Winter Break. January 2022. Day 11. The Long Road Home.

Last night was rough.  We woke up around 4am and the boat was a rockin’.  We were up for a while.  I’m shocked the girls didn’t wake up at all.

Finally we fell back to sleep and woke up around 7am and sadly were docked in Fort Lauderdale.

Our flight was 11:15am, so we planned to be the last ones off the ship at 9am, which was the latest they’d let you stay on. I was very optimistic about the day, thinking we’d get home and then have dinner by my parents before they left for Hawaii. How wrong I was.

We had a final buffet breakfast, which is where we received the email that our flight had been delayed from 11:15am to 5:15pm.  FML.  We very slowly made our way off the ship.  I think we were literally the last off the ship.  When we got our bags they were the last ones left in the terminal. 

Tzvi called JetBlue but they didn’t have anything helpful to say, so we got an Uber and headed to the airport where we checked in and dropped our bags. It was bad, people trying to reschedule flights, packed with Jews trying to get home. Then we got another Uber and headed to Sawgrass Mills, a massive mall about twenty minutes away.  It’s kind of feels like if you combined the Tanger outlet mall in Riverhead with Woodbury Commons and then also threw in a regular mall.  It was big.

Our first stop was Target, because we were literally out of diapers.  I guess that’s almost good planning?  Then we walked for a while and finally ended up at the Rainforest Café for lunch, because we can never pass up a Rainforest.  Hallie walked around and made me take pictures of her with lots of different things that she said she wanted for her birthday. She didn’t know what most of them were, but there was a plush snake I now have to buy. unch was good.  Madeleine enjoyed the thunder and lightning and the fake animals. Classic rainforest.  Tzvi and I both had Caesar salads with grilled salmon and the kids had pizzas.  It’s tough to come down off the glutinous foodfest that is cruising.

Then we walked through the higher-end outdoor part of the mall.  I got a bag at Marc Jacobs and some kids clothes at a store called Monna Lisa that I’d never heard of before.

Around 3pm we Ubered back to the airport and went through security.  We found Elisheva Feit who was also very delayed and sat with her and her kids for a while. Thank you for the entertainment.

We were supposed to board at 4:40pm, but around 5:15pm the gate agent made an announcement that the plane had arrived but they didn’t have any crew to fly it.  They said the crew was guaranteed by 9pm, but hopefully they’d be there by 7:30.  The gate agent was really obnoxious.  She kept making announcements that no one could hear because the PA system didn’t work, and then she kept saying things like “Don’t ask me any questions” and “I don’t know if you saw but there was a snowstorm in New York.” So, we went back to the Feits to hang out and ended up eating their leftover food.

Around 6:30 the gate agent announced that crew had arrived and they would start boarding soon. She continued making announcements that only those standing right next to her could hear, and when more and more passengers crowded the boarding area she started making comments like “well I’m not going to board like this.”  Finally they started boarding wheelchair passengers, and then stood in front of the line to say “I’m just going to make you all think you’re going to board.”  She then waited several more minutes before allowing us to board.

The flight actually wasn’t that bad.  A little turbulent, but okay.  It was a small plane (only four seats across) and the girls each sat in a window, but I think keeping them apart may have actually helped.  Tzvi tried to watch the Rams game, but the TVs weren’t great.  Also, the crew must have been upset about having to come to work early because they didn’t do much – the bathrooms were gross and I don’t think they cleaned them once during the flight, and then after drink service they never came around to collect garbage.

We finally landed around 10:40pm, only to be told that there were no gates available and the delay on the tarmac would be approximately 60 minutes.  At least they let people get up and use the bathroom; the next day we read in the Post that there were tons of these delays, and in Newark people were forced to sit on the runway for ten hours and weren’t allowed to get up and had to pee in their seats.  Not sure that all makes a lot of sense, but okay. When the pilot finally announced that we had a gate he told everyone to sit down asap. He kept making this announcement and we couldn’t figure out what he was waiting for because it looked like everyone was sitting.  Then we saw a flight attendant walk to the front galley.  He was talking to someone in the galley that we couldn’t see, and telling him over and over again he needed to sit down.  Finally a chasid who perhaps didn’t understand what the pilot was saying came out and walked down the aisle. Not a good look.

Finally, we got off the plane only to find chaos at JFK.  There were people sleeping all over the place and tons of bags all over baggage claim.  After about a half hour our bags came down, we called an Uber and headed home. I will say for most of the day the girls did great. They really only started to lose it at the end of the flight and at the terminal. And then it was freezing getting into the Uber. But, we made it home alive. Then Hallie ate chicken that my mom had dropped off earlier in the evening, at 1:15 in the morning.

What a great trip.  What an awful journey home.