Days 76, 77 & 78 - Last days in Miami and returning to the UK!

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So this entry is a little long overdue (some of our family have been telling us that we need to finish the blog!), but we've both been pretty busy since we got back, in between trying to catch up on sleep! We'll try and recall the events of the last couple of days of our trip, but it may be a bit sketchy! There will also be no photos to upload for this last entry, as we didn't actually take any!

Monday was our last full day in Miami and in the USA, and we spent most of it just relaxing before our long day of travelling the following day. We did our usual routine of going down for breakfast at around 9:30am, before coming back up to the room to get ready properly. Emma put on some suncream and went down to the beach for a couple of hours to try and top up her tan while she still could, whilst Craig stayed at the hostel and played some games on the netbook, as he finds sunbathing a bit boring, and he wouldn't have been able to see the screen on the beach. Emma eventually got bored and came back to the hostel, and we went to get a couple of sandwiches from Walgreen's for our dinner. The rest of the day was spent just relaxing at the hostel, watching some TV, playing some games, and sitting in the hostel lobby on the netbook, making sure that we knew how we were getting to the airport the following day, such as which buses to catch and where to catch them from, and checking in online for our flight. Later on, we packed our cases for the last time and went to bed at around 11pm.

The next morning we were up at around 8:30am. We got showered and dressed and packed up the last few things that we had used that morning, before going down for some pancakes at 9:30am. We came back up to collect our belongings from the room, and took our cases and bags back down to the lobby to check out. Our flight wasn't due to leave until around 8pm that evening, so we spent most of the morning sitting in the lobby on the netbook and watching the big TV in there. We didn't really want to go down to the beach as we didn't have any suncream on (we didn't want to go back burnt!) and we probably would have got covered in sand! We grabbed a sandwich for dinner from Walgreen's, and did the last few checks on where we needed to go before setting out from the hostel at around 1:30pm.

We walked around the corner to catch the C bus, which would take us up the road to where we would catch the Airport Express bus. We waited at the bus stop for around 10 minutes before one turned up, and we managed to squeeze our cases on and ride it the 10 or so blocks down to 16th street. Once there, we got off the bus and walked around the corner to the next bus stop. Amazingly, there were loads of taxis waiting in the area - do they really think that people will be willing to pay $30 for a taxi to the airport, rather than paying just $2.30 for the bus, which has luggage racks and only stops a few times before going straight to the airport?! The bus soon turned up, and we put our cases on the luggage rack before finding a seat. The bus stopped a couple of times in Miami Beach, before going straight down the freeway to the airport, stopping only once it reached the terminal. We got off with our cases and walked along the building, trying to find 'Concourse F', where the Virgin Atlantic check-in desk was. After walking a little while and not seeing any check in desks through the windows, we entered the building when we saw a board with a map on, only to find that all of the check-in desks were upstairs, so we wouldn't have seen them anyway! We got into an elevator and took it one floor up, emerging into the busy departure areas.

We eventually found Concourse F, and looked for the Virgin Atlanticsigns above the desk, however, we couldn't see one anywhere! We found an information desk, where we asked the woman sitting behind it where the Virgin Atlantic check-in area was, to which she pointed us back over to where we were looking before, saying that they were there. We went back and spotted a sign that had been put to one side which had 'Virgin' written on it, so we assumed that the desks just hadn't opened yet (we were around 5 hours early by this point, but we thought that we might still be able to check in, get rid of our cases and just hang out at in the departure lounge before our flight). We found a seat and waited for an announcement to be made. We noticed that the screens at some of the desks behind us had now changed from 'Aer Berlin' to 'Virgin Atlantic', and that they would be opening at 3:55pm, which was around 20 minutes away.

3:55pm soon came, and the desks finally started opening to check people in. As we had checked online already, we were able to go straight to the 'bag drop' desks, where the woman just checked our passports, printed out our boarding passes and put some labels on our cases. We then dropped off our cases in the bag drop area before heading up an escalator towards the departure lounge. We went through security without any hitches, and made our way down the corridors to the departure lounge, which turned out to be TINY! There were literally three shops and a couple of places to eat and not much else! We had a look around the shops, knowing that we needed to get a few last minute presents and some stuff from duty free. Emma picked up some presents from one of the shops (mainly ornamental presents that she was scared to buy elsewhere and risk them breaking in her case!) before we found a seat to see if we could get free wifi, as Craig wanted to ask his brother about which cigarettes he wanted, and Emma wanted to ask her dad which type of whisky he would rather have. Unfortunately, there turned out to be no free wifi, but we decided to just pay for it anyway, which only cost us around $7 between us (this was for 24 hours so it wasn't TOO bad - there was an option of 30 minutes for $5!!).

