With our eyes barely open, we took the midnight flight from LA to Miami. A very smooth and uneventful flight on an American Airlines 737, but you’d have to call it minimalist. No pillows, no blankets, no drinks, no meals, no snacks. Basically they turned the lights out when we took off and didn’t turn them back on until we were landing.
After flying through two consecutive nights without a day in between, we were looking forward to breakfast and sunshine in the hope of resetting our body clocks.
Arrived in Miami at breakfast time and thought it appropriate to go to TGI Fridays for some waffles and french toast. Only ‘regular’ coffee served in huge mugs, and you had to ask for milk. Welcome to America.
I keep forgetting, but it hits me every time we land here. Hardly anybody ever smiles. No pleases. No thank you’s. Everybody strides around barging straight through you with a glum face. We’ve noticed over the last few years that if you tip the historical 15% you are considered mean and stingy. They’ve tweaked all of the payments systems to offer you set choices of tipping amounts, of which 15% is the lowest and cheapest. At TGI Fridays we couldn’t nominate an amount, only a percentage.
Terminal D is huge and has flights going to every South American and Caribbean country. Not usually a problem being so huge, except that they changed our gate three times and it’s a 20 minute walk from the previous gate to the new gate, and we had to do it twice, being mowed down in the process.
Boarded an Airbus A319, a pipsqueak, and headed off to Panama City. US immigration doesn’t worry about formalities when you exit, and because we transited from one American Airlines flight to another, even though it was an international one, we actually didn’t go through any security either. Strange experience really to just walk onto an international flight .
Sat on the tarmac for over half an hour as bags were hurriedly ferried from late arriving connections, and then we were 12th in the line for takeoff. That’s something I’ve never seen before. Halfway down the taxi ramp our plane pulled out of the line and overtook three planes in the queue ahead of us then promptly took off.
Only arrived half an hour late, and had very quick immigration, customs and baggage formalities so we were out pretty quickly. However, there was no free airport Wi-Fi, or at least it wasn’t working, so we had no way of telling our Uber driver that we had arrived. She was sitting there waiting for us to message, and we were waiting outside hoping that she would decide to drive past. Eventually we texted Brendan in Boston who contacted the driver on WhatsApp and she duly came and picked us up.
After arriving at our Airbnb in central Panama City we headed out for a quick walk. Not surprisingly, McDonald’s was our only open option.
Finally to bed after some 36 hours. Not sure what our body clocks are thinking.
Panama Airbnb