Saturday

My flight was from Boston to New York, and then from New York to Orlando. Of course, I was treated with my first visit to La Guardia (LGA) on this trip. And of course, my flight from LGA to Orlando was delayed. And of course, LGA smelled like piss.

The flight from LGA to Orlando was the first real “adventure” of the vacation. I had a window seat in an aisle full of girls from Cornell. I know this, because they asked me if I went to the University of Delaware, and then told me they went to Cornell and the only other school that they knew about on break was Delaware. They were working from the assumption that I did not go to Cornell, which implies that they knew everyone at Cornell. This was annoying, and I wanted to point that out, but I chose not to. Actually, I didn’t really have a chance to. Around take-off, the girl next to me was asking me to chant “OR-LAN-DO” as the plane was on the runway. Yeah.

The next strange thing these girls did was play the fortune-telling game. The game where you write down 5 names, 5 cities, 5 cars, etc., and then cross things off until your destiny is revealed to you. The weird part was after playing it a few times, they started lamenting where they would be living, who they would be marrying, and how much gas would cost for their hot new ride. Now, I know that people took this game seriously in elementary school, but seriously, aren’t we all over it? Yeah, so I read my book and fell asleep to Zeppelin II, hoping to escape the ridiculousness next to me. I basically succeeded, except at one point I woke up and the girls next to me were asleep, with the girl immediately next to me sleeping with her head down face first on to the folding table/tray thing on the seat in front of her. Just head, straight down. It was crazy. I wish I took a picture.

Anyways, I got into Orlando around 6:15 or so, and I went and got my bag and waited for Geoff. Getting my bag entailed riding a monorail from wherever the hell I was to the main part of the Orlando airport. The main part of the Orlando airport is really just a Hyatt with monorails to the gates. It is kind of weird. To be fair, it is an amazing Hyatt.

When I realized Geoff’s flight was delayed, I went to figure out the car situation. I found out that the number I had to dial (#415 from the courtesy phone) was busy. It was busy the next 9 times I tried it too. So I decided to keep waiting for Geoff. Of course his flight came in way late, and the flight he was supposed to come in on was overbooked and he got bumped off it. So he came in a little over 2 hours after he was supposed to come in. However, he did receive a free ticket anywhere AirTran flies (yay?), as well as a $10 voucher for food at the Chicago airport. He also got a first-class ticket for his Chicago-Atlanta flight, but he got bumped off that too. Pretty ironic stuff. The fact that he used the whole $10 at McDonalds was pretty impressive, though.

Anyways, Geoff finally gets in, but his bag, his bag wasn’t so lucky. It didn’t make it until Sunday afternoon. It didn’t help that we were staying about 45 miles away from the Orlando airport, and thus Geoff’s bag was by far the last one returned to its rightful owner. But yeah, this had Geoff on edge until he actually got his bag.

Once we realized Geoff wasn’t getting his bag, we decided to revisit the car situation. After looking over the ad we found in the airport, we found a local phone number, and we called it. They told us to go up and find the van that would take us to the actual car rental location. So we did this. Once on the van, we found ourselves faced with a huge girls swim team. Not really sure where from, but I’m pretty sure it was a high school swim team. And they were insane. The coach of the swim team made one of the girls on the team sit next to a guy who wasn’t part of their group, or our group, or any other group for that matter. Apparently, this guy was also on their flight in to Orlando, and it seemed that there was some sort of conversing slash flirting going on between these two. All I remember her saying to him was “I’m 17 and I’m not an alcoholic.” They had a weird dynamic. Geoff would like to add that the guy “didn’t fill out a tourney bracket, so I don’t know why she was wasting her time on him anyway”.

When we got off the van, I went in to get the car. Geoff stayed out to get my bag He watched as the driver took the bags out for everyone on the swim team; not a small feat, since this team did fill up the whole van other than me and Geoff and that other random guy. He also saw no one tip the driver at all. He felt bad for the driver, and told him that it sucked that no one tipped him. Then he looked into his wallet and saw nothing but $20s, leaving him with nothing to tip the driver. Geoff felt pretty bad about this whole thing, and considering he didn’t even have his bag yet (and was thus tipping for me), it was all very unlucky. He was having a pretty shitty first day of break so far.

While this was going on, I was inside getting a car. Our reservation was for an Oldsmobile Alero, and it was for 5:30. It was now 8:30, and when I mentioned that our reservation was for an Alero, the guy at the counter laughed, and said “we don’t have no Aleros”. Yeah. He asked me if I wanted a Metro, but I pointed out that we’d have the car for a week, and I didn’t wanna drive no Metro for a week. He came back with the offer to drive a RAV4. It was a nicer car, and considering we couldn’t rent a “Mustang or similar”, it was the best we were going to do. Anyways, we walk out to it, and its golden. Golden!! A couple of guys driving around Florida in a gold RAV4. Ok. On the plus side, it was a 2004 with 3072 miles on it. A pretty nice ride, for sure, other than its reputation. It even had a CD player, but Geoff and I both had our MP3 players and no CDs. We would address this situation soon, but not quite yet. Now, it was time to drive to Lakeland.

On the way to Lakeland, we decided to stop off for some Wendy’s. Inside this Wendy’s, I think I said something offensive about the Eastern Orthodox Church and was generally being loud, as if I was some sort of obnoxious Northeasterner. I don’t remember the details, but Geoff pointed out that I was doing this, and I thought it was funny and sad. Mostly sad. Geoff – “It’s just that every time I go into the South I’m terrified of my atheism being revealed and me winding up beaten”

Anyways, we finally got down to Lakeland, and our home away from home, the extended stay motel. The room was pretty decent, with a couple of beds and a nice bathroom and a kitchen. No oven, but a stovetop and a microwave and a decent fridge. Not a bad situation to be thrown in. We immediately turned on the end of the Texas-North Carolina game, and watched UT hold on to win. I was pumped, and it was a fun game, so it was a good start to the whole Lakeland thing. Around 11:30 we started getting pretty tired and falling asleep, but I noticed that Money Train was coming on at midnight on TBS. I pleaded, but Geoff vetoed me watching this, because he wanted to sleep. Honestly, I wanted to sleep too, but I kept telling Geoff, “Nothing stops the Money Train!” He was less than amused.

Precisely at 2:15 in the morning, the fire alarm went off in our room. Of course, we both woke up. Somehow, the sprinklers didn’t go off… I’m not really sure why they didn’t, now that I think about it. It seems like a logical connection, and there were sprinklers in our rooms. But whatever. The point is Geoff tried to take apart the alarm, and he couldn’t. Geoff actually ripped the smoke alarm off the wall, but the sound was not coming from the actual alarm, but instead from an evil device which was used to alert the entire motel of… something. We had to just wait 2 minutes for it to run its course and turn off. I mean, there wasn’t any smoke or anything, so it was just a false alarm. But yeah, we woke up at 2:15. I pointed out to Geoff that if I was going to be fucking awake at 2 in the morning, I wanted it to be at the end of Money Train. I was pretty pissed at this point that I hadn’t watched Money Train.

We tried going to sleep again, but around 3 the cops started banging on the door next to us. This of course woke us both up, but we didn’t actually acknowledge it at this point. We just sat there silently in our motel, first night in Florida, listening to the cops bang on the door next to us.

It was a hell of a start to our vacation.