And so it begins....

Well, the trip began by heading to the bus station in Ottawa to catch a bus to Trudeau Airport in Montreal. That trip was rather uneventful. Oh, one thing is that they now do a security check like an airport before getting on a bus. Didn't really sleep on that bus trip, but it did take about 2-2.5 hours. Got to the airport and realized that we couldn't check in until about 3:30AM. All the restaurants were starting to close, or were closed, but there was one that was open 24 hours. Robyn grabbed a quiche and I decided to just drink my fanta. We found a comfy couch upstairs, but there were tons of people up there already. Robyn tried to get some sleep, but I couldn't.

About 1am I had to get up and walk around. I circled the airport about 10 times and went back upstairs to read for a bit. I grabbed a tea and muffin around 2am to try and keep awake. It seemed to work, and I watched some stuff on my laptop. Eventually, 3:30 came around and we got our bags checked.

Nothing was still open except that 24 hour bar. After getting our bags checked, we ended up grabbing some toast at the bar. We then toddled over to security to get through that process early. They opened their doors at 4am, we got through quite easily, and were the first ones to the gate. We found a nice spot to nap for a bit until we could board. Must have napped for about half an hour and was awoken by lots of noise. There were tons of people around waiting for the flight. Stayed awake until boarding. Got on board and I was pretty much out as soon as the plane started to take off.

I woke up about an hour into the flight. I tried to doze off a few more times, but it was useless. I was starting to feel pretty tired at this point. We got off the plane and had to go through customs. That was a pretty simple process. Then we got to our baggage claim. We had to pick up our bags, bring them to another converyor belt, and send them off to security. I wondered why they couldn't figure this part out themselves. Why did the passengers have to be the middle men in all this?

Anyway, after this we had to go up to another security checkpoint. Had to take off the shoes, take my laptop out, put everything through the x-ray machine all that jazz. Finally got through that and I sat down in a chair to put my shoes back on. Talked to an older couple for a few minutes (they asked how long my trip was from Canada)...

We decided we needed food before going any further on this journey so we jumped into burger king and grabbed a whopper each. Was tasty after not eating for almost 20 hours. But only tasty for a few minutes...then it started going ick in my stomach, but I survived it.

We then had to go get our baggage again. We're hitting around 11:30 at this point. We landed at 10:10. Anyway, got our bags and then had to figure out where to get the rental car. Turns out Hertz is not at the airport but we had to take a shuttle to the rental car place. We got there and found that we needed to pay the LDW. Oh well. They also didn't have any basic cars left, so we got upgraded to Mustang (see the pictures).

We drove to the hotel and checked in. Great hotel, took some pictures. We decided to go out and grab some booze and munchies. Came back to the hotel to watch the first part of the Daytona 500 (which I may add was happening like 40 miles from me). We were gonna go to Hurricane Sam's Bar to watch the race, but they were only open at 5pm. We had a few drinks, watched the race and then went to the bar for dinner.

Lugged our way back to the room to watch a bit more of the race. At about 7pm we decided to go for a swim in the outdoor pool. Yep...outdoor pool at 7pm. Came back to the room and I'm writing this.....