Day 0: Heading to Florida

[elfs]

Waiting to board the plane.

Omaha, Kouryou-chan, Stormy and I are currently on vacation in Florida. We've left behind a house-and-cat-sitter and taken to the air.

The flight from Seattle to Charlotte, NC, was about four hours, from 10:45am to about 6am, with a three-hour timezone change. In was a miserable flight; I cannot sleep on an airplane and spent much of it in that hellish midrange where I'm just conscious enough to wish I could sleep, but sufficiently tired that I have no initiative to actually do anything.

It didn't help that in the row ahead of us, a young boy, maybe six, was throwing up with annoying consistency, and crying miserably because he couldn't stop himself. His father, fortunately, had an infinite amount of patience in dealing with the kid, but there was a lot of to-and-fro from the bathroom.

We arrived in Charlotte in time to see the sunrise. The girls have never really seen the sunrise; by the time it comes over the Cascades, it's fairly well risen. Here, it was a huge red ball coming up over the mangrove swamps off in the distance, gigantic and beautiful.

The coffee in Charlotte sucked. Even from Starbucks, it was thin and watery, and not very tasty. I was disappointed that the large airport Starbucks didn't do hot food, either.

The trip to Miami was less miserable, mostly because I made no pretense to sleep. I read instead.

We arrived at the airport and found our rental. It's a Mercury SUV, about the size of Dr. Pearl Forester. The woman behind the counter tried hard to upsell us into something bigger, swearing that such a small car wouldn't be enough for a family of four. Pearl is certainly enough, this car will do fine.

We found our hotel room and crashed, hard, until almost 3pm.

Comments

Mangrove swamps around Charlotte?

[pakraticus.livejournal.com]

You *WERE* exhausted... Not much more than pine trees, rednecks, and the hell of suburban sprawl.

Re: Mangrove swamps around Charlotte?

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Off to the east of the airport, there was a very low line of trees and then nothing else. That was it, so if there's sprawl (and I believe you, it says so on the map) it was nicely hidden by the curvature of the Earth.