Craig messaged his mom on facebook to ask his brother, whilst Emma had a look first on Skype to see if her dad was on there, which he was. We spent a little while chatting to Emma's family, before signing off so that we could get some food and get our items from duty free. We paid for our purchases, before we were given the receipt and told that we would be able to pick them up when we boarded the plane at the gate. There wasn't much options for food, so we decided to have a Burger King as our last meal in America - not that we weren't sick of burgers by this point! Craig had a triple stacker burger meal, whilst Emma had a double whopper on its own.

Once we had finished eating, we went back over to where we were sitting and tried to browse the internet for a while, but it seemed to have stopped working - so much for getting 24 hours!! Thankfully, we didn't have to wait long until we started boarding at around 7pm, so we made our way over to the gate once they announced that they had started boarding. We only had to wait a little while before they began to board our row, and we soon found ourselves in our seats on the plane, ready for our eight and a half hour journey back to London Heathrow.

For once, the plane took off right on time at 7:55pm (normally, by the time the plane has taxied over to the runway and waited in line to take off, it's around half an hour later than it should have been), and the pilot announced that the flight would be taking just under eight hours - even better! The flight went fairly quickly, although neither of us got a wink of sleep, even though it was an overnight flight. We both watched a few films each, with Emma watching 'The Inbetweeners Movie' and 'The Hangover: Part 2', whilst Craig had a bit of a Marvel/DC superhero marathon, watching 'Captain America', 'Thor' and 'The Green Lantern' over the duration of the flight. We had a couple of meals whilst on there, one at around 9pm, which was beef in red wine sauce (neither of us were particularly hungry but we ate it anyway, knowing that we wouldn't be eating again until the morning), and we had a bit of breakfast at around 7:30am (UK time - we changed our watches during the flight to try and get our head around the 5 hours that we would lose!), which was basically a croissant, a yogurt and some orange juice.

At around 8:15am, the pilot announced that we would begin our descent, but that he was unsure whether we would have to wait to land at Heathrow. A little while later, he told us that we had to wait an extra 20 minutes for our slot to land on the runway, and that we would just be circling over Heathrow until we were able to land! He also kindly informed us that the weather in Heathrow wasn't looking very good that morning, that it was damp, misty and around 4 degrees, to which we both looked at each other in horror, as it had been around 30 degrees when we left Miami - that's a drop of 26 degrees!!

Finally, at around 9:15, the plane descended down through the clouds and we got our first glimpses of England when we were pretty much on the runway, as the clouds were so low! We landed on the runway and were soon parked up and waiting for the doors to open. Emma text her dad to let him know that we had landed, as he would be picking us up from the airport and driving us back home, and he probably wasn't expecting us until a little later, due to the flight time being shorter than we originally thought! We were finally able to leave the plane and make our way through passport control, where we were pretty impressed with the new technology where you can just scan your passport and a camera takes various shots of your face using different lights, using some sort of face-recognition software, to make sure that you are the same person in the photo on your passport! We then made our way to the baggage claim area, and only had to wait a little while until we spotted our cases on the carousel, which we quickly grabbed as they came around. We passed through customs without any problems - there wasn't even anyone there! - and emerged into the main arrivals area. We found an exit to establish where we were, before Emma phoned her dad to find out where he was and where we should meet him. After realising that the departure area that he dropped us off from at the start of the trip was just around the corner, we arranged to meet him there. We stood waiting for around 5 minutes (shivering in the FREEZING cold!!) before we spotted his car coming around the corner, and he pulled up, gave us hugs/handshakes, helped us put our cases into the car and we were soon all in the car on our way back to the Midlands.

Craig text his mom to tell her that we would be back a little earlier than planned (she had planned to leave work early that day so that she could be home by the time he got back) and we spent the next couple of hours chatting to Emma's dad about our trip, with Craig having a little nap for around half an hour - obviously the lack of sleep had caught up with him! At around 12:15pm, we had arrived back into Wednesbury, where we dropped Craig back at his house before Emma and her dad made their way back to their house. The rest of our day/evening consisted of us each spending time with our families - catching up, giving them their presents and just generally trying to stay awake so that we would sleep overnight, which meant that we had pretty much been awake for two days without any sleep! We both eventually went to bed at around 10pm, and we both had to admit that it was great to be in our own beds again - you just can't beat it for a good night's sleep!

So that concludes our trip, and this blog! We've had the most AMAZING two and a half months, if any of you ever get the chance to do anything like this, DO IT, you won't regret it! Who knows, this may not be the only travelling that we do - we both still really want to go to Australia, so maybe we'll have to start another blog in the next few years or so?! For now though, it's back to reality, and back to enduring the rubbish British weather! Thanks for reading!

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Comments

[bec]

how much would you say you spent each on the whole trip? thanks