Orlando 2025, Day 1: The Red-Eye – Amusement and Airtime

On April 1, 2025, I arrived at the SLC airport to take a red-eye flight with the intention of rope-dropping SeaWorld Orlando the next morning. Starting in 2024, I will be taking trips annually to Walt Disney World and Cedar Point, with other parks added on. If feasible, I am probably going to start adding on Disneyland as well.

Do I like red-eyes? No, not really. I can sleep on planes, but not particularly well, and it hurts my neck. I did get a memory foam pillow explicitly for this occasion, which helped, but did not fully solve the issue. However, this was the only flight to Orlando out of SLC that wasn’t over $1000 with long layovers. For those of us with hardly any PTO, long layovers aren’t really practical. Unless you want to bring your work laptop on top of all of your Disney gear (I certainly don’t).

Some comfort food before leaving for the flight. Delicious. I love Noodles and Company.

The ride up to SLC. The road is as depressing as ever. But whatever, we are going to ORLANDO!

I am already not having a great time but I am determined to make rope drop at 9 AM in Orlando.

Sorry, should have taken this before I took a bite. But this was the first true snack of the trip — some Starbie’s

I then got ready for bed in the airport bathroom, which was certainly one of the experiences of all time.

I THOUGHT I had the row to myself, but some dude moved into the exit seat last minute and dumped his beers on the center seat. At least I could still stretch out my legs.

And that exit seat is more expensive than all the others around it. So I am pretty sure he got it for free. Note to self for next time.

But yeah at least I have a tiny bit of space I guess.

And then a baby started crying loudly and I put in my noise-canceling AirPods and could still hear it. OOF. I was once a screaming baby in a plane to Texas, so yeah, I guess karma (in addition to being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend) doesn’t care that I don’t remember that trip at all.

Ooh boy. Look at all this in-flight entertainment I’m not going to use.

I would say, in addition to napping before leaving, I slept one solid hour on the plane, from 1:15 AM to 2:15 AM. The rest of the time was in-and-out of sleep, so in total, I probably slept 5 or 6 fitful hours.

But finally, the agonizing night drew to a close and they announced that we were about to land in sunny, warm ORLANDO! And only a few minutes late, to boot.