Well I finally made it to Grenada today! The travel was…interesting, to say the least. The island seems very tropical from what I’ve seen in the dark so far (which isn’t much because the airport is 2 miles from campus), and the Grenadian people have been very welcoming to us.
I started the day with a mid-morning flight out of Reagan National Airport. What a nice little airport! It wasn’t the hectic, crazy mess I expected it to be (in fact it was quite the opposite!). My luggage weighed in fine (thanks to a tad bit of help from an incorrectly zero’d scale) and I even ended up offloading a couple of carryon items before giving it all up. After a teary goodbye, I made my way easily through security (although I didn’t realize that I had to run each laptop separately through so I got a few pointed looks!) and to the gate. I didn’t have to wait too long before boarding and free wifi helped pass the time. We boarded easily, had an uneventful flight, and landed in Miami earlier than I had anticipated! And the weather was beautiful.
The Miami airport is a little bit busier and larger haha. Getting to my gate was pretty simple though, thanks to their sky train. I met up with my roommate at the gate, and after a brief reunion, we headed off in search of lunch. Last time we’ll have American fast food for 4 months! Wow! As we ate lunch and passed time waiting to board our next flight to Grenada, storm clouds rolled in, took over the skies, and let loose! I was not happy about that haha. It took them a long time to board our flight (which ended up being a good thing sadly). Because of the thunderstorms, they had to clear all personnel from loading luggage. All in all, storms delayed us a little over 2 hours. Our next delay was having to dump 4 people from the flight because we were overweight. A flight packed full of students required to be on campus tomorrow made finding people willing to leave difficult. Finally they were able to get 4 volunteers, and 2 hours and 50 mins after our scheduled departure, we took off.
The ride was a little bumpy but not too bad. I was really anxious the whole time for some reason so I didn’t really enjoy the flight much. Thankfully I managed a few naps to help pass the time.
We landed just before 10:30p in Grenada. The location of the airport on the island was really deceptive. You can see coast line out the window but the plane feels (and is) much closer to the ground/water than you think it should be because there is a peninsula that just out that you can’t see. We had time to glance out the window and se bushes before we hit the ground. It was a surprise!
Off loading and going through immigration was asy, just a little time consuming due to lines. The workers were very ready for us though, so the process was pretty quick. Next came luggage retrieval. It took me a long time to find my bags-I was pretty convinced they were lost for while :(. After we finally had our bags, we entered a VERY long line to go through customs to declare our laptops. It moved very slowly and was frustrating. It was tough to remember that the airport personnel didn’t want to be there at 11p any more than we did.
We finally made it through customs at 12:30a, found our ride to campus, got our room assignments, and checked in. The driving down here is pretty crazy! They drive really fast on small, narrow roads!
The housing currently leaves a lot to be desired. It’s no New Hall West by any stretch of the imagination. It certainly isn’t the brand new housing I thought we were getting either. I’ll have to inquire about that. The room is small and doesn’t quite live up to my standard of clean, but the AC was running full blast and felt AWESOME after being hot and sweaty for 2 hours.
Tomorrow will be an early morning and I am not much looking forward to going on 5.5 hours of sleep. Hopefully there will be some down time for a nap, I think we’ll both need it!
Good night world! Did i mention that the AC works so well here that tonight I will be sleeping under 2 plush blankets and with socks, PJ pants, and a fleece sweatshirt on? Haha
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