April 3 - At Home

I thought this would be the final blog for this trip, but our trip home deserves an entry on to its own.

Yesterday we got off the boat in Fort Everglades Florida.  What a mess with US Immigration.  There were about two thousand people coming off the boat and only six agents to handle the crowd.  We waited "FOUR" hours in a line up to gain entry into the land of free and the home of the brave.  I guess we're not on vacation anymore.

After we got cleared, we went to get a cab to take us to SIXT where we had a car rented for the day. It was a five minute drive.  We were directed to a van by the cab master.  What a scam that was.  It cost us twenty five dollars, but we had no choice because there is a closed shop in the terminal.  We couldn't get the car rental company to come and pick us up because our phone doesn't work in the States and there were no public telephones.

At SIXT the agent quoted me a price for additional insurance of fifteen dollars for the day. I repeat that number and he nodded in agreement.  When I got to the hotel and looked at the bill the insurance was for fifty dollars.  Of course I signed the contract so I had no recourse. 

I asked the agent for directions to I95 to take us to the Miami airport.  He told me to take a right and then another right.  That took us to a dead-end.  It took about ten more minutes to find the on ramp.  Thanks SIXT, this last you'll ever see of me.

The map we received from SIXT for Miami was totally inaccurate. We ended up taking a long circuitous route to get to our hotel.  Because our data plan also isn't available in the US, we couldn't use Google Maps. Of course all the McDonald's and other fast food restaurants which would have WiFi were on the opposite side of the divided road, so we couldn't use them.

Today we went airport to come home.  First we had to return the car to car rental depot attached to the airport.  Google maps had us heading in the right direction but it decided that was too easy.  So it had us turn left when we should have turned right.  This took us to the entrance of a restricted area, forcing us to turn around, go back on the road in the opposite direction for about three miles before we could get turned around in the right direction.

When got to the car rental depot, we found that there wasn't a shuttle to the airport and we would have to use the airport shuttle train to get to the terminal.  There were no luggage carts to be seen, so we had push, pull and tote all our luggage to the Westjet check in counter.

It took the Westjet counter about an hour to check in the four couples in front of us.  Then we found our plane was delayed for two hours.  Thank you for nothing Westjet.

We landed in Toronto about five o'clock.  I have to admit that getting through Canadian customs at Pearson was a breeze.  We off the plane and in our car in less than an hour.  And to make life even better traffic in Toronto was light and moving quickly. Amazing considering it was rush hour.  So we made it home safe and sound three hours later.

In the near future I will write the final entry which will include links to the best of our photos, random thoughts that didn't make the blog until now and a general wrap up.