A Heart Attack, Lost Luggage & Jennifer Aniston Pt.1

You might of read my title and wondered "what is she referring to?".

That my friends would be my honeymoon!

Today marks my five year wedding anniversary with my husband.

We plan on having dinner with our bridal party at Fujiamas tonight.

If you haven't had the pleasure of dining here let me give you a sneak peak of where I will be and what I will be devouring. Can you say the bomb.com?

Part 1 of 2: (This lengthy but worth it! I hope you stay until the end)

Our plans were made months and months in advance for a five day cruise to the Bahamas.

Ya know, kicking up our feet while waiters and waitresses pass out drinks, the gourmet meals are included and frequent stops are made on exotic islands.

Well this to my surprise ended up being the last thing we ended up doing for five days.

We booked our honeymoon, Sunday through Thursday. This would give us the next weekend to recover, unpack and relax before heading back to work Monday.

We packed our things up and headed to the airport, everything seemed to be going ever so smoothly. As my luck usually goes I should have known something was waiting for us in the horizon. We had booked a connecting flight around lunch time and had a two hour lay over. We thought YES perfect timing. We ate lunch, we stretched, we had our bathroom break (might I add that I despise public restrooms!). We had our down time and headed back to our gate. We waited almost two hours for our connecting flight to arrive when over the intercom we were told that our connecting flight had an emergency and to please stand by. Well, if you are like me panic starts to set in. What's happening? Will our flight that takes us to Miami to board our cruise have problems? I mean PANIC took over. I sat there in amazement that this was really happening.

The pilot along with the crew came through the door rolling a gurney with a man on it! He had a heart attack on the plane! They announced that they would need to clean the entire plane, restock the oxygen bags because apparently others were panicking and that it would be until further notice before we boarded our plane.

Almost an hour later our flight attendant came over the intercom announcing that we would NOT be boarding our initial connecting flight but needed to move to another gate and board the airplane there. Half a mile it seemed like that we walked to the other gate. We boarded the plane and took our seats. FINALLY we were ready to begin to our trip. I mean how much more drama and time can pass before we made it to our cruise? Ha only time would tell.

We made the trip in the plane okay, landed in Miami safely and made our way to the luggage pick up area. We had hours before our cruise was to dock and take us away to oblivion. No stress, just warm weather and plenty of activities planned ahead of us.

We sat at the luggage area for what seemed like hours (literally it was hours). No luggage arrived, no belts were moving, my second round of panicking set in. We had two hours to get our luggage, retrieve a cab and make it to our cruise line. Would we make it? Only time would tell.

We sat another hour waiting and wondering what was taking so long. An attendant finally came out and told us that our luggage had never been taken off of our original connecting flight and it would be at least a half hour before our luggage arrived. GREAT I thought to myself. Let's put ourselves on an even tighter time restraint. After staring at the still luggage for what seemed like years it finally began to move! We had exactly 15 minutes. Talk about an episode from The Amazing Race! We grabbed our luggage and made our way (running, literally running with three suitcases) down the sidewalk to the line of people standing waiting for the next cab. Basically hey take a number and wait your turn.

We finally made it to a cab, paid the guy a $20 and literally told him to drive like his life depended on it. He raced down the street and towards our cruise line. We had five minutes. We finally pulled up to the curb, went running up to the attendant at the dock and handed her our tickets.

The words that came out of her mouth next crushed my heart forever "I'm sorry your names have to be on the manifestation list at the exact time of boarding or we cannot let you on, you are two minutes late".

I sat there on top of all three luggage bags balling like a baby. We had no return flight home, no plan and no idea how we were going to make this honeymoon work. We had opted out of the insurance because we thought we had plenty of time. We had our wedding gift money from all of our friends and family and that's it. After many calls inside to the cruise line captain they rejected our tickets and sent us on our way. Everything was booked and paid for and they still wouldn't let us on. YAY us!

We got back into the cab not knowing what to do, we made phone calls to our families and went back to the airport. After 10.5 hours (no exaggeration) of complaining to a manager about the heart attack and the lost luggage we finally obtained hotel, rental car and food vouchers for a weeks stay in Miami......

to be continued...