Ft. Lauderdale, 88 degrees and 18 seconds

---

Ft. Lauderdale, 88 degrees and 18 seconds

Ft. Lauderdale is pretty, humid and welcome after winging from the west coast since early this morning. Up at 3:30am, by 4 we were ready to hail our Lyft driver. Rodan was there within 10 minutes and picked us up just outside the gates to our community. 20 minutes later we are in the pre-check line, yea, no one in line, and can smell the Starbucks beckoning to us from down the concourse. Handing our boarding passes to the TSA person, the little buzzer goes off…the scanner can’t read our passes, they have printed out too small. What? Okay…back to American ticketing to re-print our passes. This time they scan perfectly and caffeine is within sight.

A few bumps getting into and out of Dallas. an uneventful trip.

At the airport, after waiting in the wrong place outside baggage claim for a while, we finally catch the hotel shuttle by figuring out that we should be at the sign that said “Hotel Shuttle”, duh. ?

After checking in to our hotel, we spy a shopping center across the road and decide to walk over to the Winn-Dixie for some diet coke, diet ginger ale and peanuts for our cruise tomorrow. Unfortunately, the “road” is 8 lanes of rush hour traffic. 88 degrees with big voluminous dark grey rainclouds moving in quickly we try to navigate the 8 lanes of traffic to cross State Road 50. The flashing electronic crosswalk sign says we have 18 seconds to do it. Yikes we’re not sure we are that fast anymore. Go!

Refreshed with some great Chinese food and purchases in plastic bags (we are so used to bringing our own bags in California), it was a minor shock to have them bag the nuts and drinks in plastic for us. Didn’t feel right ?

That done we head back to the dreaded 8 lane, 18 second crossing and play Frogger with the traffic. We made it. Guess we’re faster than we think. ?

Next Stop: Georgetown, Grand Cayman.

---