Summer 2014 – a tale of three cities!

Well, strictly speaking it’s two cities and a Magic Kingdom, but that doesn’t quite have the same ring to it!

We’ve been such a lucky family this summer – our summer holiday was three holidays all rolled into one.  It’s a trip that we’ve been planning for and saving up to take for a few years as we needed to time it between big daughter’s GCSEs and A levels, and also at a time when small daughter was at age when she would appreciate it most.

Can you guess where we’ve been?

I don’t think this place needs many clues …!

This one’s a bit trickier – it might look familiar but look again …

What about this one?  It’s not the usual view of this city but it’s one of our favourites …

Did you get it?  Well done, I’m impressed!

It was a pretty big trip – Disneyland in Orlando, Ottawa in Canada and New York.  The photos are Cinderella’s castle (of course!), the Parliament buildings in Ottawa which are based on the same design as our Parliament buildings in London, and a view from Central Park, a wonderfully lush green space in the heart of a bustling city.

We took big daughter to Disneyland when she was small and had always promised that we would take small daughter too.  Instead of staying in Orlando for our full two week holiday, though, we decided to take an internal flight to Canada to see our relatives before coming home via New York – a place that has been on big daughter’s travel wish list for quite some time.

We planned our travels with the help of our very own personal travel agent, a lovely lady called Lesley from Travel Counsellors.  Normally, I would have organised all of the bookings myself, but as it was such a big, special holiday, we decided to get a bit of help.  Lesley co-ordinated international and internal flights, hotel rooms and car hire across two countries (often at a discount too!) and even managed to get us tickets to visit a very special place … but more about that later.

Three very different places and three very different experiences, and we loved them all.  We crossed oceans, rivers and borders, showed our passports more times than we can remember, marvelled at skyscrapers and gasped at Disney magic.  I hope you won’t mind if I share some of our highlights with you.

First up, Disneyland.  Come with us as we visit the world of Mickey Mouse …