I’ve done something bad. What sort of dad would travel to Orlando, home of Disney World and Universal Studios, without his children?

I knew they’d be upset. But then I did get them a Nintendo Wii at Christmas, plus I took them to the zoo not two weeks back. So, in a way, they owed me. I also knew that, because of the guilt, there was only one way I’d have even a fighting chance of enjoying my break. I would have to bite the bullet and insist on travelling in total, utter luxury.

What appealed about Florida, and especially Orlando, was the chance to escape the hard grind of my job as a comedian. As I was telling this eight-year-old Filipino tin miner the other day, comedy is the toughest job in the world. Irony is particularly hard work (see previous sentence), so I wanted to go to America where the concept is, apparently, almost unknown. Orlando offered the perfect chance to see how seriously the Americans took the concept of fun in the sun – in an entirely deluxe style.

Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class seemed a good place to start. The great thing about Upper Class is the number of steps you take from your front door to the airport lounge – about six. A limousine picks you up and drives you to a building next to the main terminal, hidden by trees from prying economy-class eyes.

An agent pops out, greets you, checks you in via the lowered car window and takes your bags to be processed (the ability to use your own arms or legs at this stage is optional). The limo then drives you to a special entrance.

Virgin understands that when Sartre said “hell is other people”, he’d probably just got off an economy flight from Heathrow. I didn’t see a single other passenger at the check-in building, nor on the approach to my fast-track security screening. I felt like the bloke who wakes from a coma in 28 Days Later to find London completely deserted.

A difficult few yards followed where I was actually forced to walk and share air with members of the general public (surely a Virgin-logoed sedan chair could be provided?). Finally, I arrived in the Upper Class lounge, with its high-quality food, teddy-bear-soft armchairs and salon offering Ayurvedic massage. It was all too seductive. I had to get out of there, I had a plane to catch (using priority boarding).

Sartre would have appreciated the private pods in the Upper Class accommodation. The seats, all 14 of them, face into the aisle, isolated by half-height walls. I say “aisle”, but the space involved was wide enough for a breakdancer to comfortably perform a floorshow. The chair was able to accommodate the most widespread behind, with a leather “ottoman” for one’s feet.

And there was none of that being forced to wear your headrest-mounted TV screen as a pair of spectacles because the bloke in front of you has leaned his seat back. The nearest human I could see – if you exclude the attendant who was so attending he was effectively a butler – was right over the other side of the plane. I had my silver service four-course meal, enjoyed a change of scenery from a barstool at the permanent bar, but soon I could wait no longer. It was time for the pièce de résistance. The bed.

I pressed a button (well, my butler did) and my seat slowly transformed into a full-length bed, like Tracy Island readying itself to launch Thunderbird 2. I grabbed the blanket and prepared to sleep. Only that wasn’t the blanket, it was the undersheet. The butler produced a seriously togged duvet from the locker and made my bed. Even though it was the middle of the day, I slept the sleep of the truly smug.

I was still dealing with that strange feeling you get on arriving in the States of having fallen into a movie or an REM album cover, when I pulled up at my first hotel in my live-the-dream convertible. The disadvantage of the Grand Bohemian is that it’s downtown, miles away from the theme parks and fun palaces of Orlando. The advantage of the Grand Bohemian is that it’s downtown, miles away from the theme parks and fun palaces of Orlando.

It was immediately clear, as I tried to look relaxed while asking the valet to park my car, that I’d have to park my prejudices as well. This was not what I’d expected from Orlando. The bar and lounge were packed with the young and beautiful (and by young I don’t mean toddlers in buggies), listening to a singer who must have made the last three on American Idol, accompanied on a Bosendorfer piano (worth $250,000, as I found out when I tried to rest my glass on it). On every wall, you saw exquisite works of modern art. I deliberately filled up my bladder to dangerous levels to justify a visit to the fifth-floor restroom. I wasn’t disappointed – about 20 Egon Schieles hung from the wall.

