate homing instinct that kicks in when the signage disappears. 3. The icing on this cake is of course that Americans drive on the right (note how I heroically refrain from saying "the wrong") side of the road, necessitating repeated cutting across traffic. Once you've fixed the above facts in your head, imagine two carloads of four people, trying to get out of MGM, as shown: A C B X Our cars MGM Exiting the MGM park on the right hand side of the two-lane road (each side main American highways have two lanes, like English dual carriageways), we headed straight up towards a main intersection, noting as we did so the convenient landmark of a huge Disneyland hotel, on the roof of which were four massive stone sculptures of swans painted blue, one at each corner. We should have gone straight over the intersection towards A, but went right up towards B instead, so we had to find the exit ramp that would allow us to loop around to take us back down B [U-turns strictly prohibited]. Thus, after travelling in a way that would have resembled a capital copperplate C, thus: C we ended back at our original intersection, with the "swan hotel" directly ahead. But by now totally confused, our driver Brian Taylor continued straight over this intersection towards C, instead turning right towards A. Recognising none of the fauna and flora, we had to do a repeat of what we had done on highway B, namely find an exit ramp that would allow us to loop back down to the intersection again. By this time, there was an increasing desperation to our in-car conversation about how odd it was that no matter which direction we drove in, we always ended up back at the hotel with the blue swans. However, taking a left at the "swan" intersection, Brian determinedly stated his intention not to leave the road we were currently on even if we ended up in Miami, because he didn't want to see those swans again, for any reason. A tense minute became two, then three, as we sat in the car examining the passing scenery with the intensity of Forensics at a murder scene. It looked familiar, but then so did that of the other, wrong, roads, considering how many times we'd been up and down them…and then: Welcome to KISSIMMEE Never has a road sign looked so good! Pulling up at our villa with gratitude, we piled into the house. Glancing at my watch I discovered it was nearly midnight and my body, which had been insistently reminding me that I had arrived in the country less than twenty- four hours earlier after thirty hours without sleep, abandoned subtlety and just began to yell nastily. Not having the energy to eat, I went to my bedroom and just fell face forward into my wonderful pillow, because tomorrow we had to get up at seven in the morning – we were going to one of the small Disney Parks, Pleasure Beach and were also going out for 7:30, to do breakfast American style… To be continued… Coming soon: III – You Want Fries With That? © 1995 and 2004, C. D. Stewart Page 13 of 14