So, pretty much last minute (one month before takeoff) we decided to go on vacation to Bonaire again. The primary motivation being that it would be Captain Don's 85th birthday; the secondary being that I hadn't had a *real* vacation for 3 years and was starting to snap. All work and no play makes Susan a psychotic girl.
The flights were challenging, but they always are. It's just not easy getting to Bonaire. I ended up booking a 3-leg trip: Manchester NH on Friday afternoon through Cleveland, to Houston, and then the red-eye from Houston to Bonaire. My reasoning: with this itinerary, we'd have an extra day on-island.
I was a little concerned about making all the connections, especially the last as we only had 50o minutes between arrival and departure in Houston. It turned out I had nothing to worry about - there was a handicapped diving group, "Eels on Wheels", also travelling on this flight, so by the time they were all loaded we didn't actually take off for about an hour after the scheduled time.
One thing I hadn't banked on was just how grueling travelling for 12 hours really was.
Yes, checkin was it's usual unpleasant but grin and bear it experience: both Geoffrey and I have had both our hips replaced so we always end up being poked, prodded, and peeled. Then our luggage contains lots of electronic and camera attachment stuff which apparently look a lot like bomb-making instruments, so it's unpacked for us while we're being scanned and swiped. Then we have to repack it all, and try to fit everything back in. All this is time-consuming but once we clear security it's generally over with. We were able to stay in the secure areas for the entire journey, so once we got through that it was relatively clear sailing.
Maybe I'm just old, or maybe it's because I have a really hard time dozing on a plane, but after the half day schedule of fly-wait-change planes-fly-change-planes-wait-fly, I was a complete wet noodle when we landed in Bonaire. Where it was about 90 degrees at 6AM, and not a lot of air movement.
We gathered up our checked-in luggage, got a taxi to the place we're staying, found out that our room was still occupied. Not totally surprising, since checkout is around noon, so we piled our luggage in a back room and went wandering around. However, for whatever reason she couldn't ecen tell us the room we'd be in.
We were both zombie-like in our sleep deprived state. Not to mention, sticky, smelly, and getting grumpy. All we really wanted to do was get into our room and settle in, then go for dive orientation. We wandered back to the front desk and were told that the people in our room had checked out, but the maid hadn't cleaned it for us yet, so we'd have to wait.
Soon the restaurant was open and we wandered over.
We'd been here before, so knew it was a buffet breakfast. "Room number?" the cook asked. "We have no idea!" we told her, and explained our predicament. She remembered us from our other visits, so let us go through. As a matter of fact, she was able to determine our room number, and told us. The people here are beyond compare nice.
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