One thing I didn’t see there was a family of any kind – but I sure as hell made up for that the following day at Universal. Universal Orlando is actually two theme parks, separated by a nightlife area: “Universal Studios” itself, themed around movies and TV, and “Islands of Adventures”, themed around books. But don’t expect a Madame Bovary log-flume ride. It’s more Marvel Comics, Dr Seuss and from next year, as most of Orlando will tell you, 20 acres of Harry Potter.

If you’re an adrenalin junkie, then this is the park for you. Personally, I was getting all the adrenalin I needed trying to drive on the right, but when in Rome, or “The Lost Continent Island of Adventure”, you’ve got to ride the roller-coasters.

“Duelling Dragons” is actually two “coasters” (forgive my fluent adrenalin-speak). On three occasions during the ride they come within u o 12 inches of each other, so there’s a lower and an upper height limit – you mustn’t be over 7ft 1in – can you imagine how unhappy the Orlando Magic basketball team must have been? I had a go but the 60mph speed, five inversions, two corkscrews and the zero-G roll left me existentially confused. The obligatory photo showed my 23 co-riders screaming, arms in the air, while my confused face just spelt out a massive: “Why?”

Perhaps I was just too old for rides that moved my stomach at space-shuttle speed to my extremities. With a mid-life crisis brewing, I decided to limit myself to attractions where my feet would remain on the floor. This usually involved putting on 3D glasses in front of a screen, then sitting in a seat having water sprayed in my face, heat blown at me and my chair back prodded and poked – a bit like working in a kindergarten. It can be phenomenally effective though, as with the Spiderman ride, where at one point you feel you’re falling 400ft, or, best of the lot, “Disaster!” where, through the magic of cinema, all the visitors end up in a disaster movie directed by a terrifyingly real Christopher Walken hologram. I laughed and gawped in amazement.

Walt Disney World is roughly the size of Greater Manchester, but with far less rain, and is made up of four distinct parks. Animal Kingdom, by far the largest, is a strangely effective hybrid of theme park and safari park. You come off Disney’s newest roller-coaster, Expedition Everest, with its animatronic yetis, walk a few steps from “Asia” to “Africa” (no passport or jabs required) and see a real gorilla (at least, I think it was real), hulking about its daily business.

It’s easy to be cynical (and believe me, I tried) but this combination of rides and rhinos kept me in an almost permanent state of childlike excitement. Perhaps I should get out more.

Of course, the magic of Disney was made all the more magical by the Fastpass produced by my guide, Hector – a man so competent, entertaining and handsome he was surely designed in vitro by Disney’s “imagineers” (as their designers are called). Any guest at Disney can get a Fastpass for certain rides, allowing you to book for later on that day instead of queuing. Not right to the front, though, and not on every ride. Hector explained that people had such a strong emotional attachment to rides like “Pirates of the Caribbean” that seeing smug VIPs-in-inverted-commas march to the front might prompt, at the very least, a Velvet Revolution. So we queued for “Pirates” with everyone else – quite an enjoyable experience in a sort of “Prince and the Pauper” one-off rubbing-shoulders-with-the-people way. Though I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it.

Magic Kingdom and Disney-MGM Studios offer more traditional Disney fare than Animal Kingdom – the Cinderella castle, the parades etc. Despite my gravitational misgivings, I was keen to go on “The Rock’n'Roller Coaster”, mainly because the premise sounded a little bit ridiculous: riding through an indoor California in a stretch limo-coaster with America’s favourite rock band, Aerosmith. But Disney doesn’t do ridiculous. A 0-60mph acceleration in less than three seconds shook my cynicism out of me and, though digestively challenging, the rest of the ride, with its neon signs coming at you in the dark, was simply brilliant. Even with the Aerosmith soundtrack. Disney Magic? I was starting to believe!

