When You Can’t Wait to Get Home from Vacation
Our vacation to Miami was a memorably excruciating adventure and I couldn’t wait to come back home. For starters we left home in the middle of the night to catch a 6:40am flight to Miami with the plan to arrive early to Miami to whisk ourselves to the pool or beach and get most out of the day in the sun…HAHAHAHAHA .
Getting to the airport was easy enough but parking the car at the long term parking lot was miles away and we had to take a tram to the gate that took FOREVER! We check in, go through security and arrive at our gate. It’s 5:00am and my precious little boy is totally out of control and I am not sure I am going to survive. His temper tantrums and insistence on screaming on the floor drained my energy and I am sulking knowing we have another hour to go before we board our flight.
We are finally on the airplane and my son doesn’t care that we are on an airplane and that you have to sit and wear a seat belt, he wants to touch ALL visible buttons, open and close the windows shades and kick the man sitting in front of him as many times as he can, I was LIVID and EXHAUSTED.
After screaming and kicking and touching every button imaginable my son falls asleep and so do I. I wake up just as we are about to descend and I am literally dying for a cup of coffee but I am comforted by the fact that we will soon be in Miami and there is delicious Cuban coffee everywhere.
As our flight is descending my son does not want to sit or wear his seat belt and again the wave of exhaustion and PLEASE DON’T SCREAM anymore washes all over me. By some miracle we land without anyone on the airplane complaining about my son’s screams since 5:00 am.
It is now 9:42am and the need for coffee is real. We are in Miami and I am looking for coffee and I DO NOT SEE ANY COFFEE. As we walk towards the baggage area my son wants to go on the conveyor belt with the suitcases and go round and round. He simply doesn’t understand WHY he can’t go on the conveyor belt so he throws himself on the floor and kicks and screams with no end in sight. I manage to get our luggage and we walked about 200 miles to the rent a car center in the airport only to find out that our rent a car center is not in the airport but outside the airport. I am informed “don’t worry, a shuttle will take you there”. BTW, NO COFFEE YET. We find the shuttle, load the luggage unto the shuttle. The ride is relatively short and we get to a dump of a place with a LONG line of people waiting to rent a car. We unload the luggage from the shuttle in the intense humid Miami heat with our New York long sleeve shirts and jeans. We wait on line. My son seems to love to scream and he sees no reason to stop so he just lays on the floor screaming as everyone looks at me.
We get a car and load it up to CAPACITY so I must now drive with no rear window view. By this time the heat and exhaustion are beyond overwhelming and I think I am going to die but the thought of having a cup of coffee in the comfort of our airbnb apartment somewhat motivate me to keep going.
We arrive at the airbnb apartment and as I am getting things organized and the fire alarm sounds off in the building and we actually have to evacuate ! I am now thinking this must be joke but it wasn’t so I gathered my purse and important travel papers and nervously walk down the stairs. We are outside with the rest of the people from the building trying to understand what was happening and we are promptly told it was a false alarm. We went back in the building and I am still very much needing a coffee but I am so exhausted that I call it a day trying to decipher whose idea it was to go on vacation with a child and actually think it was going to be fun. Can anyone relate ?!?!?!
