Each terminal has shops, cafes and other food outlets, together with airport lounges, baby changing facilities, wireless hot-spots and internet kiosks. Terminals 2 and 3 also have multi-faith prayer rooms.

If you are departing from Manchester and want to leave your car at the airport, you’ll find two long-stay car parks there, one of which serves Terminals 1 and 3 and one of which serves Terminal 2. There are also two short-stay car parks at the airport.

If you are arriving at Manchester Airport, you can book a hire car and pick it up when you land. The airport also has its own integrated transport hub, known as The Station, and you can catch a train or bus to the centre of Manchester or to another destination from here.

The Manchester Airport complex includes a hotel, the Radisson Blu Hotel Manchester Airport, which is situated between Terminal 1 and Terminal 2. It has 360 rooms, including standard rooms, business class rooms and suites, and also has a restaurant, a brasserie and a bar. Other facilities at the Radisson Blu Hotel Manchester Airport include a beauty lounge and a health club with an indoor swimming pool.

The complex also includes Manchester Airport’s Aviation Viewing Park, which features three viewing mounds from which you can watch the planes take off and land, and a collection of four historic planes: the front section of a Monarch Airlines DC-10; a restored BEA Hawker Siddeley Trident 3B; the Avro RJX; and Concorde G-BOAC (also known as Alpha Charlie), the second plane in the British Airways’ supersonic Concorde fleet. The Aviation Viewing Park also has an aviation shop and a restaurant.

Manchester Airport is only about 20 minutes’ drive from the centre of Manchester.

The name Epcot stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow and the theme park, which opened in 1982, was originally designed to showcase the possible future development of technology. Although Epcot doesn’t look particularly futuristic today, it’s still a great place to visit. It covers a huge area and is packed with attractions, so ideally you should plan to spend at least a day, possibly two days there if you want to explore it properly.

Epcot is divided into two main sections: Future World and World Showcase. Future World is the first section of the park that you’ll see if you go into the park using the main entrance, and it is here that you will find the rides and attractions based on technology and science.

The Future World area of the park is divided into a number of “pavilions”, including the Mission: Space Pavilion, the Land Pavilion and the Spaceship Earth Pavilion (the large golf-ball style structure which dominates the park). Popular rides within the Future World section of Epcot include Mission: Space, Test Track, Soarin’ and The Seas with Nemo and Friends.

The second part of Epcot, World Showcase, is set around the huge lake and features eleven “pavilions”, each of which is themed on a different country: the Mexico Pavilion, the Norway Pavilion, the China Pavilion, the Germany Pavilion, the Italy Pavilion, the American Adventure Pavilion, the Japan Pavilion, the Morocco Pavilion, the France Pavilion, the United Kingdom Pavilion and the Canada Pavilion. These pavilions feature restaurants, gift shops and attractions based on the culture of the countries upon which they are themed.

There is a large car park outside of the main entrance to Epcot, so if you are travelling by hire car, you can park there. If you are staying in one of the resort’s hotels, you can take a shuttle bus to the park and Epcot is also accessible by boat from several of the hotels, Disney’s BoardWalk and Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, and by monorail from the Magic Kingdom. However, Disney transportation can be very busy during peak hours, so travelling by rental car may be the easiest option.

Make sure that you pick up a park map as you enter Epcot, as the theme park is huge and can be disorientating.

In the next post in this series, we will take a closer look at some of the attractions that you can see in the Future World section of Epcot.

Image: Quinn Norton

British Airways estimates that up to 16 million gallons of low-carbon fuel per year could be produced at the site and is planning to be using the fuel in some of its aircraft by 2014.

In a press release issued by British Airways on 15 February 2010, the airline’s Chief Executive, Willie Walsh, stated:

“This unique partnership with Solena will pave the way for realising our ambitious goal of reducing net carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050.  We believe it will lead to the production of a real sustainable alternative to jet kerosene.  We are absolutely determined to reduce our impact on climate change and are proud to lead the way on aviation’s environmental initiatives.”