By the time I reached Epcot, I was ready to put on my Mickey ears and take the oath. Epcot is the most adult of the four parks. In fact, Mickey’s presence here is kept to a minimum. I loved the new “Soaring” ride, which suspends you in front of an Imax screen and makes you feel as if you’re gliding over mountains, seas and pine forests, together with appropriate smells. But my thrill-obsessed guide Hector insisted that the astronaut-training simulator “Mission: Space” was the not-to-be-missed attraction. In my view, any ride that boasts that it’s the first to come with sickbags immediately rules itself out of contention, but they’d recently introduced a less intense version so I decided to opt for that.

With the queue for the hardcore ride bursting with adults and children, some of whom must have been no older than six and girls, I took a walk of shame to the far shorter queue alongside, consisting of a mum with a baby, two four-year-olds and an old man with a hearing aid and stick. It was not my finest hour. I survived the milder g-forces and still impressive slingshot orbit round the moon, but as I watched some classic Disney fireworks from the World Showcase – a slightly surreal series of pavilions representing 11 nations, with an Eiffel Tower nestling close to a Japanese pagoda (the UK pavilion has a Fish’n'Chip shop, a real pub and a mock Tudor shop selling David Beckham after-shave and Flakes for $2.50) – I couldn’t help but sense a slight disappointment at my lack of theme-park cojones.

Fortunately, I’d now moved to the Ritz Carlton, quite close to the parks as the crow (or Dumbo) flies, but half a hemisphere away mentally from the scene of my man-failure. This was a hotel that liked to kick off its shoes and revel in its own luxury. Want a king-size bed? Have two! Toilets? Have two of them as well! My machismo may have failed me on the big rides but I was certainly man enough to appreciate a good sunset from my balconies (two of them) with their view over the huge pool and the lake and the golf course and the forest. And not a roller-coaster in sight.

Further healing came with a trip to Winter Park. Just a short drive from the theme parks through suburbs with clapboard houses and immaculate, Twin Peaks lawns, this university town felt like a piece of real America. It was like being in It’s A Wonderful Life, except in colour. My walk slowed from the 1920s newsreel pace I’d adopted in the theme parks to a leisurely saunter as I strolled past the craft shops and galleries and eclectic restaurants of the main street, Park Avenue. I dawdled at the Farmers’ Market, tasting the outrageously perfect local oranges and the best kettle popcorn since records began, then wandered into the Morse Museum of American Art to see the world’s largest collection of Tiffany stained glass. Lit and arranged like a church inside, this felt so far from the parks that even thinking of the Rock’n'Rollercoaster was enough to give me the bends. Which for all I know is something some thrillseekers would pay good money for.

Replenished and renewed, I weighed up my options. There are plenty of possibilities for the middle-aged man in Orlando. Disney alone offers fishing, golf courses, paragliding and, if your mid-life crisis is really acute, 18 laps of Nascar racing car driving.

In the end I decided Skyventure offered the perfect compromise between adventure and putting my back out. Skyventure offers “indoor” skydiving. After a brief training session, you dress up as Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Then you step into a huge funnel, effectively a vertical wind tunnel, where the breeze keeps you hanging in the air as if you were sky-diving. If you’re any good, you can shoot up 30ft and hover like a wind-whipped Peter Pan.

My first attempt was more carpet-Hoover than skydive, but my trainer Giacomo, who works in real estate during the day, took pity on me. He steered me to the top of the funnel. My heart was pumping, the adrenalin was flowing and, sadly not for the first time in my life, it had taken an estate agent to do it.

The parks no longer held any fear, so I headed over to Seaworld. Part-theme park, part-aquarium, here you can feed the dolphins and ride another suicidal roller-coaster (though not at the same time). Seaworld is known for its killer-whale show, but I preferred the dolphin show, which makes Cirque du Soleil look like a poor Monday night at a Working Men’s Club – acrobats, divers, dolphins, parrots, even for one moment a condor, all working together. Later, I found out that the trainers can get their killer whales to wee into a cup. Now that’s a show I’d like to see.

I had one final indulgence left before I returned home – a swim with a dolphin at Discovery Cove. Built to look like a tropical island retreat with thatched huts, crystal-clear water and appropriately exotic insect noises (presumably recorded), the genius here is that they never allow too many people in. On the day I went there were about 250 “guests”. I felt like I had the place to myself.

