Miami LAYOVER!!!

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Sunday, June 24th 2007

We Departed Grande Goave at 7am, to make the bumpy journey to the Port au Prince Airport, and arrivied around 9:am. We checked-in and cleared Haitian customs in a breeze. Our flight wasn’t scheduled to depart until 12:35, but we didn’t want to take any chances in arriving late. Go figure, everything went smoothly and we wound up sitting in the terminal waiting are with a solid 2 hour wait before boarding time... NOT!
Wouldn’t you know it?!?!?! The flight coming in from Miami was delayed by 3 hours!!! So we waited some more... No problem, we thought... our connection to Montreal wasn’t until 9:PM that evening. Although we would much prefer waiting it out in Miami, surrounded by Burger Kings, shops and air conditioning...the real purpose of this trip was to get home. We finally commenced boarding around 3:45PM and the Airbus 300 filled rather rapidly, considering the size of the craft. All but 10 seats were filled! We taxied out toward the runway, when the captain announced that we were to return to the gate to collect more passengers as the 4:PM flight had been cancelled entirely. The extra 10 passengers came on and we taxied out again. It was now 4:25 and we had been delayed some 4 hours... Somehow, my 5 hour layover in Miami seemed to be a very short interval and we started to question whether we would make up for time in the air. The Captain once again came to the PA and announced the flight time and said that we should land in Miami somewhere around 7:20PM or so. We thought... Wait a minute... This flight is only supposed to be about 1 ½ hours.... Crap! In all the stress, we had forgotten about the time difference (Haiti doesn’t respect the daylight savings time hour changes) Oh Oh.... Time seemed somewhat sorter now. Once landed in Miami, we knew we had to claim our luggage, re-check-in and go through all the security checks again prior to boarding for Montreal. Time was growing short indeed. Cherry on the cake was about 20 minutes prior to landing in Miami, when the flight crew announced that heavy thunder storms over Miami would force us to circle the area for 30-45 minutes. Ok... That meant a landing time around 8:PM at the best... Now we were in trouble.. Once landed, we figured OK... If we really hustle, we could still make it... After all, land ground crew was aware of our connection and would do anything possible for us to make it...right? Would you guess it!! the flight crew announced another delay as the gate was not ready fro us to taxi to.... SO ALL IN ALL,,, with all the delays and what we thought our five hour layover in Miami was going to give us way to much time , resulted in us missing our connecting flight to Montreal!!!!!!!! So here we are, writing this Blog entry from the Miami Hilton Hotel, where American Airlines put us up for the night !!

So today the plan is to head back to the Miami airport to catch our 12:30pm flight to Montreal.....

Wish us luck !!!!!

Cheers

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Comments

[Raymond Sassine]

A great big thank you for the Haiti pictures
Dear Eric and Annie I enjoyed those Haiti pictures a lot. Thank you very much. Raymond