Not another night at the airport!

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Trip Start Apr 25, 2006 Previous
Entry Trip End Apr 25, 2007

  Miami, Florida, United States
Monday, April 2, 2007

Determined not to endure another night holed up in the Miami International Airport, but still doomed to an overnight stay in said city thanks to a lack of handy connecting flights, I decided to plan a little ahead and find some accommodation. Initially I looked for internet during my stay in Antigua, but found the only internet cafe was packed with people and a waiting list, only open during the hours I happened to be at the cricket, not open on Sunday (my only free day), and ridiculously expensive anyway. Option B was finding a guidebook in a bookstore, but that search too proved fruitless.

So, arriving at Miami Airport, once again without a place to stay, I could feel the nausea of an unwanted deja vu descending over me. Maybe my quiet piece of floorspace would be available for another free night of lodging? Could I again put up with the constant hounding by security for me to "move along" like some errant street bum? I think not. I am pretty sure I have already been "beard profiled" in the USA because I always seem to end up in the Red Lane for security checks. I'm pretty confident a sleeping, bearded man, strapped to his baggage in an international airport is an invitation to be detonated from a distance by the local bomb squad. Maybe "CSI: Miami" would be there to identify my itty bitty remains.

So, using the free phones I called a bunch of hotels, ruled out the US$300+ bracket and focused more on the places providing more correct answers to: "seriously, what is your cheapest room?". In the end I couldn't do better than US$62.15 - a magically stupid number, devised by advertising a pleasant figure of US$55... only to have it munted up by adding some random tax figure. Immediately this brought back the painful memories of Canada with retarded systems designed to at worst baffle and mislead customers, and at least annoy the fuck out of everyone. I still have no idea what the tax rate is in Miami, and as I write this entry from Los Angeles I can assure you that the two cities differ in their rates. Apparently New York is the highest. All I know is that my wallet has a lot of friggin' 1 cent coins in it. No matter. I will be gone tomorrow, and free once again to browse menus and prices that may actually correspond with the amount I'm eventually going to pay. More importantly, once again free to tip people according to service rather than as some sort of randomly decided wage subsidy because people are paid less than they can live on. Even the driver of my "free" shuttle bus to the hotel had a sign purporting: "Tips are appreciated". It should have read more like: "If you don't tip me I will follow you into your hotel, stand way too close while staring at you for 5 minutes, then eventually steam off swearing at you in Spanish". He didn't even help with my bags or open a door for me, so maybe he was waiting for a kick in the nuts.

In the end I had eaten some wonderful Burger King, checked my tickets for the following day, and waited about an hour for my shuttle bus... so I only got to sleep at around 11:00pm for a 4:30am start, and had effectively diminished any real value the crappy hotel room may have offered.

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