DAY NINE - Tuesday, December 15, 2015
BEYOND EXHAUSTED
After getting up at 4:30 am in Barbados, I arrived back in Miami this morning right before noon on American Airlines. Getting through the Miami Airport is getting through a series of mazes and long lines. I don't know how people with children do it and I certainly don't know how old people and people coming in from other countries do it - dragging luggage, more security checks, passport and immigration stations and signs pointing left and right!
When you get off the plane, you are directed to a machine where you stick your passport for scanning. The machine asks a lot of questions about where you've been and what you have on you. Then it takes your picture and prints out an ugly copy of your tired frowning face with other pertinent information. Then you go down a series of hallways, tunnels and steps to wait for your luggage to come down the belt before taking that ugly photo of yourself and dragging your luggage to "the immigration man."
After waiting for about thirty minutes, my luggage finally came down the shoot. (You always think it got lost.) I grabbed it and headed to the immigration check point which appeared to have a short line, but all of a sudden a bossy looking woman shouted "CLOSED," pulled the barrier across our path and angrily directed us to a long line at the other end of the hall. That line suddenly got longer and longer behind us.
Just when I was about third to reach the end of the line, the officer at the booth grabbed the woman in front of me, pulled her and her luggage out of the line and took her into a room to be searched! I don't know if she was carrying "drugs" or what, but it scared me. It was like that TV show about drug smuggling in foreign countries and being arrested in their airports!
After that check-point, you re-check your luggage to your final destination - in my case, Louisville. I was glad to get rid of it again!
Even though going through customs took time, there was still a long seven hour layover.
Because of that, like last time, I rented a Miami Airport Hotel Day Room within the terminal itself. For @$90 you can use a day room from about 9:00 am to 6:00 pm to take a nap, bring up some food, take a shower, use your computer, read or just chill in privacy. It's better than seven hours sitting in a plastic chair in a crowd of people or walking till you drop.
When times come to board the plane, I will just go downstairs, go through screening again and go to the gate to board the American Airlines plane for Louisville and be home by 11:00 pm.
It was a long hard trip, the last of the FIFTEEN exhausting speaking trips in FOUR countries that I agreed to do this year, so I will be glad to have a few weeks off to rest at home till it all starts up again. Click the MY TRAVEL SCHEDULE bar at the top of the blog. It's already filling up and there are more to be scheduled.
WELCOME TO "RETIREMENT?"
Glad you made it through all this so far -- sounds exhausting!
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