Day 5: RAINING CATS AND DOGS

As Julie and I awoke, we snuck a peak out the window and saw that it was raining big time this morning. In fact, it seemed to be dumping buckets of rain.

When it was breakfast time, we actually had to walk through big puddles that were up to the our ankles just to get to our favorite brekkie spot Josephine’s for more of that banana crepe.

Once we were done with that, we pretty much spent the rest of the morning just packing our belongings while being glued to the television watching the Mumbai coverage as well as any new developments from Thailand.

It turned out that the Mumbai situation was winding down, but the airport hijacking remained in Thailand.

When 11am rolled around, we checked out of our room, learned that we were charged a $25 cancellation fee for turning in the car a day early and not hiring for that third day, and ate at Josephine’s one last time for a savory curry crepe as well as a pepperoni pizza from the place next door. The pizza took quite a while to come though and when we were done eating, it was time to get to our airport shuttle van along with our belongings and say our goodbyes to the resort.

The ride back to the airport was interesting because the rains still wouldn’t let up. In fact, some parts were raining so hard, that we could see little waterfalls coming down in parallel along the artificial dry walls lining some of the roads. We even saw at least three accidents with one that even hit the cliff (again, probably having more to do with the impatient local driving).

Once back at the airport, we got onto our place with little drama and made it to Miami nearly 50 minutes before the anticipated arrival time.

Well, that’s when things kind of went south. It turned out that we were so early that our assigned gate was occupied. For some reason, they couldn’t move us to a different gate and so we all sat on the airplane for the whole 50 minutes! Very frustrating to say the least because we were hoping to have a dinner before catching the flight back to LAX barely an hour later. Plus, we still had to go through immigration and customs, but at least we didn’t check in any bags.

So we settled on a Pizza Hut dinner, caught our 9pm flight and eventually arrived in LAX at 11:30pm.

When all was said and done, it was 1:30am when we finally got to bed. Unfortunately, it was back to work the same morning leaving home at 5am. I knew I’d be a zombie at work, but I figure that was a small price to pay for an experience that added more variety to our lives.

Well, next up is Thailand, but we certainly hope the political situation there won’t result in any serious problems. We’re already nervous about it even though we still had nearly three weeks to go…