Due to the various hijinks that resulted in a rather late arrival last night, our sleep was limited to about four hours before we had to head back to the airport. Furthermore the air-conditioning was shockingly loud and woke us up every time it started back up.
We have TSA Pre-Check, but only one of the security checkpoints was handling pre-check, so we had to walk by two other checkpoints to get to the far end of the ticketing area. We followed actor Cuba Gooding Jr. through security. After a fairly painless trip through security, we had to walk the complete opposite direction to get to our gate. Miami’s American Airlines gates are all basically one massively long terminal that is poorly laid out. Gates are only on one side of the terminal, so in order to pass 60 gates (as we had to do), one has to do quite a bit of walking. We eventually took the “skytrain” to shorten the time.
We arrived at our gate, D60, which was really a gathering of 8 gates all leaving at the same time. Our flight had maintenance issues (naturally) which delayed the boarding process about 30 minutes. Our backup plan was to run down to the St Maarten gate since one can take a ferry from St Martin to Anguilla. Unfortunately, once Anguilla fully boarded and we were informed that there were no seats, we were too late to try and get to St Maarten because of the maintenance delay. We just can’t win. And all this time traipsing around the Miami airport was doing nothing for its reputation. Did you know it’s considered one of the worst airports in the country? More on that at Flyin’Brian.
While we debated our options in defeat, we formulated a plan where we will return tomorrow. I ate a very subpar Cuban sandwich at the airport while we contemplated our future. For being the birthplace of such sandwiches, it was really disappointing. The whole point of this trip is to most effectively use Nicole’s Hilton points and free nights and it appears that there will be more seats to Anguilla the following day. We decided to stay in Miami and try again tomorrow. We checked into a Hampton Inn near the airport, where I promptly fell asleep.
We then went for a walk around the area, where there is a small strip mall and a lagoon with various hotels. We had some teas at Starbucks and went for a long stroll whilst checking out the other hotels. We saw a lot of iguanas patrolling the pathways. Some were as big as dogs. I was mesmerized.
We spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing and recovering. We played a game of cornhole in the pool area of the Hampton Inn. It was a very competitive game, but Nicole pulled out a win. We then had a dinner of Jersey Mike’s and Panda Express.
Tomorrow we will try again. We may not have gotten on the planes from LAX-MIA if we tried today, so in a weird way, maybe things are working out? We were able to get the rental car switched and actually saved about $8 in doing so. Apologies that there is not a more interesting blog post, but blame American Airlines and the layout of the Miami airport for that.
passports & pepto bismol 