We Like to Travel!: East to Florida

Tuesday - December 5, 2017

It seems like for every vacation we are obligated to suffer before we get to enjoy days off of work. And the suffering is that we have to get up at 4 am - surely an ungodly hour that the good Lord did not intend for lazy city folk such as myself to be up. It's still dark! It's still the middle of the night!

I had stayed up late on Sunday trying to tie up as many loose ends (packing, mail stop, downloading shows for my mama to watch...) as possible, so I already entered Monday tired - and I worked all day. Well, by work all day it means I went to work, then uh, spent about two and a half hours getting my nails done (my boss said I could! Also...my manicures always clock in under an hour - who knew the new girl at my nail place would take almost 3 times as long????) then cleared off my desk, cleaned my office, set up my out of office emails and voicemail and ran away as fast as I could.

So the night before our trip, I was tired, but also wired and excited. I managed to sleep, but all too soon my alarm started blaring. If it was any other day, I would have sobbed, but being that it was the first day of vacation - I jumped out of bed...because hey, I can still sleep on the plane! Grace and Ed arrive at our place by 4:30 am, we have coffee and a simple breakfast of Chinese breads I had purchased the day before, and we're picked up at 5:15 by our driver Bryan, who I think had been waiting outside for us by 5 am.

Because we cheap, and because we lazy, we booked a direct flight from LAX to Fort Lauderdale on Jet Blue. Actually - Jet Blue was super nice! At least it was super nice as compared to oh...Swiss Air? I had plenty of leg room, the seats were comfortable, and there was lots of TV to watch :)

I had checked us all in the night before, so it was just a matter of printing the tags for our two checked bags (one for us, one for our friend Grace), and going through security. I have Global Entry, Grace and Ed both have TSA PreCheck, and my my parents don't have anything. To all stay together, I paid $20 for "even more speed" so they could use the PreCheck line with us. We were largely successful...my mama's backpack got pulled aside for extra checks. They saw our rice rolls in her backpack and didn't know what those were. Except...she also stuck a jar of fig jam in her carry on. She had a complete brain fart and figured hey, it fit in her TSA quart sized bag so it must be allowed, so she stuck my 4 oz jar of fig jam in her TSA bag and it got confiscated. It was a mostly full jar too (sobbing). Grace and Ed also had their bags checked, because with all the technology available to us now, a bag of rice rolls (sweet rice wrapped around a Chinese cruller - savory ones have some seasoned pork between the cruller and rice, sweet ones have a sugar/peanut powder combination) is what confounds these zillion dollar machine that stands between us and the terrorist. Really?

Anyhoo, we have almost an hour before our flight departs, so we head over to the gate to grab seats since our flight was really full. Because the flight was full, they made an announcement over the loudspeaker that to make space for everyone's bags on our super full flight, they were offering to gate check our bags for free. We jumped at the offer and checked our 3 remaining carry on sized suitcases. My dad was happy, because he felt like he just saved $50. I was happy because literally minutes before the announcement I was regretting being a cheap ass - I wished I had forked over the $25 so I didn't have to lug my (small) suitcase around AND carry a backpack too. Not just becuaes I'm a whiny baby, but because I was worried that we wouldn't be able to find space for all of our stuff on the plane - so the fact that we were able to gate check took a load off my mind - even though if we hadn't, we honestly would have had enough space...because we were boarding group 2 and there was still plenty of room in the overhead bins when we boarded the plane.

So…there was a moron sitting a few row back from us who somehow got his overly large and overly heavy suitcase on board and then BROKE THE OVERHEAD BIN jamming the suitcase in…I've decided I hate him. Hundreds of people on the plane sat there while the staff tried to figure out how to fix the door latch he broke forcing in his big assed suitcase. Then we had to wait while maintenance was called, when maintenance spent time trying to fix it, and when maintenance finally determined they couldn’t repair it in any capacity in a limited period of time. I mean...Jet Blue offered free gate checking for all luggage and clearly his dumb ass didn't take advantage of it - and he ended up delaying and inconveniencing hundreds of passengers - and the crew. Who were probably pissed because they don't start getting paid until the plane backs away from the gate. I hope Jet Blue fined the crap outta that guy.

