Day 2: Into Miami: MIA = Missing in Action

January 6, 2014

Atlanta is a hub, maybe the home city, of Delta

Miami beach, with Miami City in the background

MIA is the airline abbreviation for Miami. It's the tag all our bags got when Delta refused to take them to Key West. So here I sit on the floor of the MIA terminal (no seats on this level), missing one bike - Dodie's. Delta has no idea what they did with it,

That kind of shoots what had become our plan - to rent a car and finish the trip to Key West that way. We did not even get so far as to see if a one way rental was possible. We have nothing to transport, even if we could.

So Delta's record so far does not look too good. They have refused to take us where we paid to go, dumped us in a large unknown city, and lost our most valuable piece of equipment. As I write this, Dodie is off seeing what they will do about it.

As we think about where the bike could be, we observe that the baggage claim is uncontrolled and just by the road outside. On the other hand, our impression of this place is not as if it were teeming with shifty looking people. Rather, the level is clean, spacious, air conditioned, and very calm. The only outwardly disconcerting thing is piles and piles of luggage from previous flights. What is it all doing here?

If anyone is going to go ballistic here, it will have to be us. But rationally, what are our options? Dodie is only riding a bike at all because hers was specially tailored for her. Walking into a miscellaneous Miami bike shop with a $3000 mortgage on the farm might not even get us on the road (or at least far down it), Flying home and suing for damages and broken dreams does not seem like much fun either.

Practically, we will begin by finding a way to hang around here for a day or so, to see if the case pops up in Key West, or Manila, or wherever.Whether Delta will help with even that remains to be seen, Beyond that it's all up in the air. Ah, bad pun!

The Miami airport is extremely large. The network of moving belts and trains is called MIAMover.

Dodie came back, not with the bike, but at least with some (very chintzy) $6 meal vouchers, and very importantly, a voucher for one night at the Doubletree Hotel. This would give us a chance to rest and regroup, see where things would be by tomorrow and make some decisions.

Somewhere out there is our shuttle to a brief haven of rest.

OK Delta, this room is pretty good! The shuttle driver told us that the hotel has a daily contract with Delta for 60 rooms, all used for cases like ours. Wouldn't it be cheaper to actually run things efficiently?

The view from our window is pretty desolate Miami freeway-scape

Of course, in this tale of things working out to be tough, getting to the Hotel was not that easy. The airport is huge and the hotel shuttle comes where? when? Thanks to the ATT SIM in Dodie's phone, we were able to call and let them know where we were. So we walked into the hotel and joined a check-in line. Immediately this seemed to trigger a fire alarm. Lights flashed and an urgent recorded voice instructed everyone to leave the building. Some people complied, but the counter clerks seemed unphazed. We hestitated, sort of close to the doors, ready to dash if needs be or keep our place in line otherwise. Lights continued to flash, and recorded verbal warnings were played. After about five minutes of this someone came on the loudspeakers to say "oh, just disregard the foregoing". Thanks, we needed a little more stress to spice our day!

We got into the room and immediately phoned the number Delta had given us to get updates. We actually got two. One was a card titled "Need Help?". We guessed that would be a joke. No we called the Baggage Information line. There, a friendly computer voice asked for our reference number, and then announced that our bag had been found! It then went on to detail how the bag would be given to a delivery company and would show up at our "temporary address" in six to twelve hours. Since we hadn't really given baggage an address, I chose the "representative" option to speak to a person and get things nailed down. The system said someone would answer in "six to nine hours" and invited me to stay on the line. No kidding. They also said I could go to the website to see everything that they can see. I did that. The website admitted that the last time they had actually seen the bag was at a "plane side" scan, in Atlanta. The system assumed the bag was in Miami since it had seen it go on the plane to Miami. Since I too was in Miami, it deduced that they had done it and that we were or would soon be reunited. In short - same story as five hours ago! All that stuff about delivery companies - sheer electronic hallucination!

We dragged ourselves back to the airport and Dodie joined a line to speak to an actual person in baggage. Meanwhile I drifted off to browse through the drifts of hundreds of stacked up mystery bags beside the carousels. An agent came and kicked me out, said it was a security thing. Thanks, I said, I'm glad to see you are watching over the bags so carefully! Then I sleazed over to another corral of bags, Waitaminut, what's that? Dodie's bike!!! It sure wasn't here before. and why was it now hanging out with these 300 other mystery items? I grabbed it and went dancing and twirling down the corridor with it toward Dodie, still in line.I showed an agent my drivers' license to establish that I was the Steve Miller who had scrawled the affixed name tag. No bar code scanning or logging out happened. Neither has baggage seen fit to call and see if we have committed suicide yet.

No time for suicide, we immediately implemented plan B. We travelled 5 miles on the horizontal escalators and 5 miles on the mini train, to the other end of the terminal. There we rented a white SUV and bingo, with a simple application of raw US cash, gasoline, and horsepower we were back in business in true American style. Tomorrow we will cruise down the Interstate, then HWY 1, and be in Key West. One day late, but moving fast!

Hey, hey, that's our missing bag. Why is it here with the racy red ones??

You need a train just to get to the end of the terminal building

In the hotel parking lot, opne of these white SUVs is ours. At the car rental, they had rows of dozens of these, all ready to go with the keys in the ignition. Choose any one, we were told.

Dinner at the hotel was good quality. Surprise, the warm dinner rolls were tops!

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