My travel agent went out of business while I was in Cuba and did not confirm my return flight.
There were four of us and we were to rely on our Canuck professor for cash until we could leave -which he never doled out, in hindsight - (we spent all of our cash intentionally up to the last minute we arrived at the airport).
Stranded at the airport, we waited for a while to find out when the next flight to North America would be.
There were no flights until the next afternoon. The airport was essentially like a gutted Sam's club with knock off paintings of American cartoon characters in a play area, etc.
For that eight hour stretch only available food I bought was a sleeve of sub-Hydrox quality vanilla sandwich cookies and a can of Sprite. All of "my money" was gone at that point.
Air Canada provided taxi and hotel vouchers and we made our way to the
Hotel Triton Neptuna. The accommodation level was exactly what you would expect from a voucher after being bumped from a flight at a Cuban airport.
We also had a two dinner vouchers, so we literally drew straws to see who would go to the buffet. Another guy and I won.
We used the plastic bags on the cups in the room to line our pockets and planned on sneaking all of the food we could carry. We were so hungry that we got to the buffet right when it opened and were the only people seated in what was essentially a ballroom.
Labor is cheap in Cuba, and there were about 8 waiters each for both of us. They watched us attentively which made it very hard to shove food in our bag-lined pockets from there on out.
In hindsight, we were also pretty hung over, exhausted, and loopy at this point. So I'm sure the waiters enjoyed when we played lookout for each other and gave "high signs" to shove rolls in our dirty shirt pockets. Smooth as ice.
The rest of the group took to the streets and ate a whole chicken off the carcass and bought rolls. Nowadays, people would assume they were on Cuba Bath Salts, but this was a different time (2001).
That night I was so thirsty that I broke down and had a tincture of whatever liquid came out of the bathroom faucet of a run down Cuban hi-rise hotel. It was a new low and I was convinced I was doomed to **** my pants on plane from there on out (against all odds, I did not).
The next morning we strong armed our way into the continental breakfast and went for it. All of it. The Canuck professor left to make a phone call and then hurriedly cut our meal short when he got news of a morning flight to Canada.
We hightailed it to our rooms only to find that a toilet had flooded our floor and most of our belongings were imbued with Cuban hi-rise hotel toilet water.
The staff had big squeegees on poles and were happy to sling it off the balconies as if it was a part of their daily routine.
We burned up our last taxi vouchers on the way to the airport (why would we need them again? <<foreshadowing>>).
Our taxi driver, I **** you not, had some form or Tourette's or something that made his arm and torso/head/neck jerk violently every few seconds. At that point, all you can do is revel in the absurd.
We already told to "aeroporto muy rapido" or whatever as we put our wet luggage in his trunk and before we realized the what we were dealing with. That was the probably the most terrifying drive in a car I've ever had.
Turns out, the flight time was wrong somehow and we figured this out just in time to really figure out which flight taking off was the one we had tried to get on.
Then we waited at the airport for a flight back to the continent. Eventually we got a flight for 10:30pm or so and spent our day on the airport shed again.
The flight was mostly empty, which seemed great. But after a little bit in the air, we stopped over in some resort town and picked up a bunch of drunk and loud French Canadians and their whining-in-French children in the wee hours of the morning.
One pea soup eating ******* put a partially open rum bottle in the overhead and beads of rum streamed down the bottom of the overhead and flicked onto outfaced during takeoff.
The story goes on since we had to fly for Montreal to Toronto and then drive, from T-dot to Lex in minivan. You can imagine.
