WHERE WE STAYED IN ORLANDO

There are loads of places to stay in Orlando but, as we found, many of them get booked up at busy times. We wanted somewhere that we could self-cater and with a swimming pool - we had it in our minds that after a day at a theme park a swim would be the best way to end the day (and as it turned our this was perfectly true).

After trawling around the internet for hours we settled on Bahama Bay Resort. It is located to the south of Orlando just off Hwy 27 and about 1.5 miles from Hwy 192 (which take you to Disney).

We had read that the big downside of Bahama Bay Resort is that it is some way from Disney – in reality it is about 15 minutes away and we felt that this was no problem at all. Even if you were staying at a Disney hotel it would take 10 minutes to get to the parks using the transportation system so 15-20 didn’t seem bad at all. However, we did not go to any Universal parks (other than SeaWorld) and they would be probably 30 minutes away.

We booked a 2 bedroom (Andros) condo through Hotels.com but were really lucky as they did not any of this type left and so we were upgraded to an enormous 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom condo. Also it was brand new and so was spotless.

The condo was up 2 flights of stairs (which might not be ideal if you have very young kids) and this meant we got a great view as our balcony faced the large and picturesque Lake Davenport – we had dinner outside most nights and the floor to ceiling mosquito screen around the balcony meant that it was perfectly safe for the kids and none of us got bitten.

We understand that it is better to ask for a newer apartment if possible and one other tip is to request that you are not too close to building work – Bahama Bay Resort is big and is getting bigger with quite a few new apartment blocks being built.

The resort has a lot of facilities. Most importantly for us it has 2 swimming pools – one is by the main reception – we didn’t use this pool but it looked great. The one closer to our condo was lovely – big pool, 2 hot tubs, a bar and lots of sun-loungers. But what made it was that next to the pool was a man-made beach with volley-ball court which overlooked Lake Davenport – really great setting. We found that the kids loved this as they could dig in the sand and have a swim while we could read books and drink G&T or beer from the bar!

The reception area is large and they hold various ‘events’ there – drink receptions etc but we didn’t go to any of these. There is also a small shop which was useful at times – they seemed pretty disorganised in there but they had one great service where you could borrow DVDs at no charge – very useful when the kids were tired.

One other thing which will be useful for some people is that they have a WiFi network at Bahama Bay Resort. This was great for David as he needed to keep in contact with the office from time to time.