Do you recall when we changed around all our Fort Lauderdale plans starting in January 2015? We had a flight down on January 7th and a night booked at our usual La Quinta hotel near the airport. When we decided to stay on the Pacific Princess, and then further decided to take the Grand Princess cruise on January 24th, all that had to be cancelled. In their place I booked a flight to Fort Lauderdale on February 6th. However, by that time, they were all ridiculously priced (we use frequent flyer points, but still...), like four times what we'd usually pay. The only one that was reasonably priced was a late flight getting us in at midnight. We've done it before, and booked it. Then, as backup in case of inclement weather, we booked a morning flight on February 5th.
The next issue was to reserve a hotel. There was nothing available for less than $300 near the port and some were as high as $400 for a pre-cruise night. We had waited way too long. In the event we took the morning flight on February 5th, I found a La Quinta on the west side of Fort Lauderdale with availability; we'd need to rent a car to get there. However, if we were coming in two days early, it would make sense to do that anyway.
Well, the weather didn't preclude us from flying out either day, and, had we more than two days at home, we might have chosen to take the earlier flight, but we were still taking care of things at home the morning of February 6th; to fly out the morning of February 5th would have been difficult to do. I cancelled the earlier flight (gotta love Southwest!!) and also the first night in the hotel in Fort Lauderdale, and one night of the car rental. Then we started thinking...we weren't going to be getting in and getting our luggage until after midnight. By the time we rented a car and found our way in the dark to an unfamiliar hotel, it would be after 1am.
By midday on the day we were flying out, we received the news: our flight was delayed. We wouldn't be arriving until 1am, meaning we'd have maybe 7 hours in a hotel before we'd need to leave to drop off our rental car again. What a waste. We made a decision: we'd just stay at the airport until we could catch a taxi to the ship.
My first step was to see if it we'd even be allowed to stay overnight in the airport. I Googled it and discovered an entire website dedicated to doing just that. Fort Lauderdale airport ranked high on comfort in the reviews, so we had that going for us. We decided we were up for the challenge and I cancelled all our other arrangements.
We knew from the website SleepinginAirports.com to go to the rental car area on Level 3 for the most comfortable seating. Sure enough, it was just as described online. There were three leather sofas near the Avis counter, but we weren't comfortable laying down on any of them. Instead we found a seating area near the Hertz counter with high-backed leather chairs. It was 2am by the time we had collected our suitcases...we just needed to survive a few hours. We each laid down a large suitcase on the floor and then put a roll aboard on top of them, placing our feet at seat level. I had thrown in a pashmina when all this went down earlier in the day, and wrapped myself in it. I popped in ear plugs and...well, I actually slept about 4-5 hours. A Broward County Sheriff patrolled occasionally to guard against problems with homeless people (as long as we had suitcases, we were fine), but the other six or so people snoozing in the other chairs were the same as us...simply biding time until they could get on a cruise ship.
It was never dark and, from about 3am to 4am was quite noisy, with a Zamboni-type floor cleaner making its rounds. But I slept before and after that quite easily. By 6am, the rental car counters were all coming to life again, but I slept right through the activity. By 8:30am, G was rushing back from the bathroom, telling me to gather up my stuff; he had hitched a ride to Port Everglades on a car rental shuttle for the price of a tip. By 9am we were in line to board the Caribbean Princess, and our biggest difficulty came when we were unable to ever sit down in the terminal to await boarding. Due to the large number of in transit passengers, we had to stand outside for about 2.5 hours. That I could have done without, but we accept full responsibility for the fact that we were there so early. We weren't alone; there were passengers who had just disembarked other cruise ships already in line.
With the help of an hour nap after lunch, we survived our adventure just fine. Would we do it again? Heck yes, we would. Faced with the same issues, we'd easily do it again. Of course, I'd always try to have better arrangements in place, and we did, until everything changed and we ran out of options. I would never do it with kids, and wouldn't recommend it for anyone over 70 or so, but even for a pea-detecting princess like myself, for just a few hours, it's entirely doable.
When is the last time we did something for the first time? Life is full of new experiences!
