Florida, day 1: transit

Our much-anticipated trip to Miami began at 5:30 AM with the drive to CPH. We'd done the online check-in the night before, and we were pleasantly surprised that it allowed us to skip a very long line. The check-in guy asked why we were connecting in Newark since there were several considerably nicer places to change planes available. It's been years since either of us had been to Newark, and this seemed pretty menacing. However, everything went smoothly at Newark, and with the exception of the restrooms by the baggage claim, the place seemed quite nice. We waited only a couple minutes at immigration, and the guy was cheerful and pleasant. The security people were not equally nice, but they did their thing without being particularly offensive either. After all the hype about increased security, we were expecting worse.

With both flights, my ears failed to adjust properly, and I was in agony. I kept feeling my ears, because with the pain, I expected to find blood running down my neck. Oh the joys of flying when you have a cold.

It took about an hour to pick up our rental car--naturally they didn't have the car we'd reserved, and my husband wouldn't give up without a free upgrade. They eventually gave us a Mazda mini-SUV, which is pretty nice.

When we finally got to our hotel, it took us half an hour to park. The signs for Hotel Registration Parking lead us to valet parking, $28. Ouch. Getting back to normal parking wasn't obvious, but the worst thing was that the Hotel parking was on the 7th floor, and we couldn't get there. We drove several laps, but no go. We could get to levels 6 and 8. We could even see level 7. Since there were security guards on every level, we eventually asked one, who instructed to go all the way down to the bottom, then from there switch over the other half of the parking structure with the odd levels. Apparently it had been possible to cross between them at one time, but that had been undone in the name of security. Whatever. We were too tired to care.

(view from our hotel room)