A Key West Sojourn

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 already there...

Total five passengers were scheduled to fly out on a 9-passenger capacity stick of gum with a wing nut and rubber band....

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 and that's why all five of us had visited the podium with questions about the status of the flight.

They finally thought it best to make an announcement over the PA system which resulted in a debate on who should make the announcement...when all five passengers are staring bullet holes through their skulls standing not ten feet away.

Anyway, the story that was relayed 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 guns 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) were sprung from Customs and we were finally on our way...

We checked into the hotel and did a fairly intensive pub-crawl last night finally getting back to the room at around 1:00.

It seems the kid can drink... He held his own and was able to walk under his own steam the final block and a half from Fogerty's... He lost his capacity for intelligible speech during our stay at Sloppy Joe's an hour earlier and I believe was on autopilot while we listened to the band at Fogerty's.

Anyway, I peeled my tongue from the roof of my mouth, showered and dressed and will be making my way down to Starbuck's to kill time while I'm waiting on the kid to rise...

See you later…