This is a re published post due to technical issues with the first post... therefore it's out of order... check the date to put in its proper order: Due to some technical problems, click on this link to get to |Alli's blog (
Alli's Blog )
The Following is My Daughter Alli's perspective as a Passanger, Assistant and Young person..... enjoy:
Sunday,
October 21, 2012
Today was long and treacherous. 1st
off, let me start with a couple recommendations for you:
# 1.) DON'T FORGET YOUR
PASSPORT
# 2.) IF YOU CAN AVOID
TRAVELING ON A SUNDAY, DO SO. Everything closes early.
 |
| Passport? What Passport? |
So
to start out our adventurous day, we woke up around 5:00 AM. I called our
airport in Ft. Lauderdale around 5:15 and they said
they would pick us up in 15 minutes. We strolled downstairs to grab some quick
breakfast and noticed the weather was playing on the TV. The newscaster was
telling everyone how a cold front had pushed the clouds and rain towards the
island so Florida
would be clear. Problem is, that is exactly where we are headed.
Around 6:00, we began to worry about our courtesy
ride so I called the airport again. Turns out they had gone to the wrong hotel.
After hanging up the phone, I hear Dad whispering obscenities under his breath.
When I ask him what is wrong, he looks over at me with frustration in his eyes
and mutters, "Guess what I forgot… my passport."
After a few minutes of panic, we try to come up
with a ground plan. Dad gets on the phone to mom and I jump on the courtesy
computer and google it. While surfing the web, Mom confirms that Dad did indeed
leave his passport behind. I come across several articles, including one
published in USA TODAY in
January, of a Canadian who was able to get entry into the USA by pulling
up a digital copy of his passport on his IPAD. I fill Dad in on my findings an
he asks Mom to scan or take a picture of his passport and send it to him.
Meanwhile, our ride has finally shown up and we
start piling our luggage into the van. Dad receives a few unreadable texts from
Mom and finally one legible one. Apparently she is unable to scan it.
We pile up the plane and
take off… now an hour behind schedule. It was very cloudy and over the radio
hazardous weather was reported "heading East over Nassau". Kind of in the same direction
we were heading. Dad clicks his Spot Locator GPS to alert everyone at home that
we were okay. Meanwhile dark clouds are starting to appear all around us.
Our first refuel stop is in Exuma, Bahamas.
It is a nice big airport. They direct us to customs and we unpack our luggage.
Dark clouds were still rolling in and we even heard a distant clap of thunder.
We hoped it would pass while we were inside.
Once inside the lobby, we were discouraged by how
empty it was. We waited and another group went in and walked behind the yellow
line and around the corner. Brad decided to follow suit and charged around the
corner as well. He returns with a stack of paperwork for us to fill out. He
makes a few more trips and finally Dad follows his around the corner.
I wait patiently with the luggage and then Brad
comes back and begins picking up his bags. He tells me not to worry about the
paperwork and informs me that we are good to go. I ask where Dad was and Brad
replies that he is coming. Concerned about how easy things appeared, I
consciously decided to wait and see where Dad was.
Dad then tells us we need to pull all the luggage
around to the other side. We oblige and Dad is in deep conversation with a man
at a desk and still filling out some forms. The man asks to see our passports
and Brad and I whip ours out. Dad shows the man the picture Mom had texted and
starts explaining his story. This is where things got complicated. The man,
unconfident about what to do next, tells us we have to wait for immigration to
get here but not to worry that she would only be 10 minutes. We step aside to
wait patiently.
Brad seeming irritated, asks Dad what he had said.
I guess if we were headed straight to St. Croix,
we'd be fine. However, Dad's small plane would have to make stops to refuel. He
had told the man about our flight plan to stop in Inagua and Puerto
Rico to refuel and grab a meal.
It takes about an hour for immigration to arrive
and Brad starts the talking, stating that our destination is St.
Croix. The woman seems annoyed and asks us if we are planning to
make any stops in between. Brad says "Just to re-fuel" and is very
adamant about it. Finally she clears us and we packed up and left.
As we begin to taxi to the runway, there is a
sudden bumpy thump! Dad and Brad turn to see what has happened
and somehow we accidentally had knocked against a runway light with the plane.
Our windshields and windows
begin to sprinkle with raindrops and we wonder what it will be like in the
air. Once in the blue, Dad makes quite
the maneuver to avoid flying into any of the enormous clouds. In the distance we could see endless clouds
that seemed to stretch from “floor to ceiling” per Brad. Brad and I weren’t worried. We had full faith in Dad’s flying
ability. Dad, however, later admits to
being a little bit nervous. We made it,
considering, and it actually was a very smooth ride, believe it or not.
