New Year’s Eve

I officially have a cold and am unable to dive. We did a bunch of grocery shopping this morning, as the stores will be closed on New Year’s Day. We relaxed around the pool, and I had a nap later in the afternoon. I needed my energy for this evening. We went out for dinner with Pat and Natalie at Blue Cactus, and spent three and a half hours in the restaurant, mostly waiting for service and food. The excuse the owner gave us was that they had a group of 20 that slowed things down. When the meals finally arrived, the others were good, but mine was just OK. It was the toughest piece of Filet Mignon I have ever had. We got back to the unit about 10:30 and we were all in bed by 11:20. My excuse was I had a cold!

Our location on Bonaire

First dive

Trudy and I did our buoyancy check dive with Yellow Submarine in the late morning, and then we continued with a dive on the house reef. I got a couple of decent pictures.

Run around, rest, and do nothing but be busy

The day started early for us, 6:15am, as Pat and Natalie, who are joining us for two of the weeks we are here, were arriving on the red-eye flight from Houston. The same car rental firm forgot to pick them up at the airport, so they took a cab and arrived at about 7:20am. We had arranged for our rental truck to be dropped off at the unit at 8am; they showed at 8:50am. They informed me that they had given away our rental truck, which was a nice one, and they only had a wreck for us. I asked if they had Pat and Natalie’s truck, and the woman looked at me funny. She didn’t and said that she had them arriving later in the day. I had told them on the phone the night before that Pat and Natalie were arriving on the red-eye in the morning and not to forget to pick them up. She said she would be back in about 30 minutes with Pat and Natalie’s truck, so we went out to get some breakfast. Our truck had no seat belts and Trudy didn’t want to keep it. When Pat and Natalie’s truck arrived we talked to them about getting a new truck. We arranged to exchange the truck at 5pm for a brand new truck. At 5pm when we arrived at the garage to pick up the new tuck and they had the hood up and were working on it. Apparently the air conditioning didn’t work; we took the truck anyway and they are going to e-mail us when they get a new truck and we can again exchange.

We also did some grocery shopping and got registered with Yellow Submarine for the diving for the next three weeks. And I managed to have a nap.

The evening ended with a wonderful meal from “Bobbie Jans”. I want everyone to understand how much I like this restaurant. On a web site dedicated to Bonaire; www.bonairetalk.com, there was a post asking for your 7 favourite restaurants; I posts “Bobbie Jans” seven times. They are only open on the weekends, so I will be having them again tomorrow evening.

Travel Day...continued

We were exhausted from the day before and slept in until about 10am, and just managed to get some breakfast at 10:50 before the restaurant closed. After breakfast I connected to the Internet and searched flights on American’s web site and discovered that they were selling seats on the Bonaire flight we wanted; our hopes were raised. We checked out at noon and proceeded immediately to the airport. The first stop we made was the American ticket office to get two tickets for the Friday flight. After explaining our situation the agent informed us that the ticket fee would be $252 more, plus the $100 change fee. To say the least we were not happy about the mixed messages. We tried to reason with the agent but she would not budge; she did say that we should go to line 5, American Eagle check-in line, and talk to a supervisor; they might be able to waive the change fee. Fortunately the line was short and I explained the entire situation to the supervisor; she asked for our passports, which she scanned into the system. She then informed us that the system was not asking her for anything and we were now confirmed on the flight to Bonaire that evening at 6:55pm. YA HOOOO! Now we just needed our luggage!

I went down to the United baggage claim office and to my surprise they had our entire luggage (4 bags). We went back to the American counter and checked our luggage and proceeded to wait until the flight. The flight was relatively uneventful, except myself and another individual were ticketed with the same seat; he really wanted mine, but I sat in it first. He made a big stink, and almost got himself tossed off the flight. He took his seat, but the flight was delayed while we waited for a supervisor from the ticketing desk to come out to talk to him. They told us that he was actually re-assigned to the seat he was in and I was in the correct seat. So we departed about 20 minutes late. On the surface this may not seem like a big deal, but that 20 minutes cost me a meal at my favourite restaurant, “Bobbie Jans”. I got to the restaurant 10 minutes before they closed, but they were out of food for the day. As a side note, the car rental agency didn’t show up with our truck, so we had to wait until the next day to get one, but that’s another entire story, almost as sad as our flight story.

We did finally enjoy a meal at one of the few restaurants that was still open; most of the kitchens close at 10pm, so we were lucky.

Travel Day - Start of new Vacation

Normally traveling to Bonaire takes about a day. It starts with an early morning flight from Ottawa ending at about 9:30pm in Bonaire. This trip was not going to be that easy for us.

The adventure started at 3:15am on Thursday morning when our alarm went off, which meant that we had about 3 hours of sleep. We got to the airport before 4:00am which was fine, but no one from the airlines was present. We got checked in and at the counter with Air Canada and proceeded through security and US Customs. While waiting for the plane Trudy checked the departure screen for the Ottawa – Washington leg, and noticed that our flight was scheduled for 45 minutes later than we thought. We checked our connecting boarding pass and it showed our boarding for the Washington – San Juan leg before we arrived in Washington, it had been re-scheduled to leave 40 minutes earlier, leaving us less than 30 to connect. We left Ottawa and arrived in Washington after our flight had left for San Juan. I checked the departure board and saw another flight to San Juan was departing in about 30 minutes, so we managed to get on that one. The wrinkle is that this flight had a stop in St. Thomas first, then on to San Juan. Up to now, even with this longer flight we still had lots of time to make the connecting flight from San Juan to Bonaire. Instead of a five hour layover, we still would have about three hours. We flew no problems to St. Thomas, where they would not let the San Juan passengers off. They boarded the plane in St. Thomas and taxied out to take off, but we didn’t. The pilot came on and informed us that there were mechanical problems and they would need to look into it.

By the time we landed in San Juan, we had missed our connecting flight and we had been on the plane for a total of nine and a half hours without being allowed to get off. The biggest problem for us was that we were changing carriers, so United was not responsible for getting us to Bonaire, just to San Juan. We were on our own for accommodation and as far as American was concerned we were just a customer who didn’t show up for a flight.

As our luggage didn’t make it to San Juan we went to the Baggage Claim office to track it down. They checked their records and it showed our luggage was scheduled to arrive on the 10:30pm flight later in the evening, so we decided to leave it until the next day to pick it up. The agent made a few calls for us to locate a hotel room, which typically runs $200 - $400 US per night. The hotel at the airport was fully booked, and he gave us a number for another hotel located in Old San Juan. We then proceeded to the American ticketing office to see what they could do about our missed flight. They indicated that the flight on Friday was fully booked but they had room on Saturday. It would be an $84 ticket cost change charge, plus the $100 change fee per person. They also indicated we should get to the airport three hours before the flight on Friday if we wanted to try standby. We decided to call the hotel to see if they had a room and wait until tomorrow and try the standby route. We were able to get the hotel and enjoyed a good sleep in San Juan.