My dolphin was called Dexter. A cute little smiley chap (aren’t they all?), he was three years old – a teenager in dolphin terms – and judging from his eye for the lady dolphins, his hormones were certainly playing up. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful but I have to admit the ride didn’t quite live up to expectations. It was a little too short. And where were the g-rolls, the inversions, the vertical loops? Perhaps the theme parks had got to me after all. Besides, somewhere in my heart of hearts, I couldn’t quite believe that Dexter wasn’t animatronic.

I finally found my dolphinesque inner peace snorkelling in the Cove’s “coral reef” with thousands of fish and huge rays over six feet across. It was the sort of calming, inspiring, happy experience that even Disney would be hard-pushed to create and I vowed to return to Orlando as soon as possible.

Maybe next time I’ll bring the kids.

Maybe.

This article first appeared in The Independent. My kids still haven’t forgiven me.

The thing is, I’m a nervous traveller. It’s not the flying; it’s everything else. I always leave heaps of time to get to the airport before check-in, usually about a month, and I always overpack – I need two suitcases and a deluxe carry-all with trolley option just to get the morning paper. I exaggerate of course, but, as my family will vouch, only slightly.

Still, even I couldn’t say no to a trip to Mexico to cover the celebrity opening of a luxury hotel to be attended by, among others, Cindy Crawford. Besides, this was my chance to be a different sort of traveller, the sort of rugged, confident type who doesn’t take seven pairs of underpants for a three-day trip. Ruggedly, I went online to look up my destination: Cancun, on the Caribbean coast. According to legend, Cancun was founded in the 1970s when Mexico’s tourist planners fed various data into a computer (sun, sea, available land) in an attempt to come up with the perfect resort. OK, as founding myths go it’s not exactly Romulus and Remus, but it worked.

Despite its vulnerability to hurricanes (I don’t know how the computer missed that minor detail), Cancun soon outstripped Acapulco as the Mexican Las Vegas, America’s Ibiza for kids ready to go out and enjoy their first legal tequilas.

It was when I changed planes in Miami that the Cancun demographic hit home. It looked as if everyone over 35 had been siphoned off at the check-in desk and herded on to a bus, which is probably even now still sitting on the Tarmac. Only the young and beautiful had survived. And me.

Throughout the plane, groups of boys and groups of girls were noisily trying to make groups of a boy and a girl. Undaunted, I remained focused and professional, and began studying my publicity pack as the girl next to me asked a black guy whether it was really true what they say about black guys. The hotel I was heading for was the ME Cancun, run by Sol Melia, one of the largest hotel operators in the world. “ME” is their new luxury brand. I don’t speak fluent PR, but it sounded incredibly hip, with ” Experience Managers” and an “Everything is Possible” service appealing to “travellers with a common psychographic” (as opposed, I suppose, to “demographic”). I feared it was all a little too hip for a man whose prize possessions on this trip were the new linen suit he’d bought for £70 from H&M and a jumbo-sized bottle of Pepto Bismol. I wasn’t even sure how you pronounced “ME”. Was it “me” as in “myself”? Or “ME” as in the disease, which seemed a bit unlikely.

But as soon as I’d swept through the hotel lobby, with its New World sense of space and clear conviction that it’s actually an über-cool art gallery, I knew that I’d have to leave my cynicism at the front desk for the duration of my stay.

And then I saw my room. It wasn’t just the sheer size of it. It was all the toys. The iPod dock with surround sound; the large plasma telly; the ” rainstorm” showerhead wide enough to soak every bit of all but the largest American. By the time I looked out of my fifth-floor window I was ready to phone down and get them to break up my cynicism into little pieces and distribute it to the poor. The beach seemed so close I practically checked my feet to make sure they weren’t getting wet. It was as if they’d held a sandcastle competition on the beach a couple of years ago, where one kid had built a sandcastle with a moat, one had built a castle with a little flag, and one had built an 11-storey hotel in a horseshoe shape with 448 rooms, a spa complex, three main pools and a nightclub. I imagine he was the winner.

