Saturday came too soon, of course. A and I ate our leftovers from the night before, and then had plenty of time to kill. Eventually we went to the pool bar, where I got more than a little drunk on Banana Quit and Coconut Kooler - for some reason none of the bars offered any kind of food, which might have helped me out a bit. C and :R: joined us for a bit, but then :R: left to go back to air-conditioning. The three of us moved over to Spicer’s (I think I was able to walk on my own) and shared a couple of plates of fries. We found :R: in the Television Lounge in the main hotel building, and we sat around and watched music videos for a couple of hours until it was time to go. Getting to the airport was no problem, but we did have a bit of a wait to check in. Of course they had problems printing my tickets, so it was a while before we could join the next line, the preliminary security check. While the other three stood in that line, I went and paid the $20/person departure fee. When I rejoined my friends, they’d moved about halfway through the line - only one man was checking everybody’s passports! Once we got past him, it was the usual metal detector check and then on to the waiting areas. A bought a couple of things in the duty free shops, and then they announced our flight, so everybody got up and formed a line…and stayed put. They finally announced a problem and said that boarding was canceled, so everybody sat back down…and stayed put. They didn’t update us for a long time, and finally I heard that if you showed your boarding pass at the snack bar, you could get a free non-alcoholic drink. I presented ours and got a couple of sodas; meanwhile A had ordered some cheese sandwiches from the upstairs restaurant to be brought to the snack bar, because after passing through security you had to stay there until your flight left. She also tried contacting US Airways because we could tell we’d miss our Philadelphia connection, but she couldn’t get any further than the Grenadian operator; the gate agents were utterly useless as they promised everything would be taken care of by the time we got to Philly. Our cheese sandwiches arrived within minutes of our flight being actually called for boarding; A held onto both of them even though we were in separate rows. When the flight attendant came around with the snack bags, she said “here’s your vegetarian meal” and handed me…a low-fat meal. With meat. I pushed the button and got her back, and she realized that she’d given my meal to :R: “and he’s already eating it.” Okay, fine, could she please go up to Row 12 and ask the woman for one of the cheese sandwiches? It took a while for her to figure out what I was asking (and apparently she still wasn’t clear when she asked A about it), but she did return with my cheese sandwich. I missed out on the plaintain chips and cookie, but the sandwich was heavy and compensated somewhat. The rest of the flight was uneventful; C and I did my crossword puzzles together, and we played Scrabble on my Visor. Of course we did get to Philadelphia quite late, and because that was our port of entry we all had to wait for the baggage to be unloaded and show up on the carousel, and then we had to go through customs and immigration. The baggage was the longest wait - the legal proceedings went fairly quickly, we’re American citizens and only bought souvenirs overseas, and we weren’t in a country where Mad Cow Disease is prevalent - but I don’t think there was any chance we could have made our connecting flight to BWI, even if we hadn’t been two hours late leaving Grenada.
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