Our Trip to Puerto Rico - The Journey There

We actually had two trips planned for our holiday break.

The first one, our visit to family for Christmas in Tennessee, didn’t work out as we’d hoped. Between the blizzard that swept through the middle of the country just before Christmas and the Covid that hit Lauren right afterward, we stayed home. We’ll get there soon for a visit, we hope.

By the end of December, however, Lauren was fully recovered and the snow had mostly melted away, so the second trip was on.

For a long time we weren’t sure about where we’d be going on this trip, or who actually would be attending. Sicily was a possibility – Kim and I would like to go back to Italy sometime soon, and my family roots are there. It would have been fun to explore. Plus it’s got both beaches and skiing, which made it attractive to Kim and Lauren. But with other commitments hemming us in for time, we decided to save this trip for another day when we could spend the time there that it deserved. Montreal was briefly a possibility – Oliver and I liked the idea of visiting a cold-weather city, but the cold was precisely why Lauren wasn’t interested. In the end we decided to try visiting San Juan, Puerto Rico, a place I knew precisely nothing about other than that it was tropical and I didn’t need a passport to go there.

In the end Oliver decided to stay home. Dustin was coming up from Texas to visit at about that time, and this way they could have the house to themselves for a bit. On the other hand, our niece Sara was able to join us, so we’d be four for the trip.

We drove down to O’Hare Airport in a dense fog on Sunday – New Year’s morning – for our flight, which would connect in Orlando and get us to San Juan around 7:45pm local time (5:45pm Wisconsin time). Sara would be flying direct from New York and would get in around 10pm – we’d meet her there and take her back to the Air B&B where we would be staying, have a nice few days together exploring a new place, and then head home on Friday.

That was the plan. It worked out, but there were times when we weren’t sure it would.

Let me just say now that under no circumstances will I be flying on what I will, for legal purposes, be referring to Ghost Air, ever again. They were disorganized, uninterested, and generally not up to the challenge of either delivering what they promised or making up the difference between that and the reality of the situation in any coherent way. We did have one leg of our journey on the way home on what I will refer to as Wild West Airlines and that was fine, if rather basic. I’ve flown on RyanAir, after all, and like them WWA promised only to get us from Point A to Point B safely and on time, and they delivered. There was nothing promised about comfort, food, or extra anything, and nothing of the sort materialized. But they held up their end for what they promised. Ghost Air, however, should be dismantled and sold for parts.

Our flight out of Chicago was delayed an hour because of the weather. This wasn’t too much of a problem – Kim, Lauren, and I are adults and expert packers and each of us brought only a backpack for the week, so we didn’t need to check any luggage or sit near each other on the plane.

The problem came when we arrived at Orlando. We actually arrived at our gate with 20 minutes to spare to catch our connecting flight, but we sat there waiting for Ghost Air to find a gate crew for more than half an hour while we watched our flight depart from the next gate over, promptly at 4pm as advertised – the only flight in Ghost Air’s entire schedule that left on time that day, as near as I could tell.

Eventually they let us into the airport and we got in line at the Ghost Air “service” counter to try to get rebooked. This, it turned out, was an experience. For one thing, there was the group in front of us, who got so irate at how poorly their concerns were being handled that the attendant simply walked off, which didn’t help any. It probably wasn’t an accident that about an hour later when I walked by the counter there was a fully armed Orlando police officer sitting there, biding his time. Kim ended up speaking to the other attendant at the counter who tried to tell us that since this wasn’t their fault – it was the weather –they might be able to get us there on Tuesday. Kim then explained that a) no, it wasn’t the weather’s fault, it was Ghost Air’s fault for leaving us on the plane to watch our flight take off, since they knew very well when it was arriving and didn’t see fit to have a crew there, and b) we had our niece flying into San Juan on her own so unless they planned to pay someone to find her, take her to a hotel, and pay for her stay there, we would be flying out that day. There was a short pause, and then the guy set about getting us onto the last three seats that were left on a flight leaving about four hours later, around 8pm Florida time.

Meanwhile Sara’s flight was boarding and we’re on the phone with my brother trying to determine if she should get on or just go home, all in real time.

We got the boarding passes, told Sara to board her flight, and settled in to wait.

Have you ever been to Orlando’s airport? It’s a dump. This is especially true on New Year’s Day, since this is apparently a big travel day for the House of Mouse and the place was absolutely mobbed with Disney traffic – there were precious few places to sit, for example. For a while we ended up sitting on the window ledge of a ramp between the gates and the food court, and if you tried to look down the terminal all you saw were bodies.

Lauren and I debated whether this counted as me having “been to Florida” or not.

I was indubitably standing on Florida ground. I even ate a meal there – we eventually found dinner at a French sandwich place that was reasonably tasty. But I never left the airport and my only purpose was to pass through and be gone.

Eventually we decided that this did not count. In order to say you’ve “been to” a place, you need to leave the airport and have a meal while not in motion (which rules out driving through and eating takeout in the car). Otherwise it’s a separate liminal category that is neither here nor there, one that in my experience now includes Kansas, Florida, Switzerland, and Germany (all airports) as well as Rhode Island and New Hampshire (drive-throughs with no meal while not in motion).

I am happy to have my streak of never being in Florida intact, if only on a technicality.

Of course the flight was delayed until 10:38pm.

So we sat there, in the airport, holding our precious paper boarding passes, reading our books, taking short walks, charging our phones, and generally looking forward to arriving in San Juan. Meanwhile Sara’s flight took off, flew down, and landed even before we boarded.

Our flight didn’t actually take off for another half hour after we left the gate. Don’t ask me why. At that point it didn’t matter.

We got to San Juan around 3am local time, and after some searching we located Sara. I texted proof of this to her parents so they could actually go to sleep that night, and we jumped into our waiting Uber ride to get to the Air B&B.

We arrived at around 3:30am to find that the place had not been cleaned from the last people there. Eventually we discovered that there was a legitimate reason for this and the hosts were very quick to make amends – by the time we woke up the next morning there was a bag with towels and toiletries by the front door, a cleaner came after we left to be tourists for the day and left the place in perfect shape, they refunded us some of the cost of the place (they offered to refund it all, but that seemed excessive to us given the prompt and thorough response) and in the end we would happily stay there again – but having to make the beds with fresh sheets at 4am after a very long day of travel was a bit of a drag.

We also didn’t figure out how the AC worked until the next day, which made that night rather warm. After that, however, it was nice.

Eventually we fell asleep.

It has to be said that the rest of the trip went much more smoothly, and we had a grand time while we were there.