Orlando is just around the corner, and I’m still in the stages of chucking together bits of our vacation. I called around today to get information about child seats.
According to Air Tran, the airline we’ll be flying with, child seats are not required for children - even those who have paid tickets. This is a good thing to know, since on our flight to Palm Springs, we carted around the car seat and it caused nothing but problems for everyone.
It was a pain to lug the seat down the 4 plane aisles. All of the flight attendants kept telling me that such a large thing would have to be checked, and then I’d have to go into the standard diatribe about how it’s a car seat (and not a strange-looking one, even) and that my kid was going to sit in it and it’s perfectly allowed. And there was also the frustration of having to seat her in a specific spot (can’t remember now whether it was aisle or window) rather than what we thought would be convenient. A complete nuisance not worth saving $50 (see below).
So it’s good that Jennifer at Air Tran customer service told me that car seats are not required. Abby will be able to sit in her seat alone with only the normal adult seat belt. This seems reasonable to me, and I’m sure she will appreciate sitting in a big-girl chair. I suppose that they’d have to let kids sit without a kid’s seat, since they allow infants to sit in their mothers’ laps with no restraints. And would airlines be hypocritical?
Now, as far as ground transportation is concerned, I had a few caveats. The first of which is that the rental car company has to be in the airport. I’m not sure that I believe Expedia’s in/out of airport data, and it’s a little hard to use that as primary criteria anyway. The WDW Info site has good information about rental companies that are on-site at MCO. I will not go through that two-hour Alamo fiasco again.
After figuring out which companies were on-site, I chose one that I knew had PT Cruisers and called up their customer support. The guy who answered told me that Orlando did offer child seats with their reservations at the cost of $7 per day. That’s not bad for saving the headache of carting the seat around.
Unfortunately, they don’t show the PT Cruiser online as a reservation option, so I’m kind of wondering which of the car models I should choose. Mid-size? Intermediate? Luxury? I suppose that I could always upgrade when we get there if need be.
In my search I also learned that Air Tran allows you to upgrade your seat to business class when you travel between PHL and MCO for only $50. This is something to keep in mind after spending a week with a weary borg-mom, pregnant-wife, or cranky-kid. Either I float us all up to business or I escape to free cocktails myself and let them suffer in the small seats.
We still need tickets to Universal. I asked Mom to pick those up from AAA, since she’s a member and the discount is 10% there. Berta keeps on harping on the “no need to go there since nobody can get on anything”, but she’s thinking of Islands of Adventure. At Universal, there are a ton of rides that are ok for kids and pregnant women. Earthquake, King Kong, Twister, Jaws, Terminator, E.T the Ride… And there are a couple of good things for us non-invalids, too, like the Back to the Future ride and the M.I.B. ride. Plus that’s where Nickelodeon studios is, and I’ve never been to that part. Abby might like it.
Curse you all who have taken away Islands of Adventure from my itinerary!! I suppose that it’s partially my own fault. If Berta were not pregnant, she’d be able to ride. She thinks she’s going to get on a bunch of stuff, and I think she’s going to start noticing a lot of signs that say, “Pregnant Bertas Not Allowed.” We really need a current Birnbaum book so that we can know definitively which rides are good and not so that A) nobody gets their heart set on anything in particular and B) I can carefully select which few rides I want to get on that not everyone else can. It will be amusing when we encounter a ride that Abby can get on that Berta can’t.