I rushed down to the beach like a child at Christmas running downstairs to see if Santa’s been. (Maybe I ought to get out more.) VC It was night-time and the most ridiculously beautiful full moon hovered over the sea, as if someone – probably one of the Experience Managers – had hung it there. It was perfectly parallel with the middle of the hotel. There was something a little bit Da Vinci Code about it (“when the full moon is aligned with the ME hotel and the pasty-faced Englishman…”), something a little bit Truman Show. It was just too textbook beautiful.

By daylight, it was clear this was The Truman Show. The sea was as turquoise blue and clear a sea as I’ve ever seen – and I’ve watched Pirates of the Caribbean 1 and 2. The beach itself, which the locals claim is the most beautiful in the western hemisphere (haven’t these people been to Blackpool?), was postcard-white, and sprinkled with just enough of the young and gorgeous to make it picturesque without feeling in any way crowded. Beer guts and stretchmarks were clearly banned under Mexican law. Timidly, I stripped off – the whitest man in the western hemisphere – and lay on a sunbed.

They take the idea of a sunbed literally at ME. All around the pools and along the beach are king-size beds. Some of them even have their own thatched roofs to keep you shaded. There are beds in the bar areas as well where somehow they seem to really fit in. It’s surely only a matter of time before Phil Mitchell and Dot Cotton are lolling on a king-size down the Queen Vic.

And then there’s the music. If you like silence, then get thee to a Mexican nunnery. Here, it’s music everywhere – the bars, the lobby, the pool, even the beach. It starts in the morning somewhere to the left of Sting circa his rainforest years, then gets more upbeat and techno as the day (and night) goes on. It worked for me. As I plastered on my factor 112, capable of withstanding a small nuclear explosion, I was starting to feel just a little bit hip.

That evening, only slightly confused by my meal of some traditional Mexican, er, sushi (international cuisine being part of the ME “psychographic”), I decided to sample Cancun’s famous nightlife and headed for a club whose very name conjured up a sense of elegance, style and sophistication: Coco Bongo. This was the Cancun my friends on the Miami plane were heading for. I feared the worst as I queued next to a bloke with a T-shirt set out like an optician’s chart saying: “READTH/ISWHIL/EICHE/CKOUTY/ OURT/ITS”. But I was soon whooping and cheering like a crazy man as dancers and acrobats acted out pop videos and scenes from films on stage and high above the dancefloor: a Mexican Madonna “Like a Virgined” for us; Spider-Man swung from ropes above our heads. Every now and then a siren rang and huge clouds of what my fellow clubbers reckoned was oxygen was pumped at us to keep us from tiring. It was only when I found myself cheering a dwarf on a trapeze dressed as Beetlejuice who then stripped to reveal he was wearing a bra that I began to suspect they were actually pumping in a gas that removes your critical faculties.

Walking back into ME after Coco Bongo it was a miracle we didn’t get the bends. The hotel is so flawlessly tasteful, so perfectly cool, you can’t even get annoyed with its coolness. Earlier, they’d shown us how each area of the hotel has its own smell: coffee and vanilla in the internet bar, cucumber and melon in the lobby, etc. Every sense is subtly massaged. If these guys ever turn to the dark side, they’d make excellent torturers. They also showed us the VIP rooms – not that much better than ours, give or take the odd Jacuzzi, though if you can’t be bothered to bring your own iPod you can phone ahead, tell them your musical taste and they’ll put one together for you. As the blurb said, “Everything is Possible”. I was starting to believe.

