Key West Vacation - Part I

My son and I were on our way to a long promised trip to Key West.

Back in the mid 1990’s, I found myself between jobs and badly in need of some degree of decompression time. I managed to secure a week off between jobs and booked a trip to Key West. It was the first (and thus far the only) time that I actually did a vacation alone as an adult. My son, who was 11 years old at the time, didn’t understand why Dad wanted to take this trip without him. I was a weekend parent due to a divorce three years earlier and would always be sensitive to the absentee parent guilt trip.

I promised my son at that time that when he was old enough (meaning 21), I would take him to Key West as it was more fun to go there as an adult. My truthful assessment at the time… so, here we are a decade later and I’m making good on that long ago promise.

The first two flights went off with nary a hitch.....

Then we got to Miami....

We had a scheduled layover of just under an hour.... We picked up a bite to eat...( The orange peel and two pretzel sticks they gave us on the previous three hour flight had worn off) and proceeded to our gate ten minutes ahead of our "boarding time" - 2:45pm

We met our fellow castaways; the professor and the Howell's were there already.....

Total manifest included five passengers that were scheduled to fly out on a 9 passenger capacity stick of gum with a wing nut and rubber band serving as propulsion....

The highly efficient "chatty Cathy's" that were manning the gate podium we're engaged in a tense debate about the relative merit's of "Rosalita's Ninos...." and apparently didn't make an association that time to board the plane had come and gone. This would explain why all five of us had visited the podium with questions about the status of the flight.

The gate attendants (Chatty Cathy’s both) finally thought it best to make an announcement over the PA system. This, of course, resulted in a debate on who should make the announcement....

The scene being made all the more superfluous because all five passengers are now staring bullet holes through their skulls standing not ten feet away from the podium where this nonsensical debate was taking place.

Anyway... the story that was relayed to the passengers was that the flight was delayed because "the crew" was "tied up" in Customs.

I knew the lucky streak was bound to end at some point.

So we sat.... I did ask why the "tying up” at customs of the crew members wasn't factored into their scheduling and after a little gnashing of teeth, they added "well the flight was late getting back from Cuba."

We were then visited by three large uniformed law enforcement officers with handguns and several stern looking suits who proceeded to confer with the "Chatty Cathy's" (in Spanish of course) about the status of flight 9130.... (A small sigh of relief because our flight was 9131).

The arrival of the cops with the flaunting of high callipered weapons did create a bit more space at the podium because the five passengers all decided to back off about ten paces.
I started investigating car rental avenues at this point.

Well about an hour and a half later, the skipper and his first mate Juan and Carlos (dubious position unrevealed) were sprung from Customs and we were finally on our way to Key West.