I made it (again)!
10th December 2007
Well, I made it and virtually in one piece. I am now sitting happily in the Comfort Inn Miami. I have about 12 hours until I have to be on the bus to the ship so I should be able to get some sleep and maybe even partake of the complimentary continental breakfast in the morning. All in all, so far so good.
The flight from Brisbane to LA was a bit of a non event. I did have an exit seat, which meant that I had plenty of legroom but they must reserve these seats for people of a larger persuasion because, while I had space in front, the space to the sides was very limited between the two guys on either side of me.
Being able to fly directly from Brisbane is so much better than stopping in Sydney I can not express my happiness. The less times I have to go through security, the much happier I am although having my carry-on bags checked twice before I got on the plane, once when I got my passport stamped and then again at the departure lounge, was starting to get a bit tiring. I wonder if it may have been the mass of wiring that I had stuffed into various pockets of my pack that may have been the cause for some interest. It’s a sad fact of the world today that I have so much electronic gear and need to carry so many chargers and cables. There’s my laptop, pda, iPod and camera and they all need chargers along with sundry other cables that connect them to sundry other devices. But before a couple of people mutter “toys” I have to say that they are all necessary and I would not be able to survive without them.
So, the flight from Brisbane was uneventful but things started to perk up once I got to LA. I only had 2 hours to get off this plane and get on the next one to Miami. I realised that it was going to be tight but I had the comfort of being able to say it was all the travel agent’s fault if I didn’t make it, having booked through a professional rather than doing it myself. Had I done it myself I probably would have booked a slightly later flight to Miami and just relaxed in the departure lounge. But I hadn’t done it myself and was stuck with the schedule as it stood, probably designed for an “everything runs smoothly” scenario. I gathered all my gear, got off the plane and weaved my way through the slower traffic to the immigration queues. Not too bad when I got there and I only had a 15 minute wait until it was my turn. The problem was that he said I was in the wrong queue and had to go and stand in another one. Keeping calm I went and stood in that one only to be told that I hadn’t fully completed the form and needed to fill out the back, the part marked clearly “for official use only” I might add. Finally getting to the right place with the right form I expected to be pulled into an office and interrogated like last time. Fortunately that didn’t happen and I was stamped and passed through to the baggage carousel.
Of all the things that can go wrong when you travel I think waiting at that carousel is one of the most stressful parts. The last time I saw my bag was when it vanished through a rubber curtain on the other side of the world. How it makes it from there to the right plane and then off the plane and to the place where I’m waiting is a mystery and the relief when I finally saw it was even greater than when I had my passport stamped and was welcomed into the USA. Now I just had to get to a completely different terminal, check in and get on the next plane. A fast walk outside through a surprisingly cold Los Angeles morning and I found the American Airlines terminal. Of course the self check in terminal didn’t like me so I had to queue up and do it with a real person. As soon as she saw what flight I was trying to catch she said that I wouldn’t be able to make it, attached a red “hold” label to my bag and sent it down the conveyor belt. Then she started tapping away on her keyboard. A few minutes later and she said that she had managed to get me onto the flight I was booked for but that I only had 5 minutes to get there and I’d better hurry. “Go over there and straight up that escalator” she said, wished me luck and sent me on my way. I got to the escalator, showed my boarding pass and was told that it was for first class passengers only. There was no way the woman was going to let me up so I had to go to the far end of the terminal, up the escalator there and all the way back to a point directly above where I started. The seconds were ticking away.
Now I just had to get through the security check point. I had my laptop out and my shoes off in preparation and shoved them all through the x-ray. I made it through the metal detector without a beep but was then told to wait because I had been selected for extra scrutiny. I’ve been through this part a few times now and it’s not painful, just time consuming and I was fast running out of time. Not that these are people you want to hurry or get offside, so I just had to submit to the pat down and swabbing of my bags and then gather everything up while I tried to figure out where my boarding gate was. Of course it was the furthest one, so I had to trot as fast as my dodgy knees would carry me through crowds of people who must spend their free time doing nothing but wander slowly through airline terminals. As my gate came into view I could literally see the doors being closed and I must have had a look of terror and desperation on my face that was visible from even that distance because he saw me coming and held the doors open. A quick flick of my boarding pass through the machine and I was down the bridge and onto the plane.
From this point on things picked up. I had an exit seat again and I had the row to myself so I was actually able to get a couple of hours sleep. There is no security to go through getting off an internal flight and my bag was among the first on the carousel, probably because it was one of the last on the plane. Having been to Miami International before I knew where to go to wait for the shuttle to my hotel and it was a relatively short wait until it arrived. The drive to the hotel was short, check-in went smoothly and I arrived in my room a good half hour ahead of schedule.
When I first got the email telling me which hotel the company had booked me into I immediately did a search for it. It was not the same one I had stayed at last contract and I was curious whether I had gotten a better one or a worse one. The reviews I found were not very encouraging; in fact I don’t think that I found a good one. I am here to tell you that you probably should not believe everything you read online or at least not everything if you only find extremes. The Comfort Inn may not be the most impressive looking hotel you could stay in but it has all the facilities downstairs that you would need and I can’t help but be impressed by the room. It has to be the biggest hotel room I have ever been in. It’s not a suite as such, being just one room but you could have hours of fun playing hide and seek in the vast expanse. I may even have to pull a chair up to watch TV, rather than lying in bed, because of the distance involved. I’m a great believer in the adage “you get what you pay for” and I’m pretty happy with this free room.
So here I sit, safely and happily ensconced in my Miami hotel room, hoping for the last decent night’s sleep I’ll get for 6 months. Tomorrow I get on a bus for familiar old Fort Lauderdale and my first glimpse of a black and white ship called Amsterdam that will be home for some time. Hopefully it’s going to be a good time, maybe I’ll make a profit this time, definitely I’ll take lots of photos this time and absolutely I’ll have experiences that I’m going to remember forever.
I’m also going to try to write more, shorter messages this time rather than the less frequent but long ones I did last time. We’ll see how that goes.
Greg