Day 364

Manpan915">
2011-07-01 22:11:48 +0000, a photo by Manpan915 on Flickr.

I've never been so happy to see a shower and a bed...

So the day started out great! We woke up at 6:30am, drove to Philly airport with almost no traffic. We checked in with no trouble. We sat at the bar at 9:45am and ate breakfast complete with a bloody mary! We got on our flight. It left on time. Little to no turbulence. I met GREAT people on the plane that I sat with. Maureen from Philly, she has 3 kids and works in a cafe. She was on her way to New Orleans to visit her sister. And then there was Trina. Trina was a 75 yr old woman from Caracas, Venezuela, who spoke NO English and required me to translate almost the whole trip...

AND THEN...

The pilot comes over the loud speaker and says we can't land in Miami because the airport shut down due to inclement weather. And so our nightmare begins.

We start circling Miami and did so for about and hour until we were informed that the we were running out of fuel and that Miami was still closed. We were going to have to land in Palm Beach which is also bad due to the weather but it was better than Miami. I was dizzy and nauseous from circling and I just wanted to land. Meanwhile, Muareen and I are joking about crashing and making the most of our trip and I trying to translate to Trina, who has now earned the nickname Mamacita, what going on. I was hoping I wouldn't mess up and mistakenly tell her the plane was going to crash! lol

We finally landed in Palm Beach and every 5 min we were told something different. We could get off the plane and wait while we refueled. No, we couldn't get off the plane. Yes, we could get off and try to arrange other travel plans but only if we didn't have bags checked. Everyone with checked bags had to stay on. Oh, and it was gonna be 2.5 hours until they fueled up. Then we were told, after everyone complained about being hungry and feeling sick, that we WERE allowed off the plane to get something to eat but that we had to hand our boarding passes to the clerk. At this point we were on the plane for about 6.5 hours for a 3 hour flight. I WANTED OFF!!!!

We landed in Miami around 10:25pm and the next flight to Curacao was leaving at 10:40! We RAN to the next gate, including a trip on the Skytrain! We barely made it but was thankful we did. The flight went smoothly and we landed in Curacao around 1:30am, only to find...

Our luggage was MISSING!!!!!

At this point I just had to laugh...

Our shuttle was actually at the airport to pick us up and take us to the resort which was 40 mins away. So when all was said and done, we were checked in and walked into our room sometime around 3am!