The next day, the day of the party, there was a buzz at breakfast. Cindy Crawford was there. A US colleague asked me to swap seats so they could see what Cindy was having (muesli, so not exactly a scoop, I’d say.) As for me, I didn’t have time to sit and watch a supermodel digest. I wanted to check out Ciudad Cancun, or, for those of you who speak guidebook: “downtown” Cancun. Cancun is really a tale of two cities (of two ciudads?) – the Zona Hotelera with its hotels and luxury shopping arcades, situated on a strip of land so freakishly narrow it was bound to have been bullied at school; and downtown – a busy, humming Mexican city with shops and markets and, as far as I could tell, a complete absence of pedestrian crossings. I spent so long stranded with a Mexican lady in the middle of one road that when I finally tried to leg it in front of a truck it was her life that flashed in front of me, not mine. Still, it was good to glimpse the real Mexico – loud, friendly, with sheltered squares and grocers and people who didn’t have perfect teeth.

It was also good to confirm the odd stereotype. Even in the tourist markets the Mexicans are so laid back they hardly bother to hassle you. Most of the shopkeepers just sat in hanging chairs, eyes, at most, half open under their cowboy hats, as if auditioning for an part in a Clint Eastwood western. I was almost disappointed not to be called “gringo”. At least their relaxed attitude allowed me to have a good look round their wares. These ranged from garish ponchos and outrageous sombreros so huge they were like a visual aid for that schoolboy joke showing a Mexican on a bicycle from above, to more subtle, traditionally made, Mayan clothing: the sort of thing that would have got you instantly elected president of the Islington CND back in the 1980s.

Jewellery is a local speciality, with a lot of silverware, but my eye was caught by the traditional Mayan flutes. These are shaped (and coloured) like a penis, with holes along the, er, shaft. Like the real thing, they come in different sizes, but intrigued though I was to see if the bigger flutes played lower notes, I wasn’t quite at ease enough with my sexuality to put one to my mouth in public and try. Instead I went for a hammock. Because of the weak dollar, your pound goes a long way in Mexico, but I was still so happy I’d bartered the price down to £20 (something the pre-ME me would never have done) that I totally forgot the damn thing would be murder to get home – where I had nowhere to put it. Anyway, I couldn’t wallow in triumphant haggling. I had to be ruthless, tough, uncompromising, and get back to ME for a “Colour of Turquoise Spa Ritual and Massage”.

Normally, nothing makes me tenser than a massage. There’s the whole pants-on/pants-off question, whether you’re meant to talk or not, anxieties about erotic thoughts entering your head and their embarrassing consequence which then guarantee that erotic thoughts enter your head, etc etc. But the card with my free bedtime gift of perfume the evening before said today’s motto was “Dare ME!”, so I dared.

It started badly. I couldn’t work out which hole in the disposable pants they gave me I should put my foot through so I ended up tearing them and asking for another pair. As a punishment I was taken into a room and brutally exfoliated. The lady rubbed some stuff into my skin which she later revealed was cloves, ginger, grapes and rice – basically, she’d covered me in food. It was the first time that had happened since a rugby club dinner when I was at university. I was then put in a bath and pummelled with jets of water while she pressed down on my face with an aromatherapied flannel. And for this people pay money? Finally, I received a full massage and – would you believe it? – by the end I was so relaxed I forgot to laugh when she tinkled a little bell over my body’s four compass points. I’m no expert, but a journalist whose only job is to travel the world and write about spas (it’s tough, but someone’s got to do it) said it was one of the best she’d ever experienced.

Relaxed, exfoliated and smelling of food, I headed for the party. Rumours that George Clooney and Shakira were coming turned out to be false, but it didn’t matter as some weird Sorcerer’s Apprentice effect kept depositing more and more beautiful young Mexicans through the front doors of the hotel. I chatted by the lifts where a couple in a bed with white satin sheets writhed together, but tastefully, the ME-way. I downed sublime melon gazpachos in tequila glasses, unconcerned about the two-yard exclusion zone my garlic breath inevitably created. I danced to DJ Skribble, even though I wasn’t so sure about his taste – a scratch version of The Carpenters’ “Please Mr Postman”? Surely not. But by then it didn’t matter. ME (pronounced “me”) had got me. I was smiling, chilled, probably taller and definitely younger than I had been when I arrived. I was one of the beautiful people. Truly, everything is possible! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. Cindy’s waiting…