Ok, Bear in mind that I do not like flying at all, so anything other than a perfect flight will scare the holy hell out of me. We took off from Gatwick at about 11:15 am on the Wednesday morning as expected. The flight itself was due to be just over 8 hours and on the whole it was fine. We were coming into land at Orlando about 10 minutes late, so no real setback as far as time was concerned. I was sitting in the middle block of seats with Beth, our eldest. I look across as we are coming in to see the airport. I look forward again and brace myself for the touchdown. About 10 or 15 seconds later a gust of wind blew the plane sideways by a fair amount. Next thing is that all you hear are the engines roaring up to full power and us climbing at a franetic rate. My heart was pumping so fast, I kept waiting for something to go wrong, we managed to get back up while being blown all over the place, it was terrible. The kids were being lifted from their seat, mind you they thought it was great, some kind of ride. People were vomiting all around me. We circled again and tried once more, it was not quite as bad but we still could not land. Anyway, we had been in the air for about 9 hours by now so we needed fuel. The flew south and landed half and hour later at Tampa, the landing was find although it was raining. Great I thought they will put some transport on for us to Orlando, but no. The captian said that it would take about and hour to refuel and we would be back up. We took off as he said about 1 hour later to fly back the half an hour to Orlando, the take off was bad too, really bumpy. We touched down with everyone holding their breath at Orlando with no further trouble. When we were being bussed into the resort, there was a young couple saying that the stewardess they sat by had started to un-button her jacket and when we got off the plane people at the front had started inflating life jackets and they had dropped them on the floor when we got off. So it was not just me that was scared.
I have to admit, I was really scared but as I said I do not like flying anyway so that does not help. When you fly on the smaller planes to Spain or Italy, there always seems to be plenty of spare runway and the plane always seems to have plenty of power. But those 747's really need every inch of runway and all their power to get off the ground.
Other than that it was a fantastic holiday, we are going back. The flight home was perfect, 7 and a half hours landing at Gatwick at 6:30 am.