So jet lag won again and I was awake until 04:30 with an alarm set for 09:00. Needless to say, I feel [and look] like an extra on The Walking Dead:
I’m trying to keep myself awake so I’m going to give this a go. Apologies in advance for the apathy that may appear throughout.
After making it through rain, cancelled transport, a bag left on a train [with all of our holiday money in it] and a transfer that failed to arrive, we finally reached our first destination: The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes. Lets just say all the woes of the past twenty four hours quickly disintegrated as we looked out from the balcony of our massively upgraded room. [Believe me, whilst It might become tedious after the fiftieth time you’ve mentioned it, it is absolutely worth telling everyone that you are on Honeymoon – their suites are larger than our flat].
I’ve not edited these photos as I want to give a realistic view of what this place looks like
[I am so so tired I didn’t have the energy to do it].
I also thought I had more photos of the insanely large room we had but as I wasn’t planning on blogging I only took the below:
The pool area is large, very comfortable, has views of either the golf course or the hotel and sits against a soundtrack of early noughties pop music [who the hell knows why?].
We were constantly given cold bottles of water and little treats: who knew you NEEDED iced watermelon pops on hot days?
FYI the poolside Nachos are large. Very very large [look at the hand to bowl ratio].
Their main restaurant Highball & Harvest serves Breakfast [and what a breakfast: doughnuts as big as your head, an egg station, a full Southern-style buffet or à la carte], lunch and dinner. Dinner is GREAT.
Not your typical all-American food, this is good quality, flavourful, ‘dainty’ ingredients with brilliant service.
All guests have access to the adjacent JW Marriott Orlando Hotel and its restaurants [and water-park-esque lazy river] which is probably a good thing to take advantage of considering there is only one other restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton, Norman’s, which is more on the fine-dining side of the spectrum. We did neither and actually went to International drive on three out of the four nights we were there.
Where else can you sky-dive, eat yourself into a stupor and go to a gig all in one night?
The Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes offers luxury, great service from all staff and a pocket of tranquility in a usually busy part of Orlando. It is highly accessible from almost everywhere [around 20 minutes from the airport and Walt Disney World, 15 minutes to Universal Studios and 10 minutes to International Drive] and is definitely one of the best hotels I have stayed in.
That’s all I have the energy to write today but I’ll be back with more HM antics from twenty minutes down the road very soon.
STANLEY
[P.s. I will eventually get used to WordPress’ editing features but at the minute it’s arguing with my brain and my face is just staring into the laptop.]
STANLEY SAYS 