The day started rather early when Virgin sent us a message to confirm that our flight had been cancelled. We were on the phone to them by 6am but they said that the earliest flight home that they could book us on was the same flight next Friday (!!!!!!) so all of a sudden we find ourselves with another week here in California.
I'd had the phone on speaker whilst we were waiting for quite a while to get through to Virgin (no doubt they were taking a fairly large volume of calls) and unfortunately this had woken Jake up. His first reaction to hearing about our lengthy delay was not at all positive, but Nicky managed to get him to see the bright side reasonable quickly. Judging by Nicky's Facebook traffic today it sounds like Jake may not be the only one in his class who won't make it back to school for the start of the summer term.
Similarly, when I called work it sounds like I am not the only one stuck overseas. Hopefully being away for another week won't prove to be too much of a problem - there is one rather important meeting next Thursday, so I will need to brief colleagues at some point between now and then. The biggest work bummer is using up my annual leave. What with our 2 week holiday booked in the summer it doesn't look too good for a long break by the time we get to Christmas!
Next up was the challenge of sorting out our accommodation. I went to the front desk, but they told me that I would need to call DVC member services to organize new reservations. Calling them, they have managed to get us a further two nights here at the Grand Californian, but then we need to move over the road to the Paradise Pier hotel. Good job that we'd just got our new Bay Lake Tower points, as this extra booking has done for them for this year, plus a borrow from next year as well. Still, at least it's not "real" money!!!
Can't say the same about everything else, but at least it was easy to call Budget and extend our rental for an extra week. We did try calling our travel insurance to see whether they would help us with any of our additional costs, but the clear and resounding "no" didn't come as that much of a surprise.
Now that we have all of this extra time we need to decide what to do with it. We only have one day left on our Disney passes, and extending them would essentially involve upgrading to an annual pass, which is rather expensive, so we are going to make do with one more day in the Disney parks. We've already done the vast majority of the rides that we wanted to do anyway. If we're lucky, they may have the Matterhorn Bobsleds back up and running when we use our last day.
Previously we'd decided that we would stick to Disney parks for this holiday, but with the extra time we're thinking that we will go over to Universal for a day. I will definitely need to pinch the memory card out of Jake's camera by then. The bad news is that I have taken about a thousand photos so far, so prepare to get bored, very very bored when we finally get home. You have been warned!
As to our day today, after this morning's stress we went out to Denny's for some comfort food - breakfast at lunchtime. Everything looks better after a couple of syrup-soaked pancakes. Then we went over to the Garden Grove shopping area - Anaheim's answer to the Pointe in Orlando. Looks to be very new and a pleasant environment, but lots of units still to be leased. They had a bowling alley, so we went in for a game. We were almost the only people in there, and it was the nicest bowling alley I've ever been to by quite some margin. Sadly I have to report that I was the only one not to get a strike. Jake was the winner, and the only one of us to break into three figures. I got a little bit of revenge on one of their American pool tables. Jake and I played a game of 8-ball and then a few games of 9-ball, a game which was new to Jake but which he
picked up well. Not wanting to boast (much!) but I did manage to clear the table at one visit from the break off in one game - only time I've ever managed that.
We popped to the supermarket (well two actually as the Walmart we went to was a bit disappointing so we stopped in at a Target as well) for some essentials - bottles of water, fruit, snacks, breakfast bars and so on.
Then back to the hotel and Jake enjoyed a dip in the pool before we headed to Whitewater Snacks for tea.
Weather forecast is for mid 70's and sunshine tomorrow, so plan is to stake out a good spot by the pool (we also picked up some suntan lotion at the supermarket today).
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