M&M&M's adventures - Canada to USA [draft]

This morning we were up fairly early and had free breakfast at the hotel. I was actually wanting pancakes with maple syrup as it was to be our last morning in Canada. Alas, no pancakes were to be found. But a nice hot breakfast of bacon and eggs did hit the spot.
We did have an hour or so before we needed to check out and drive to the airport to return the car. It is about a half hour drive from where we were staying to the airport.
Marika had found that there is a farmers market near the waterfront so we were going to go check it out but as we were flying out, we wouldn't really have bought much other than what we could eat right away as we can't take fresh fruit back to the USA.
I did a google search online and found that there was a Pandora shop nearby and since I'm a collector of unique location charms, I made a dash there and told Marika and Michelle I would meet up with them to check out and drive to the airport.

So I did a mad dash uphill to the shops area of Halifax. Bumped into a New Zealand woman in The Vault which is the shop selling Pandora charms. She was in Halifax with her marching band and she was also after collector charms. I got a Nova Scotia charm with a lighthouse and one with a lobster because they are the two things I will remember about my trip.

On the way back to the hotel to meet Marika and Michelle, I walked halfway up the hill to Fort Halifax. The old fort sits atop a hill and there's a view out to the water from there... But there seems to be a lot of construction of high rise buildings going on near the water so I could imagine that in a few years time, the old fort's view will be completely obstructed. 

We made it back to the airport and returned the car. The guy who checks the cars was funny. We had actually tried to clean some of the red dirt and dead bugs from the car the day before at a servo stop. So I apologied to the guy that the car was a little dirty when we returned it and his reply was something like "not at all. It doesn't look like you hit enough bugs for me. You needed to hit more of them so that they don't multiply and bother me." That was my laugh for the day...

We had made it to the airport in good time but because we were flying to Fort Lauderdale, I assumed we would go to the International counter for Air Canada. But after waiting for somebody to come and check us in, we figured we were in the wrong place and went down to the Domestic counter. We had to transit through Toronto anyway so I guess we did have to check in domestic first.

So we were finally on our way from Halifax to Toronto. When we got to Toronto we needed to transit and I was so grateful that the air stewards onboard our Halifax/Toronto flight had been so helpful and told us to exit quickly and walk to the right to F terminal. We landed early but it turned out that our transit time was actually really really tight.
So we picked up our luggage and then went to check into the next flight from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale. They set up an immigration centre at Toronto so basically when we cleared, we were in the USA already.
When you go to enter the US, there are kiosk machines that are meant to make it easier. You insert your passport and then it asks you for your fingerprints but the finger pad is so difficult to use. Michelle had so much trouble. So I took our bag of food - no fresh stuff but chocolates, dried fruit etc and went through to the counter first because our transit time was so tight. I got to the counter and the guy basically interrogated me. Who was I with? Why had I been in Canada? Why would I ever want to go to Prince Edward Island? And just because you have no literary culture, you don't need to turn your nose up at me Mr. Sour face... And when I answered the question of who I was with, he had to see them and Michelle was still stuck getting the fingerprint thing sorted out. It was such an unpleasant mess and we were stressed because we needed to get to the next flight quickly. I wonder if US immigration officials train in pardon my language "how to be an arsehole 101"?

Why Air Canada books such tight connections when US immigration is so slow and painful is beyond me. I think you need at least 2 hours between connections. Anyway, we made it...

So we arrived at Fort Lauderdale around 7:30pm due to the time difference. I had booked a hotel close to the airport for the night. We have booked a rental car but I couldn't see the point in collecting it tonight as we would just pay one extra day rental. The hotel has a free shuttle from the airport so I called when we landed and they sent the shuttle for us. We dumped our bags after that long horrendous rush around airports and we were hungry.
I'll give a shoutout to the front desk at Homewood Suites by Hilton Ft. Lauderdale Airport because they were lovely when we checked in. We asked about places to eat nearby and were advised that there is a free shuttle that would take us to one of the eating places they had on a list.

So we hopped on the shuttle and took our driver's advice to dine at Miller's Ale house which is a sportsbar. It was a good choice.

Ribs and ice cream dessert

I ordered half a rack of ribs... yummm

Couldn't resist dessert - peanut butter ice cream cake

The shuttle stops running at 11pm so we called around 10:45pm for the driver to pick us up again and he brought us back to our hotel... What a day... We were so tired after a long travelling day!