Departure days don't really count as vacation days in my opinion. All you do the whole time is travel. Arrival days usually have some activity that happens in the vacation location, but departure days all you do is leave. That was basically our experience today. Jess wasn't feeling well from drinking the night before and slept in a while, but I was up at 8:20am getting everything set and ready. I brushed my teeth and put toothpaste on Jessica's so I could pack as many toiletries as possible. I was so organized from the night before, however, that there really wasn't much to do, at least until Jess woke up and I could put away her toiletries and pajamas. I did take the opportunity to chug down the remaining hard cider we had in the fridge because I was not about to throw a full beverage in the garbage, no thank you! She got up around 8:40am and started getting herself ready but she was still feeling sick. She didn't drink that much but Four Loco's are pretty powerful on us and she'd had a weird amount to eat so it made sense she was more sick than her usual hang-over.
At 9am she managed to get herself to vomit (aren't you glad you read this blog) and she felt better. We wondered if the sickness wasn't the alcohol so much as the alcohol and the copious amounts of pasta she had eaten the day before that was upsetting her stomach so much. With the vomiting passed, however, Jess had mostly gotten out of her system whatever as upsetting it and was ready for the day! At 9:30am we hit the hotel Starbucks which had absolutely no prices whatsoever so we couldn't plan in advance what to get to add up to $26 exactly. We had to ask the prices of everything as we ordered, but we got basically three egg and meat sandwich things, one with ham, one with sausage, and one with Impossible, and we had just enough money left over for one cakepop! Our total was $25.90! Perfect! We took our goodies back to the room, stripped the place so housekeeping wouldn't have to work so hard, and set off!
We hit the front desk to check out, check out bill, and order a taxi. Our bill was naturally wrong, as they had only set up the account for one guest to be getting $13 meals free so it was a good thing we checked to rectify that in person (I just had a feeling they were gonna do that), and taxi's were waiting outside already so we were ready to go! No limo this time, just going the regular poor-people way (but not the Algieri Poor People way which would have been walking). It was a flat rate of $19 for the cad ride from the Tropicana to the airport which was great to us and we were there in a few minutes! We arrived at the American Airlines terminal at 10:30am, just as we planned, giving us an hour to our takeoff. We had already check in but we printed our boarding passes and headed up the escalator to security. Jess's bag got pulled cause she forgot to take my tablet out and mine got stopped cause the food I had needed to get checked, but all that was typical and normal and no problem to us! We just waited patiently and chatted with the security guard going through the stuff.
That done we took the weirdly long walk and tram ride to Terminal D, Gate 3. We were there about 10 minutes before boarding began for the first groups but as we were Group 6 we had a while to go. Or so we thought. There as basically no one in any other group besides 6-9 so this whole 'split up people by group to make boarding less congested' thing really didn't work out. On our flight in, Southwest had kept every middle seat separated to promote some form of social distancing, but this American flight was jam packed! We'd gotten an alert the other day that both flights were very full and it was possible we would be bumped. It didn't happen, but we could see how it could with how stuffed this plan was! We were only on that flight for about an hour, and we were barely up in the air before we started the descent towards Phoenix, Arizona. We landed at 12:30pm and our connecting flght took off at 1:30pm so we had a decent amount of time to get wherever we needed to get to in this strange and foreign airport. As we exited we asked the person behind the desk where our gate was, since it wasn't listed on our passes and she told us Gate 10A and gave us directions. It was another fairly long walk but we were already in A so not too long to our next boarding zone. We arrived with 11 minutes to boarding and did a bathroom run before getting in line.
This flight, from Arizona to Florida, was the long one, about 4+ hours, so naturally I was bored most of the time. I like that flying is obviously faster than driving or taking a bus, but goodness it is so dull up in the air. You just sit there. That's it! And I know I like to sit and do nothing in my home all the time but there isn't even the option here of getting up and doing something. You're just stuck sitting still for 4 hours. So stuck we sat for the flight just listening to music, eating our Starbucks sandwiches and a burrito, and half-napping. When the descent started, however, a young child, maybe 3 years old, began crying and getting fairly loud. Jess initially thought he was just scared but we heard him complain that his ears hurt. He cried and screamed the whole 30 minute descent and in that time various people offered the mother gum but she already had gum. The boy just didn't want to have it because he said he was in too much pain to chew. Children are like that aren't that. I felt bad for the poor thing, it's very uncomfortable the first time you're ears pop on an airplane and as I thinka s an adult it isn't as bad (if I remember correctly from my childhood to now). Could just be that it's a foreign feeling as a child though, as opposed to an adult who's accustomed to the sensation.
We landed about 8:30pm, took about 10-15 minutes to disembark, then we texted our mother that we'd arrived. She told us she'd be 20 minutes so we made our way slowly to the arrivals pick-up area and found an empty bench to sit down on. We ate the last burrito, which felt symbolic, and waited for her to arrive. A man was wandering around asking if anyone had a lighter, which no one did, and seemed somewhat upset that 'no one carries a light around anymore' which I thought was funny because 1: We're at an airport. If anyone has a lighter it's shoved deep in their checked bag cause they aren't permitted on flights and 2: You also don't have a lighter, so who are you talking about exactly? I thought it was funny and it amused us until our mother swung by the our car. She'd taken it upon herself as a birthday gift to get it all cleaned for us, so she'd taken it to a car wash, gotten it vacuumed, and steamed the seats. Our car was pretty filthy so it was a very nice treat! We headed from there to Denny's. We'd planned to eat at a different one but because there's like a zillion of them in Orlando we found one sooner and pulled in there. We had a lovely meal of nachos, mozzo sticks, and a Super Slam while we recanted tales and caught up. We gave mom the gifts we'd gotten for her and dad, just fun things. We got her a money fan, a fan that is made out of hundred dollar bills for that cooling sensation of being fanned with $700, and for dad we got him two dice, one that said Ron's Casino and, because it's Vegas, one with his stripper name that said Rod's Casino. This was in reference to a misspelling that occurred on a playbill the year he played Friar Tuck at Robin Hood's Springtime Faire with us and we hoped he would get the joke as we wouldn't see him to explain it.
We were there until about 11:00pm but with Jess and I needing to get home so I could go to work the next day at 9am we had to get moving. The plan had been for mom to stay at Denny's until dad got off work at like 12:30pm when he would pick her up but I said we could drive to the hospital so she could be there for when he drove home. But we ended up missing a turn and dad seemed to be unsure whether mom would even be permitted in the hospital if she wasn't a patient so I said I was fine with just driving her home. Mom felt bad, having planned all of this so Jess and I would be good to head right home after Denny's, but I felt better about her being home where she would be able to relax. We got to her house about 12:30pm and we set off from there to home. One of the ramps we needed to get onto, however, was closed, so our GPS sent us the wildest way to get onto I-4 to get around this ramp issue and it was a whole mess but we got passed it after much panicing and worry. We arrived home at 1am and basically pulled out what we needed for bed from our suitcases and hit the sack, trying to pretend we would be fresh and ready for work the next day.
I meant to post this yesterday but got swept up in taking a luxurious bath-bomb infused bath after work that I missed it. I even had it all written except the drive home. How dare I miss a day on the blog my mother and two friends from up north read! I'm a disgrace! The point though, after our week-long adventure we are finally home and I have to say I'm glad. I like traveling, I like being new places and trying new things, but there's no place I love more than my home. I'd pick there over any place in the world! And I hope no matter where you roam, you too have a sanctuary that you're always somewhere pining to get back to, because what is travel without the fun of being able to reflect and recant when you're finally home. Until next time friends!
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