Zombies, hurricanes, aeroplanes

It's perfectly natural to feel some degree of anxiety before one goes a'travellin on a jet plane. Perfectly normal. I don't get angst from the thought of flying on a plane, although I am prone to a touch of claustrophobia, and I am not especially stressed over having to spend 24 hours hanging out in airports - or Dante's fifth ring of hell as they are commonly referred.

But I am a little uneasy about visiting a place that has a hurricane season. Not the odd tempest; a hurricane season. Florida started its hurricane season three weeks ago and is already racking up the major storm cells - number four, Tropical Cyclone Debby, is doing Flo Rida at the moment.

Florida is one of the prime targets during the Atlantic hurricane season, and is also the holy mothership of big, scary roller coasters.

On the rare occasions when the current nanny state Australian Government isn't telling me what not to view on the interwebs, what I shouldn't eat for breakfast or otherwise intruding into my personal space and business, they are bleating and harping on about not mixing these two things together. If I had a dollar for every time they told me not to ride a roller coaster in a hurricane blah blah blah. W’ever.

But what the hey, I'm gonna do it, because I'm on holidays. I'm sure the locals know what they're doing. Even though most Floridians are probably of the opinion that space aliens are sending coded messages through their fillings, I'm just going to trust that their roller coasters have been grounded.

Apart from the hurricanes, everyone has been warning me to be careful of the lightning. Um, okay. I'll make sure I do that, as opposed to my usual habit of leaning on tall, pointy, metal structures during a violent storm.  And then there are all the face-eating zombie attacks that have been occurring in Florida lately.  Zombies, hurricanes, lightning - I don't know how to pack for any of these occasions, and Smart Traveller is fairly useless for information on anything other than things that explode or pick-your-pocket.

I'll be spending a couple of weeks near Orlando, in Downtown Disney, which is pretty darn ginormous. There are around 20 major hotels in the "complex", each with a few thousand Mickey Mouse themed boudoirs, so Disney need to shuffle around a minimum of 20,000 people all day, every day, via their magical little carpet ride shuttle buses. It’s like rearranging a couple of suburbs worth of tourists, each of who don’t have a car or a clue.

People often ask me how I am going to cope with the crowds and the noise and the mouse ears everywhere at Disney World. Well Disney are in fact quite exceptional at crowd control. They have to be. They can't have any off days. If you are a mad crowd control enthusiast or revel in all manner of organisation, regulation, neatness and order then go to a Disney theme park.

And they also excel in a quite excellent way at time management. I imagine a key requisite to getting a gig with Disney is the ability to tell the time in a timely fashion, as well as the obligatory infectious good nature. Even at 11pm.  Even in the presence of ghastly tourists.  Rules me out then.