Today we flew to Fort Lauderdale.
Leaving the house: mostly smooth, only ~10 minutes late. Driving to the airport: easy. Dropping the family and luggage off at the terminal: seamless. Economy bus: waiting for me as I walked up. Checking bags: 5 minutes. Security (TSA Pre): 2 minutes. Even Starbucks was fast1. Having Raleigh-Durham (RDU) as our home airport has been a blessing for us: large enough that it has some direct flights to interesting places (like Iceland) but still small enough where it’s not overwhelming. That’s not to say it hasn’t been chaotic at times, but at least it’s organized chaos.
The wheels fell off the cart once we landed in Fort Lauderdale, though. We landed 10 minutes early, and then it took Delta 55 minutes to get us into a gate2. Then Uber was saying 25+ minutes for an UberXL so we got a cab3. Then when we got to our hotel, 30 minutes after check-in, not only was our room not ready but their machine to cut keys (a big part of a hotel’s operation!) was not working. They did provide a $50 voucher to the restaurant, so we went there to kill time and have a snack.
Once finally in our room, I vegged out and destressed. This is where old me would’ve wandered down to the bar for a Scotch or two. I settled for a Heineken Zero instead. Oh, two more hotel ‘misses’ today: that was the last Heineken Zero they had, and they ran out of mint to make my backup drink, a virgin mojito. Trying not to take these as signs… of something, I don’t know. I’ll just stick with the “full-bodied” Florida tap water instead, I guess.
The taxi driver had a handy book that shows which cruise ships are in port each day. Today was 8. You could really feel it at the airport and during check-in at the hotel. Tomorrow is 7, so I’m expecting a degree of chaos in getting to the port and onto the ship.
For the evening we had sandwiches from Publix4 in our room and then turned in early.
Footnotes:
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Remarkable for an airport Starbucks. ↩
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The general flying public is super understanding about what it means to be on an active taxiway and how that impacts their getting up and moving around the cabin. 😐 ↩
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We took a cab, available immediately, instead. It was fine, and the same price as what Uber was quoting. Hmmm. ↩
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Publix continues its proud tradition of making deli subs with no concept of space or time. ↩