I am Confused (Again)
We arrived at Bonaire's lovely Flamingo Airport, located conveniently next to the Donkey Sanctuary, early enough for them to go through our checked baggage by hand before loading it onto the American Eagle ATR. The flight took off about 20 minutes late, but that was not a big deal at all, since everyone's connections had at least 2 hours (ours is 7) to wait. I actually caught a nap during the flight, and we landed here at San Juan, where we found an electrical outlet, some happy fun wifi, and a pretty good Dominos branch, and all is fine with the world.
So what am I confused about? Well, we arrived at one end of the airport, were put on busses, and let out at a door close to where we landed. Then... the walk. Yes, we walked. And we walked. Wes estimates that the walk was about 1/4 mile. And walked. All the way to the happy fun customs/immigration area, where we got up to the front of the line, and then stupidly realized we hadn't filled our customs forms out because we hadn't been given any on the plane like normally happens. Banished from the line, we went to find the form to fill it out. Right under the "Welcome to the United States" sign were several forms that we figured MUST have the right one in them. WRONG! NONE of the forms were in English!
This is the part where I'm most confused. "Welcome to the United States" was in English. But in order to get an English language customs card, we had to ask specially at the American Airlines "help me cuz I'm lame" desk. A very confusing turn of events indeed.
Once we got the form filled out, and went through the happy immigration man, we found another curiosity of American airports - no free carts. That sucks. $2.00 per cart, and for scuba people like us with 120 lbs of gear each....well, you can figure. So we got our stuff, we went painlessly through customs (hooray), and thankfully the AA check in for baggage was RIGHT THERE so we could dump the stuff and run like crazy to get to our flight that we only had 6 hours to get to :-).
Yes, we are looking forward to getting home.