Surviving The Spring Break From Hell

Of course, once we get to our terminal, who do we run into? No one I know, but friends of one of the girls going with us. Well, maybe "friends" is the wrong term. I guess the better term would be HER ENTIRE FUCKING SORORITY. Guess what story they got to hear? True story: about a year ago, someone brought up this story again, so of course they make me tell it. As I finish, I notice one of the girls is sitting there with her jaw hanging. She looks at me and asks, "That was you????" She'd heard the entire story before, a year before meeting anyone that was there at the time. Apparently, I'm famous…you can just call me the Airport Condom Guy.

We get on the plane and take off. The ride wasn't too bad. There were a few bumpy spots, but nothing horrible. Now, we're broke restaurant employees so we weren't taking a direct flight. No, we actually took 3 separate planes to get to Florida and split up on a couple of occasions. We land and three of us go off to catch our plane. This time, I put my wallet in my carry-on bag in case we have anymore metal detectors in our future. We get on the second plane no problems….and then we wait…..and wait……….and wait. Finally we take off…and land about ten minutes before we're due on the next plane. Now we're at the Atlanta airport which is fucking HUGE. We were like those people you see on tv and in movies, running to catch the next plane. We make it…..barely.

We finally arrive in Ft. Lauderdale, get our luggage and go wait for the rest of our group at their terminal. Everyone's baggage shows up and is pretty much intact. One of the girls lost a wheel on one of her suitcases, but no biggie. We take a cab to our hotel room. Now, we arrive on an off-day apparently, so we only stayed in that hotel for the night and were spending the rest of the week in a hotel nearer the beach. It was pretty late, so we just crashed for the night.

The next day rolls around and we get another cab and move to our new hotel. Now, I'm missing some in between details of what we did. Basically, I don't remember what we did, ergo, it must have been boring. It seems like we did some drinking and hung out at the pool, but it doesn't matter.

We get to the new hotel and decide to go find a place to eat. We're in a section with all kinds of hotels so we figure there have to be tons of restaurants in the area, so we start walking…..and walking…..and walking. After about twenty minutes without seeing any sort of food place, we start asking people on the street if they know where any restaurants are. The first couple of people don't know anything, but finally someone tells us there's a restaurant about a half mile down the road. We thank them and keep heading in that direction. After about ten minutes, we arrive at the restaurant….and keep on walking. I'm sure it was a nice restaurant, their valet parking attendants were dressed very nicely and the cars in the parking lot looked really expensive. However, we all only brought a few hundred bucks with us and didn't want to blow a substantial chunk of it on dinner. Luckily about another half mile down the road, we found a diner.

The food was good and the staff was nice. We chatted them up some and found out that the bus picks up right in front of the diner and goes right past our hotel. Even better, its only a dollar per person. Now, we don't have to walk back to the hotel which is a good thing considering more than half of the group already had blisters.

We spot a liquor store across the street and head on over to it. We buy a LOT of alcohol and sit around the bus stop waiting for the bus. A cab driver pulls up and offers us a ride, but we decline, figuring the $5 for the bus has to be cheaper than cab fare.  While we're waiting, one of the girls calls another friend that we work with and of course tells them about the airport condom story.   She's up walking around while the rest of us sit on the bench, tempted to open up the liquor and start drinking. Well, all of a sudden, Amber makes some sort of squealing noise and jumps to the side as a car is driving by. Apparently, someone in the car threw an egg at her, but luckily for her she got out of way. Unfortunately for me, I was sitting behind her at the time and got hit in the leg. Now I have blisters on my feet and egg running down my shin. I start trying to use what I've learned on the Discovery channel to figure out which direction is north, so I can start walking back to Indiana. About the time I spotted some moss on a tree, we notice the bus coming in the other direction. We decide that we don't feel up to anymore egg dodging, so we cross the street to catch the bus, rather than wait for the bus to swing around.

Now, my shins are safe and we're ready to get back to the room and start drinking…especially me. The bus keeps driving and driving and it starts getting later and later. One of the guys goes up and gets one of the pamphlets with the bus routes on it and we check to see how long we've got. Now, where I'm from, busses run in loops. Some are bigger than others, but they still loop in a fairly short amount of time. Apparently, this was not the case in Ft. Lauderdale. The bus we were on runs from one side of the city to another before turning back. Now we notice, that the busses quit running at 10pm, its about 9:55 and we're way across town, over by the airport. We're in the bad part of town and its only getting worse. Every other store is a liquor store or pawn shop, all the windows have bars and there are packs of stray dogs roaming the streets. After realizing that we're the only people left on the bus, we go ask the driver if he's going back to our hotel tonight. Of course not. His last stop is at the bus depot, which we're almost to.

 

Fortunately, he's a nice guy. He needs to get cigarettes anyway, so he takes us to a little better area and lets us get out at a well lit gas station. At this point, it's been close to four hours since we set out to get food. We take turns watching the liquor and going inside to use the bathroom. We decide to call for a cab realizing we made a good call not taking the taxi earlier because we wanted to save a couple of bucks. While we wait for the cab to get there, we take turns going to the back of the building and taking shots. The cab finally shows up and the guy flies. He's seriously like a bat out of hell. We get back to our hotel in a matter of minutes and the cab fare winds up being……. $5….and this was from across town. Now we're really glad we saved that money by not taking the taxi the first time around.

Needless to say, we got drunk. The next morning, we went out and rented a car. God bless credit cards. Then as we're testing out our rented convertible, we found out something interesting. Had we taken a right instead of a left on our quest for food, just beyond the two big hotels blocking our view......were about 20 restaurants and fast food places. None of them had valet parking.