Day Two – Ft. Lauderdale Here I Come

After all my years of train travel, I finally wised up and learned something new: Ear plugs + eye mask = sleeping like a zombie for eight hours on a moving train. My sleep was only broken by the 30 second rotisserie-style full body flips that occurred like clockwork every hour on the hour, in order to accommodate my aching hip joints.
 

Later that day, I discovered that there’s a certain stretch of track, south of the Orlando/Kissimmee area, that feels, for lack of a better simile, like god is humping the hell out of the train. Sideways. I was taking one of my mid-afternoon naps, curled up on my side across both seats, my bum towards the aisle, when suddenly I realized my head was being repeatedly, and rhythmically, smacked up against the arm rest. I smiled to myself, thinking what a shame it was that I was making this trip alone, because this phenomenon had awesome potential that was sadly going to waste. Eventually, however, I had to sit up. Because god or no, sometime’s a girl’s gotta take a break, you know?

So the downside to this glorious little laptop gift was that it caused me to abandon my usual beloved train-ly activities - reading and staring out the window - in favor of watching movies. One of which was the movie, “Rec”, which my friend had also added to the laptop. This turned out to be a fun, interactive viewing experience which I’m quite sure amused the people in the seats around me, as I gasped, jumped, and repeatedly smacked my hands to my eyes in a feeble attempt to shield myself from what I was seeing.

Two hours before I was due to arrive in Ft. Lauderdale I realized that spending 18 hours in a train station before getting on a ship was kinda stupid. So I called from the train (still can’t get over the hyper-convenience of all of this super-connectedness) and made a reservation at the cheapest place in town. Literally. I specifically asked for the cheapest place in town.

Arrived at the Ft. Lauderdale train station and quickly surmised that making that reservation was indeed the right thing to do, since the station was only slightly larger than my last bedroom.

I then had to take a bus to the motel, and on the way there was much discombobulated struggling and fussing with my cumbersome, overstuffed crap (that now included the jacket that was essential in New York but obnoxious in Florida). This, in addition to the flaming tattoo, ensured all eyes were turned my way for an uncomfortable amount of time.

There was an upside to the unwanted attention and ensuing conversations, however, and that was that the bus driver gave me a free bus pass for the rest of the day. He was from Dominica and apparently liked the idea of my Grand Caribbean Quest.

And what a great little gift that pass turned out to be. After I settled in at the Cheapest Motel In Ft. Lauderdale (where, by the way, I got a room with a king sized bed, another facet of this trip that was sadly going to waste on my aloneness), I used my pass to traipse all over the frigging city looking for a Dunkin Donuts and a CVS. Mission accomplished: Midnight. Better than spending the night sitting in the motel watching television, I suppose.