Bananaman, meet Monkey and Gloria

Rockapella Cruise

Day 1 -- Saturday, January 22, 2011

Miami Beach

On Friday night, I had a wonderful birthday dinner with a bunch of friends at Catal.  I had packed pretty much everything beforehand, but didn't want to go to sleep when I got home, for fear that I wouldn't wake up in time for my very early flight.  So I stayed up to blog the Line of the Day and finish up whatever before the wee hour of the morning when Bananaman and  I needed to leave.  Yes, Bananaman joined us on the trip!  After all, this was partly a birthday present to myself, and it was still January.

I drove over to the Everetts' house, parked my car there, and their very nice friends drove us to the Ontario airport.  I had tried to weigh my bag before leaving my house, and wasn't really sure whether or not I'd need to distribute the weight a little bit more to my carry-on bag.  You know, if the stupid airline would just let us have at least one bag free, I could have checked two bags and been just fine, but no.  I missed Southwest even while I was packing.  Anyway, much to my delight and surprise, my very pretty and very new luggage was a grand total of 50.00 pounds.  PERFECT!  What a great start to the trip!  This made me so happy that you wouldn't think that I was a non-morning person going on NO SLEEP. 

My seat on the plane was on the aisle, just as I had chosen it.  Someone had asked if I would switch to their middle seat so that they could sit with whomever, and I declined because I knew it would be a long, uncomfortable trip.  I felt bad about it because someone had switched for me before on another trip, but then I remembered that I chose my seat way ahead of time, so why didn't they do that for themselves?  Perhaps those were the only seats left.  I don't know.  I was just annoyed again that I wasn't on Southwest, because then maybe I wouldn't have cared as much about the fact that I had done my job of buying my flight months in advance so that I could choose my own seat without having to sit between two strangers. 

When we arrived in Houston, we took a very long walk to the other terminal for our plane change.  As I was getting something to eat (the other part of the Sandwich Crew had, of course, bought sandwiches at Subway), Liz arrived at the gate as she was going to be on the same plane for the last leg of our flights (she had flown in from LAX). We landed in Miami and contacted Jenn, whose flight arrived a little bit after ours.  We walked a very long way (but this time with very heavy luggage in tow) to get to her terminal.  Really, Miami Int'l, you need to have a shuttle system that goes around the airport for free, or at the very least, have people that can tell you that the terminal you want is hella far from your current terminal.  I mean, I know that I was exhausted, but this did not help.  Jenn's luggage took a while to be available, so we were treated to a tantrum by someone who was not a 2-year-old.  (No, it was not one of the PellaPosse). 

Jenn and the shuttle driver seemed to have some kind of weird miscommunication, but we eventually found him after dragging our luggage across several lanes of traffic and back a couple of times.  He was very talkative as he gave us a little tour through Miami on the way to the hotel. 

Ah, the hotel.  Jenn had very generously used her Starwood points for the PellaPosse to stay gratis at the Four Points by Sheraton Miami Beach.  Thank you, Jenn!  Liz and I stayed in Room 909 (the area code to the I.E.!  This made the Everetts happy).  We notified Karla that we had arrived.  Then I heard 3 knocks at the door like this:  knock knock knock "Sherry?"  knock knock knock "Sherry?" knock knock knock "Sherry?".  So I ran to the door to find Ms. Karla herself, giggling all the while in her Sheldon-ness.   Stacey was there, too!  They talked about the walk that they took this afternoon, and the saga of Stacey not having luggage.  Stacey had taken an earlier flight than planned, and the airline assured her that her bag would be transferred with her.  Unfortunately, they had stayed on the delayed flight, and now nobody was available to transport her luggage to the hotel.  Ooh, American Airlines was getting an earful from our Stacey.  Because Bananaman isn't enough for me to carry in my purse, Karla gave me a cute little pink hippo that we named Gloria (after our ship, the Glory).  I gave them their PellaPosse shirts, which prompted Stacey to be thankful to at least have one other shirt to wear for the cruise.  We agreed on a time for dinner, and I went to Jenn's room to prepare goody bags for the Posse.  Since Jenn had been on several cruises before, she had little treats for us, like little white boards, adhesive notes, pens, confetti guns, and nail files.  I added the other shirts to the bags. 

My friend Drace was disappointingly not available to join us for dinner, so we ate at the hotel restaurant, the Sungrass Cafe.  I had the special, which was salmon on fried rice with a Greek salad and a slice of chocolate cake, with a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, which came with the dinner.  How nice!  I would have rather had some tiramisu, but the restaurant was all out of tiramisu, lava cake, and key lime pie.  Whatevs.  Jenn pretty much expected at that point that we would just have yogurt and granola.  The bread was served with roasted garlic on the side, which made Wendy and me giggle because we know who likes that stuff. 

Karla and Stacey had a very nice view of the moon and the beach from their hotel room.  We were all given free bottles of wine in our room, which we all agreed to take on the ship.  I made sure that Liz packed it in her carryon as per the cruise instructions.

By the time we went to bed, Stacey's luggage had still not arrived.  She had skipped dinner in order to wait in the room, and she still didn't have luggage?  We were angry at the airline right along with her. 

Exhausted and excited at the same time, we turned in for some shuteye.

Good night, Miami!

This is from the next morning, but I didn't take any pics that night.