Hello from sunny Florida, well it was...it’s now 1am. We made it here and what a fiasco it was. I woke up wide awake at 6am. I didn’t need to be up until 7:30am but for whatever reason (nonstop coughing probably had something to do with it) I was awake. I laid there until 6:30am hoping I’d fall back to sleep since I knew what a long day it’d be for us. After laying there for 30 minutes I just decided to get up and have a nice relaxing morning before the crazy hit.
I surfed the internet a little, transferred my $630 Disney reward dollars to my card & unsubscribed to all junk emails that I had been just dealing with for a while so that way checking my email while on board would be much quicker. I have a Outlook type of email program on my macbook, so since Internet on the ship is so expensive, I log on & get all my email, log off, read and reply to them all, then sign back on & send them. So usually I only use about 2-3 minutes of internet time to check & respond to email. I also write my trip report in Pages (word) & then just log on, copy & paste and then log off. Usually takes about 4-5 minutes. I have this down to a science, since my 14 day DCL Transatlantic cruise. I live blogged that two week trip every day and only needed 55 minutes for the two week trip. Matt got up at around 8ish and had some work to wrap up. After I was done with all my little errands it was time for Austin to make his final appearance. I’m gonna miss him! My dad showed up at 9:15am so that I could go get my mani/pedi. The mani/pedi was pretty uneventful, well except for the woman stabbing me repeatedly with the cuticle cutter UNDER my nail. My big toes is still sore from it. I don’t really know what the deal was with that. After I got back, we closed up the suitcases, loaded up, had lunch & said our final goodbyes to Bania & Rocky. We’re off!
We got to the airport early since my dad need to be back by a certain time. We arrived at 12:20 for a 2:15 flight. Rather than flying out of JFK or LaGuardia and have all the hassles that come along with those airports, we fly out of a small local airport in Westchester. This airport is tiny. There is one tiny restaurant/bar, a dunkin donut stand & a news stand. Period. Not the best place to spend some time. Upon checking in we’re informed that our plane is delayed an hour. Ugh. Okay, now we’ll be getting in at 6pm. Still much better than the original 11pm. So We head to the little bar area and Matt spends the next HOUR talking to a guy about sports. Now don’t get me wrong, I love baseball talk but not with a Yankee fan & a Braves fan. Only thing that could make that worse is if a Philly fan joined in. After that fun we headed thru secutiry, but not before treating ourselves to a Boston Cream Donut, and once that was devoured, into the ONE terminal in the airport. It was packed! People sitting all over the floor, standing room only. We spend the next 3 HOURS waiting for our flight to board. They kept pushing it back by 10 minute increments until we hit the two hour mark. We finally took off exactly two hours after our scheduled departure time. The flight was pretty uneventful. It was Jetblue so we had the DirecTV and the gave us the three movies for free due to the delay.
We landed in Orlando to rainy, ugly weather. It’s now 6:45. We still have to get our luggage, check in to our room, drop the luggage, pick up the rental car and then drive the hour and fifteen minutes to Daytona Beach. Once off the plane I hightailed it for the hotel to check in while Matt went to baggage claim. Once I checked in I met him at baggage claim where we waited for an additional 20 minutes for our luggage!!! What is going on today?? So we finally get our luggage, head up to our room and run right out. In this short 5 minuted exchange Matt was able to notice that we were upgraded to a runway view. I didn’t get any pics of the room, because of the time constrains. I’ll get a picture of the view tomorrow morning. We headed to the rental car and we were finally on the road at just before 8pm!! The drive to Daytona Beach is real easy so that was really good. We arrived at the Festival just before 9pm and still hadn’t even had dinner. My cousin met us in the parking lot and walked us in to where my family were all hanging out. Matt got my Uncle really good. They were all manning the ticket table and my Uncle was standing by there with his back to us so Matt walked up behind him and said, “$25 for a ticket?! That’s absurd!!!”. My Uncle turned around and the look on his face was priceless. We thought he was gonna give Matt a right hook until he realized who it was. He was really blessed that we came & we were blessed that he didn’t knock out Matt. Next they handed us cold pizza, which at that point tasted like Palo Brunch to us. We ate that in seconds while greeting all the family. One slice of pizza was not going to do it for us, so Matt got BBQ ribs which he said were really good. I got a corn dog and it was “interesting”. The finale was a deep fried Pop Tart and that was amazing! After gorging ourselves we headed back to the area my family was to spend some time with them while we waited for Matt’s childhood friend, who is temporarily living in the area, to meet us. Once he arrived we headed in to hear some great blues music. It was fun. Great music and a great time with family, old friend & drunk people. I love drunk people- they’re so fun to watch! My favorite was this one couple who couldn’t dance at all but that didn’t stop them. I was cracking up. At around 11pm we decided we should head back. It had been a long day. The drive home was pretty uneventful. We returned the car and on the walk back to the hotel Matt HAD to get a McDonalds double cheeseburger. It was probably the worst double cheeseburger in the history of McDonald’s Double Cheeseburgers.
Sorry this report is more on the dull side tonight. As you know, I’ve been fighting a slight cold. I felt really good today, basically just a runny nose. That was until our decend on the plane. As we were landing I started feeling a sharp pain in my left ear. It was pretty bad the whole time. Once we were on the ground it felt clogged but not the usually airplane way. It felt like I was holding a seashell up to my left ear. Not only am I struggling to hear out of it but it’s aching a little and I’m hearing like whooshing sounds. At 1am it still feels like that. It’s been like that all night. I do get some relief when I tilt my head a certain way it totally clears. Hurray! So it’s been a pretty misrable night for me. Tomorrow I’m going to pick up some “swimmers ear” to see if that’ll help at all.
Well that’s it for tonight. Big day tomorrow. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment