Going home

Fort Lauderdale is a leisurly hour drive from Miami and the airport, we checked out of the hotel at noon and loaded the car up, once you’ve checked out of the hotel and your bags are packed up that’s it - the day is wasted really, we didn't have to book the car back until 3.00pm and the flight home was not until 8.00pm so we had loads of time.
We took a slow drive south back through the Miami suburbs just to kill some time, did a right at the High Street and ended up at the airport just after 1.00pm. So what do you do - dump the car early or carry on driving around the airport perimeter road for another hour; we/she decided we’d drop off the car and check in early, get rid of the bags, have some lunch at the airport, get a paper and think of how to kill six hours until the flight.
It cost me $3 to rent a baggage trolley to load our four enormous bags onto and then found out the Virgin check in desk will not be opening until 3.30pm so we were stuck with the bags for another two hours, but we managed to find a table at Chillies where we could keep an eye on the bags and had a bit of lunch.
The check in desk opened on time and we were well early, we joined a queue of about 10 other couples, when we got to the front of the check in line we had to get Mr Jobsworth America, you know the sort 5’4”, 14 stone with piggy eyes. I asked for the seats near the emergency exits for a bit more leg room, he clicked away on his computer and said ‘Yes sir, there are still exit seats available’. Result, I thought, ‘Can we have two’. Sure you can, $75 each – plus tax, how do you want to pay’. – Pay ?? forget it I said . . . bastard.
Three suitcases were loaded and passed the weight test, one was well under weight but the last one was 8k overweight. We exchanged views on the fact that although this one was overweight, the four suitcases combined are within our weight allowance, but he insisted every individual case had to be 25k or under - and we’d need to repack them.
Now this is at the front of the queue and there are people backed up behind us in the queue and the thought of unpacking the bulging cases here was a nightmare. ’How much if we go to excess with this one bag’. I asked ‘Its $75 per bag’. – You can forget that too, I thought, Can’t you waive that charge, surely this flights not full. In his best monotone computer generated voice with a weasel like smirk, he said - I’m sorry sir, I can’t do that.
Its times like this that you realise being a member of the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club counts for bugger all, so I thought f*** you then, if you want to be pig headed about this I’m not shy, we’ll stand here at the front of the line and unpack the cases for as long as it takes - and all these other people can wait. He obviously couldn’t give a shit - so we did just that.
Having passed that we then had to hump our own bags over to the x-ray scanner and wait for them to be scanned; you can wait and watch if you want, he advised, they do it in front of you, but if you decide to go and let them get on with it and they want to open a case – they’ll bust it open - and reseal it with duct tape - if you’re lucky.
We waited and watched which was a good move as an ‘official’, who looked something like a rogue wheel clamper, decided that he wanted a closer look in one of our suitcases and we were there to give him the combination so he didn’t have to bust it open.
Now standing there and giving the Fed’s the combination number of the suitcase is not the sort of thing you would expect an Al Qaeda insurgent to be doing, but nevertheless having memorised the three digit number, he opened the case to take a look.
I’ve been around long enough to know its sensible to let them get on with it but I was interested in what he was interested in, and watched as he took out a small bottle of ‘Roses unsweetened lime juice’ (I had bought for making the Cosmopolitan Cocktails we had learned about on the ship) and he wiped it down with some explosive detecting pad which he fed into a detecting machine.
This guy had been humping and opening suitcases all day long and I dread to think of the cross contamination mess he'd be in if ever the machine found anything it didn’t like on any of his swabs from mine, or anyone elses suitcase.
The Roses unsweetened lime juice didn’t set off any alarms so I got it back, the case was not damaged and we never got banged up in Guantanamo Bay so it all turned out OK in the end but it reminded me why there is a 3 hour check in for American flights.

Small world II

We had several hours to kill at Miami Airport and having read the first Daily Mail I'd seen for six weeks cover to cover twice I was clicking my heels pondering on whether to have another pizza, when I bumped into an old mate who I was a Sergeant with at Carter Street in the early 80’s; turned out he’d just been on a cruise to the Caribbean and was going back to Heathrow on an earlier flight. Small world innit.

Welcome home

Home overnight on the redeye, arriving back at Heathrow at about 9am, Rebecca picked us up from the airport and dropped us at Victoria – where the trains were all f***ed up due to a frost the night before - welcome back to the real world . .

What now

New boiler, new bathroom bit of decorating and hopefully back to work just after Easter – can’t wait . . . .