Okay, rant over. But it does still make me mad. Because this guy broke the overhead bin’s latch, the contents of that bin and its neighboring bin that could slide over were removed, all of it had to be checked, and because the Captain thankfully made the call to just fly without the bin instead of forcing us all to get off the plane, facilities had to tape the bin shut. So not only did the whole plane have to wait for this, the poor people who just happened to sit near him got all their stuff checked against their will because of this guy.

Other than this inauspicious start, the rest of the flight went by pretty quickly, probably because I ended up falling asleep for over an hour. The rest of the time was spent playing games on my phone and tablet, reading, and eating our rice roll lunches and snacking on kettle corn chips the airline gave us. For a 5 hour flight, it passed pretty quickly, probably because we all fell asleep as none of us slept enough the night before.

rice roll - the simple, simple thing that stumped the zillion dollar TSA machines

the inside of my sweet rice roll. I feel a compulsion to take photos of my half eaten food. Don't judge me

Getting off the plane was a slog like always, but get off we did, and fortunately, all of our suitcases made it! We win! We then roll them over in between the terminals to get picked up by Lyft. It was close to 5 at this point, and on a Tuesday, rush hour was in full swing. So the trip, ended up being close to $40, which was still cheaper than booking a limo service, and we had a guy who masterfully fit all of our luggage into his Ford Explorer like an expert Tetris player. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but he found the place fine. I had to convince him to go into the garage though – because the entrance to the Vacation Club is from the grody garage, there’s no outdoor entrance L. The first ten minutes are free – and we told him over and over again that it was free for 10 minutes before he was willing to back up and drive into the garage.

Check in was smooth, and the guy working the desk was polite, but he gave us a weenie room that overlooked the ugly parking garage. The room itself was fine, but the view was kind of not awesoe. The 2^nd bedroom was also locked off, so we couldn’t get in. So I had to trudge down again, and he asked if I tried to open it from the outside. What? Clearly I've never been to a Marriott Vacation Club before, so I used my key, entered the 2nd bedroom from the outside (literally a door down) and unlocked it so we could sleep in it. I loved our room - but I didn't love the rest of the hotel. But I booked it for cheap through VRBO. Booking it through the Marriott website would have been about $500.

The view from our unit. What you don't see? The parking garage below us

The unit was itself was fantastic - it was fully stocked with glasses, mugs, big and little plates, silverware, pots and even baking utensils. So...we did the MOST Chinese thing ever. We bought a roast duck from Sam Woo, froze it, and brought it with us to Fort Lauderdale for dinner. 😆 Yes, we did. We put it in tupperware, ziploc bagged the crap out of it (hoping and praying that the clothes in my mom's checked suitcase wouldn't be coated in delicious roast duck sauce), and also brought with us a bag of uncooked rice. Yeah...we're not type of Chinese people. We did it because 1) we're cheap 2) we didn't have a car, so we'd have to Lyft or Uber to dinner 3) my parents didn't like any of the food options near our hotel (somehow, Hooters just didn't appeal to them) and didn't want to go out just to eat more non-Chinese food they wouldn't love. So my mama literally came up with the idea of bring a duck with us about 2 days before our trip. Oh, we also brought some blanched potato vine leaves with a little tub of sauce. So we had meat, rice and vegetables. I swear my mama could create a full dinner in a tent with a match and a packet of cheetos.

The unit as we enter. The kitchen is to our left, with the living room ahead.

looking towards the kitchen/entrance of the unit

the fully stocked kitchen. I've never used an oven on vacation before!

We heated the roast duck in the oven, my mom made a pot of rice on the stove, and we grubbed. Then we wandered down to the little shopping plaza attached to the timeshare (it was not so awesome, though my mom got a pair of sunglasses for $8 since she forgot hers at home), purchased some severely overpriced water from the 24 hour CVS, and chilled in front of the TV’s (there were 3!) for the rest of the night. I was tired from the lack of sleep over the last two nights, so I was ready to bed down super early. Keep in mind I'm usually a night owl, but multiple nights on 4 hours of sleep took its toll, and I didn't even pull out the sofa bed in our room (we took the lock off studio because there was a sofa bed in there while Grace and Ed took the master with its jacuzzi tub). I showered, threw a sheet OVER the couch, and slept on that. I was so tired I was asleep by 10pm...which was 7 pm in LA. Yeah...I'm an old lady. But I fell asleep thinking that the next day, I get to go cruising for two weeks!