Our next stop is Inagua. Now let me tell you about Inagua. We landed in the very small, falling apart
airport that is Inagua. No one to greet
us we walked up to a small “T” shaped building with screen doors rusting on the
hinges. Inside there were 2 women: One who
is slumped down on a torn up chair bench and another leaning on the doorway of
a very small office door.
There is two other offices I can see, one located
in the middle of the main room with shaded windows and another where I can just
make out the bottom half of a TV screen showing some Juliet Roberts movie. Across from the shaded office is a door
leading to the middle of the “T”. This
long room has double -doors on either side that are torn open. Then at the base of the “T” are the
bathrooms.
There was no air condition just a few fans randomly
hanging throughout the building. I hurry
to the bathroom and when I come out Dad has been chauffeured to the shaded
office to pay a landing tax fee and order fuel.
He also asks if there is anywhere close by where we can get lunch. Unfortunately, there isn’t. Dad doesn’t want to push his luck without a
passport so he pays the tax fee and then we head outside to wait for the fuel
truck.
Outside, we try to be patient while standing in the
blazing sun. When a richety old truck
comes around the corner, Brad and Dad exchange glances. A man and a woman hop out of the vehicle and
the woman starts to unroll the fuel hose while the man hooks up the battery of
the truck to the fuel pump to power it.
The woman tells Dad that there is a fee for fueling
the gas on top of the price for the fuel itself.
We have no choice so onward the woman goes to
pumping the gas.
It seems to take forever
to fill up.
As Brad says, it “trickled
out”.
Once we were on our way,
we started discussing not stopping in Puerto Rico and heading straight on to St. Croix. Dad is
a little hesitant about whether or not his plane can go without the extra stop
for fuel. There is some more maneuvering
around some thunder boomers: very high and build-ups on clouds. The closer we get to Puerto
Rico, we also notice that more than half the calls on the radio
were in Spanish.
It is near dusk when we
approach Puerto Rico. Dad and Brad had continue discussing whether
or not to stop and where, and the plan decided was that we were going to stay
the night in Puerto Rico. Dad, being very anxious about figuring out
where he was going to land, was worried about landing in Puerto
Rico (foreign territory) without his passport.
“The winds were with us, weather was holding, and St. Croix is American territory, and I’m an American
citizen,” Dad made the conscious decision, called up on the radio and changed
his flight plan to go straight to St. Croix.
The trip from Puerto Rico to St.
Croix tested Dad’s instruments, he later tells me. For 60 miles it was completely dark with no
land marks. Dad admits to being more
than a little nervous during this time.
Approaching St. Croix,
Dad had words with the radio tower.
Since customs closed on Sundays at 6:00 PM and we had stopped in the Bahamas for
gas, “we are in trouble”. Dad’s response
was “I’m an American citizen”.
After landing in St. Croix,
Brad leapt out of the plane to great an airport staff member. Dad stayed behind a bit to update his flight
log. Brad comes back to the plan to let
us know staff member, “Susan” with the airport’s fire department is bringing
over a truck and will be transporting us to customs where they called in a
woman from home.
While waiting for Susan to bring back a truck to
transport us, Dad called his contact “Kellie” to let her know we arrived while
I called Mom and Mark to tell them we were safe and sound and on the ground.
Susan was very nice and helped load up her pick-up
truck. The two men hopped into the bed
of the truck and I climbed into the passenger seat. The cool air condition felt great inside but
I did find it odd to see 3 air fresheners hung up all around the passenger side
of the vehicle.
Inside the customs building it was empty. I felt a strange sensation of déjà vu. Luckily, this time we only waited a few
minutes for someone to arrive. During
these few minutes, having skipped lunch and not had dinner, I gulped down my
leftover sub I had gotten from Brunswick,
GA the previous day for
lunch. Dad and Brad warned me that once
customs arrived, it would be tossed.
Sure enough, they were right.
The customs woman had short dark curly hair and
wore reading glasses on the tip of her nose, reminding me of a librarian. The
stern look on her face didn’t mask her annoyance of being called in after
hours.
The woman dons her latex gloves and wrapped the
remains of my sandwich in a clear plastic bag like she was collecting evidence
for the police. She took the bag into
the back around the corner to dispose of it.
She handed us a stack of paperwork to work on before she left. When she returned, she then asked us for our
passports. Dad went into his speal of
forgetting it and showed the picture on his phone. She laughed a little and said she’s get to
that part later. We followed her to the
customs desk where she pulled up her computer.
Raising a judgmental eyebrow, she asked if we had a flight plan.
Dad pulled out his “manifest copy” as she called
it, which I guess wasn’t official paperwork.
She said it wasn’t in the computer, therefore it didn’t exist and we
were an “unplanned arrival”. Very
obviously annoyed, the woman was actually very professional throughout the
entire conversation.
Stay Tuned for the Rest of the Story! Thanks for your support. Bye for now... Robin
