Thursday 28th April 2011
It was a 12 hour day of travel today as we left London Gatwick at 11.15am this morning and finally got to our hotel at 6pm local time this evening.
It was quite a relaxed start to the day today as I met up with Devan and her parents just off of the M25 motorway and then we drove the short 40 minute journey to Gatwick airport. After having a few problems with our originally booked seats I managed to get the seats upgraded, we didn’t go up a class this time but we did manage to get a lot more leg room than we would have normally had. The Virgin Atlantic flight was good even though the plane was quite old and the TV screens were smaller than on the newer planes. It wasn’t ideal as we didn’t have on demand TV but we both managed to watch 3 films including The Fighter which I thought was pretty good.
Once we got to Orlando we collected our baggage and then it was straight into our hire car for the 70 mile journey to Daytona Beach. The journey went very fast, Devan did a great job as DJ and we had a good sing-a-long which made time fly by! We arrived at our hotel at 6pm, had a quick shower and got out to dinner by 6.30pm. As always when we get to a new town it’s nice to have a quick drive around to get a feel for the place and not before long we drove straight past the Daytona International Speedway which is absolutely massive! For those that don’t follow NASCAR you might remember the stadium from “Days of Thunder” with Tom Cruise? (it’s one of my favourite films so I was loving it!).
We found an Olive Garden restaurant which was perfect for our first night, they kept on offering both of us cheese on everything, including the salad, but we were quite happy with our standard meals!
It was then back to the hotel to turn in for an early night. First day of training tomorrow to prepare Devan for her first round match on Monday – can’t wait to get stuck in.
