Our flight home was not scheduled to leave until 8:00PM, so we decided that we’d take a tour of Fort Lauderdale after disembarking the ship. This proved to be a beneficial way to use our time before going to the airport. We started with a narrated bus tour. We were impressed with the neighborhoods whose homes had palm-lined streets in the front and boat-filled waterways in the back.
We stopped at the Museum of Discovery and Science, where we saw a Gravity Clock, one of only 3 in the world. The clock is in the front courtyard; we didn’t have time to go inside the museum but from the description of its contents, Bill & I agreed that our grandkids would love this place!
Next we boarded a paddlewheel boat for a 90-minute cruise which took us past unbelievably lavish mansions with equally extravagant boats of all types.
Below: Senator John Kerry’s sailboat on the left. Judge Judy’s boat on the right.
This boat even carries its own helicopter!
We had a pretty view of downtown Fort Lauderdale with a marina in the foreground.
We thought we’d just be killing time before our late flight, but it turned out that we thoroughly enjoyed our day in Fort Lauderdale. A 45-minute drive took us to the Miami airport for our nonstop flight to San Francisco.
NOTE: We learned something about airline compensation for a delayed flight. Our plane had mechanical difficulties and we were over an hour late in taking off, which meant that BART had stopped service for the night by the time we landed. A fellow passenger told us this had happened to her before, and the airline would pay for us to get home. She, too, had been planning to get home on BART. We went with her to the airline representative at baggage claim where we were given a voucher for Super Shuttle to take us to the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART station parking lot, where Melanie had dropped off our car that day. American Airlines paid $170 for our shuttle. If we hadn’t met that woman, we never would have known that all we had to do was ask!
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