The Houghs' Return to Florida: Day IX (Epilogue)

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Day IX

There and Back Again

We spent most of this morning cleaning up the condo, doing last-minute laundry, and packing up all our suitcases and carry-on luggage.  As we were getting ready to leave, the girls took one last, long look out at the scenery from our balcony.  They were pissed they couldn't swim in the pool this morning, but they'd live.

Jet-skis zoom across the lake behind our condo.  You couldn't pay me enough to do this.  Don't you know what kind of prehistoric horribleness lives beneath the surface of Florida's waterways?  F***ing alligators, people.  And they eat people all the damn time.

Heading down to the car one last time, sad to leave our condo.

These back-up screens (or whatever the hell they're called) are pretty handy.  Kris has one in her van, obviously.  They didn't install them in 2005 Ford Focuses for some reason, I don't know.

We dropped off our Kia to Hertz by the designated time without issue, and neglected to pay for a shuttle to our terminal (it was seriously a three-minute walk, no thanks.)  We checked our large suitcase - which this time was filled with a crap-load of souvenirs, shoes, toiletries, and the majority of the clothes (in order to keep the weight down) and worked our way through the TSA security points.  Me and Kris' carry-on backpacks were super heavy - we had off-loaded all the heavy and fragile items from the large suitcase to avoid having to pay for an overweight checked bag - so we were happy to be able to finally set them down when we arrived in our terminal.

While we rested for a bit, the girls went into a couple of the airport's last-chance souvenir stores:  they had one for NASA and Cape Canaveral, one for Disney, one for Universal, and one for Sea World.  The girls went in the latter three, not caring about space travel in the slightest, spending the most time in Sea World (of course.)

The girls once again gravitated towards the stuffed animals, but we were able to deter them without too much hassle.

Checking out different shops around the terminal.  We had about an hour to kill before our flight, so we didn't have any problem with this.

Having checked out all the stores in the terminal, we boarded the tram to our Gate. . .

The girls were still big fans of the tram, even after a week of roller coasters and simulators and everything in between.  It's the little things in life, folks.

We arrived at our gate about twenty minutes before we were scheduled to start boarding.  Our luck wasn't as good for the return flight, though - when I checked in 24 hours before our scheduled flight, we were stuck with seats in the farthest back row.  Of course.

Killing time before the flight.

They had a cool little movie theater set up in our gate, which was filled other kids from our scheduled flight. . . and this random lady that insisted on sitting in the front row, obscuring everyone's view behind her.  What the hell, lady.

Then, as our kids were all watching Moana on the theater screen, disaster struck:  the crew found a huge problem in one of the plane's engines.  They had already loaded up all of our luggage underneath the plane at this point, so seeing this kinda shit right before you board with your family is pretty unsettling.  Our flight was delayed an hour while the plane techs checked out the problem(s). . .

Then it was delayed an additional 45 minutes, as more and more mechanics were called out to repair the engine problem.  No one in the gate was cool with this.  How hard is it to drive another plane up to the gate and use that one instead?  Anyway, while all this was going on, I walked up to the gate service desk and politely inquired if it'd be possible to get seats for my family closer to the front of the plane.  Impressed by my politeness - the poor desk attendants had been dealing with irrational assholes blaming them for the plane's problems for hours now - they bumped the Houghs up from Row 45 to frickin' Row 23 (booya), and thanked me for my patience.  Whatever it takes, America.

Seriously, now.  How comfortable would you be flying on this piece of shit after watching guys work on one of it's engines for two hours?  It was, like, 100 degrees outside, and I can't imagine these guys were giving their work 110% out there - I can't even form sentences when it's that frickin' hot outside, let alone do a bunch of sophisticated tests on an airplane.

At long last, after two and a half hours of waiting, the mechanics said "good enough," and stopped working on it.  The Captain gave the all-clear to board, and we settled into our much-nicer seats for our return flight to Detroit.

Long story short, we didn't die on the way back to Michigan.  We had a good flight back home to the Mitten, and once in Detroit we gathered up our luggage and made our way outside, where Kris' aunt Melanie picked us up in Kris' van.  We dropped her back off at Uncle Wayne's and then began the two-hour drive back home to Midland, where we finally arrived around 10pm.  It was a great vacation, and we lucked out in so many different ways.  We've already decided that we'll be returning in 2020 or 2021 to do a Disney Cruise and a few Disney theme parks with the Voigts (we're funned out with Universals.)  Florida is too much a part of our lives now, having lived there for nearly a decade and created so many roots down there, so we'll just have to accept the inevitable.

- Fín -

- Brian