A Trip gone SO wrong

Since you all seemed to get a kick out of the fire alarm going off in the middle of the night while I was in Nashville, I thought I would share with you a story about one of my many adventures with my dear sister.

Many years ago, I invited my sister to go on a cruise with me. It would be her first cruise and my second. The plan was that my parents would drop of my sister at my apartment on Sunday night and we would drive to the airport Monday morning and catch our plane to Miami and then get on our cruise. But we slowly learned that not everything goes as planned.

1. The Sunday night drop off went as planned. Before my parents left, they even took us to Walgreens to get an under water disposable camera ( which we never ended up using anyway).
Later that evening, we settled down to watch Desperate Housewives ( remember that use to be on Sunday nights?), and I passed my sister her cruise documents to look over.  She looks at the documents and then looks at me and says I don't have any identification with this name on it. Is that going to be a problem?  I said What do you mean?  My sister had gotten married several months earlier and I thought for sure that she would have her drivers license, school ID or SOMETHING that had her married name on it.   I quickly called the phone number on the back of the documents to see what we should do.  The customer service lady with the cruise lines said that she would need to bring with her a copy of her marriage license  to show when checking in and that should suffice. HOWEVER, she did say that she wasn't sure my sister would be able to get on the airplane. Well, that was just great. It doesn't really matter if they let her on the cruise if she can't even get on the plane to get there.

2. We called her husband  and he said he could fax over the document. oh good, that was a sense of relief. We go down to the business office in my building and find that it is locked! What the heck. Apparently it closes early on Sundays.  We went around the building to track down the maintenance guy to see if he could let us in. We finally find him in the parking garage. Apparently he was the parking attendant that night. He is no luck with letting us in to use the fax. Luckily this other fellow in the parking garage overheard our conversation and said he had a fax machine in his apartment that we could use. We didn't know this man, he was odd, it probably wasn't a good idea to go back to his apartment with him, but we were desperate!  He gets out this old fax machine that he probably hadn't used in about 10 years. After about 45 minutes of messing around with it we throw in the towel.  The man suggests we find an Office Max or Kinkos or something but it's close to midnight now and nothing like that is going to be open.  Luckily we find a Giant Supermarket that is open 24 hours and after a little begging, they agree to help us and long story short we receive the document.

3. It is now after midnight. We get back to my apartment. My sister watches TV while I finished up some last minute packing. After a few minutes my sister said she heard a bell. It sounded like one of those bells that you hear during a boxing match or something. I listen closer and we figure out it was the building's fire alarm. We rush down the 6 flight of steps as we hear the ambulances and fire trucks outside. Yup, my building was on fire!   I know that the least of our worries was now our "stuff" but we kept thinking wouldn't that be ironic that after all we went through to get that stupid document if it now went up in flames? I must mention that it was October. It wasn't too cold but it certainly wasn't hot out. We waited outside until  after 3 am.   We were told that most of the damage was done on the first three floors ( mostly smoke damage). They weren't "officially" letting people back in the building but  we needed to get our luggage and get going because we had an almost 2 hour drive to the airport. We snuck in one of the backdoors, held our breath as we walked up the first 3 flights of stairs and then continued on to my apartment where we gathered up our things and left. I still didn't finish packing I just threw some things in a suitcase and hoped for the best!

4. My sister, my room-mate, and myself made it to the airport safely. Right before we boarded the flight I decided that I had to use the restroom. I gave my purse to my friend to hold. I thought she was going to wait for me to board the flight but when I came out she was already on the plane, with my purse AND my boarding pass. That didn't go over well! We finally got things straightened out and I was allowed on the plane after everyone else had boarded.  And to think this whole time we thought it was my sister that was going to have the problem getting on! By the way, they didn't give her any problems when she showed her ID and her marriage license.

5. After all this, the good news is our cruise was fabulous. We didn't encounter any problems. However when we debarked we had quite a bit of time before our plane departed so we decided to take a cab to the Art Deco district in Miami and then spend some time at the beach. We no soon got to the beach and we were caught in a torrential down pour. We looked rather funny rolling our luggage in the sand in the middle of a rain storm. We got a cab and then went to the airport. It wasn't until we already were in the terminal that my sister remembered she left her shopping bag in the cab ( some things she bought in the art deco district).  The flight home went well, no problems. When we got to the parking lot, we found our car would not start. My parents had just got a new SUV and left us borrow it for the week.  Airport security had stopped by to help but it didn't work. We ended up having to call the on-star assist network and found out that there was nothing wrong with the car and that it wasn't starting because of some silly safety feature. Apparently the SUV thought we were trying to steal it!

Of course we can now sit back an just laugh about this trip now. We definitely made some memories!
I know this was a LONG post so Thank you so much if you ended up reading the entire thing.

Have you ever had a memorable trip where so many things went wrong?  -L

We are linking this post up with that gals from the Friday 5!