Cruise end

The cruise wrapped up, and we took a cab to our Fort Lauderdale hotel by the beach.

It was funky as the dickens. Helen and I had a room that was about ten feet from the bar. This made sleep potentially a problem.

We spent two days exploring the nearby beach and shops, and unwinding from all our unwinding. The night-noise problem wasn't anything. I slept right through it, like usual, and Helen had great success with her earplugs.

My favourite part was swimming in the surf. There were tons of jellyfish, but we same through unstung.

*

Fly-home day sucked.

When we got the machine to spit out our tickets, we got no seats assigned. The screen said that the flight was overbooked, and to see the agent. Lola and Bernie got seats.

We rushed through to our gate, but of course there were no agents there.

Several showed up for the flight before ours, but couldn't help us. Likely they could have, but they were swamped trying to care for their own passengers. They vanished immediately after their flight left.

I went online, and found that the issue was only with our Florida to Chicago leg, and that we actually had seats for Chicago to Vancouver. There were a few seats on Florida-to-Chicago available in the class called EconomyPlus. For $50 each, we could snatch a pair of them. I ran back out through security to try and find an agent. By the time I did, the seats were all gone. The agent did issue us corrected boarding passes showing our second flight seats.

Back through security again. The agents were there, and Helen was on them. I waged in, too. They tried to assure us that we would get on. I stood nearby and waited. They kept asking people to accept a later flight for a $300 reward. They seemed to need 9 seats. A few folks went for the money deal. A couple of folks missed a connection, and their seats went into the pile, too.

We eventually got seats, but not until everybody was already lined up for boarding. Not everybody did.

I hate the airline industry.

Parted with Lola and Bernie in Chicago, as they were flying home to Vernon through Seattle.

We ate while waiting. Our Vancouver flight left half an hour late, but somehow managed to make up the time and land almost on time.

Caught our train and rode for three stops, then walked a km to our hotel.

The next day we set out about 8am. We walked back to the train, and from there every connection went smooth as silk. It went train, walk, bus, ferry, bus, bus and walk. We were home by 2pm., and you can't do better than that.

And then we collapsed.