Florida USA: travel and breakfast

We went over to Florida last week for my eldest daughter’s wedding. This was held on February 14th (Valentine’s Day).

The flight out – on Friday 12th February was eventful. We were delayed on departure and then just before we were due to land we were told that due to storms affecting Fort Lauderdale and Miami we were being told to hold off landing for a couple of hours. The captain then said we didn’t have enough fuel to last a couple of hours so we were off to The Bahamas.

We landed at Nassau and were not allowed off the plane. I called the hotel to let them know we were delayed. I couldn’t get through to the car rental office and I left a message for my daughter who was supposed to be meeting us at the hotel at 8 pm. They refuelled the plane after an hour and 45 minutes and we then set off again, swinging wide to avoid the storm as it came towards Nassau so the flight took more like an hour and a half rather than the 50 minutes we were promised.

We landed at Miami about 11 pm – having been due in at about 5:15 pm. We arrived at the car rental office at midnight and had to queue for an hour to pick up the car. We then drove away… I thought north, but it turned out to be south. So we had to turn around and head back. We then picked up the I-95 heading North.

I may have been a bit tired but we missed the exit we wanted, so we ended up taking the I-75 back south. Having driven around looking for the hotel I remembered that my mobile phone had satnav “Ovi Maps” on it. I turned it on, it picked up the satellites – eventually - and directed us to the hotel. We would never have found it without.

The next morning we met up with my daughter, her fiancé, his mother, his half sister and his half sister’s friend for a proper American breakfast in a diner. After two pancakes, bacon, sausage links, eggs (sunny side up), coffee and toast I started to feel human again.

We then headed over to Sawgrass Mills to get some shoes: my wife had sent a pair off to be dyed to match her dress, but they had got lost at the dyer. So we had a hectic hour or so visiting shoes shops before we found a pair that were the right colour and fitted her. Miracles do happen!

We met up again with the fiancé's family at the wedding venue (Bonaventure Golf and Country Club in Weston) for the rehearsal.

That evening we went to my daughter’s new mother-in-law to-be’s house for a meal.