Day 8:

  We're huddled into one of the windowless dining rooms.  People are amazingly all coughing and sick.  There must be a few hundred of us in there, all now feeling pretty darn sick.  I really feel run down, more so than I've ever felt before.  It's now about 8:00am.  Some people are worried they'll miss their 8:30am flights.  They will.  We have early check-out, but those that have normal check-out can't leave until 11:30am.  The last flight leaves Puerto Rico at 11:30 until 8pm it turns out for almost all flights to the central US.
  The night before we had to leave our luggage outside our room for pickkup at 10pm (no choice, everyone has to do it).  We're then hurried down to the pier where there's rows upon rows of luggage.  Surprisingly, Becky finds our 3 bags and we high-tail it over to Customs.  I explain the Rum "rhum" and there's a certain tricky bit involving number of liters and location.  If it's a US.Virgin Island then you're allotted a certain number of liters versus other locations.  Appleton is manufactured in Jamaica, not a Virgin Island territory, but purchased into the Duty Free of Saint Maarten.  The guards are honey badgers and don't give a shit and let us through and don't even check our bags.
  We get to the airport and beg for the next flight, which is 11:30am.  If we had made the change on the ship by way of through the airport, it would have cost us $1400.  The way we did it here, it cost $300, though oddly we were not placed on stand-by.  No first-class options were available, though we had to fly into Philadelphia and then to Denver.
  We wait the 3 hours in the tiny Puerto Rico airport and I'm feeling beat-up sick, though I eat a little.  I'm starting to get the shivers.  The flight to Philadelphia is long at about 4 hours.  Luckily I'm stuck in a nice back corner, though the seat sometimes there will go back a tiny bit, it does not.  Becky graciously took the center seat and chatted the old lady in the aisle seat.  She had just had open-heart surgery.  I hope to God my oncoming cold doesn't kill her.  I cover myself in my leather jacket and try to doze-off but it's no use.
  Philadelphia is rather large.  The inside concourses are laid-out like you're in the Cherry Creek Mall in Denver.  It goes on for miles like this with no gates.  I try a place called, "Pizza King" and it sucked donkey balls.  More like Pizza Ass.  I wasn't about to try the "Philly" as I know they concoct it with Cheeze-Whiz.  No thank you.  The Gate girl says we're not supposed to be on this flight and there's a mixup but it gets worked-out.  Full flight again.  Every flight is full.
  I'm tortured with a center seat (as is Becky, though 4 rows back) for 4.5 hours.  The Japanese kid next to me is twitchy and the elderly man next to me is weird too.  Since I'm in the first coach row, there's no tray (well, it's actually embedded into the seat's arm) but there is a lot of legroom.  A small 7" movie is playing from the overhead, In Time.  Already seen it but it was fairly good.  My two enemies elbowing me, not allowing me the "Sacred Rule of Center Seats" in which the center-seat-sufferer gets both armrests aren't smart enough to realize that there's headphones in their front seat pockets so they stare vacantly at the soundless screen, fussing.  My fever is getting pretty high.
  We arrive in Denver late and I try to negotiate the next flight out.  Turns out our original Denver to Colorado Springs tickets are still good, however, and it leaves in 10 minutes.  We get onboard the mailing tube.  I'm feeling really hot now.  I get to sit next to Becky who equally complained about her center seat earlier, that one passenger was using her as a back-pillow and slept on her.  At least we get to sit together for the final lap.  Of course, they have to de-ice the plane because it's 45 degrees.  Anything to delay us.
  The flight from Denver to C.Springs is always bumpy and low, though in-the-air time is usually under 20 minutes.  We were hitting a LOT of chop.  It's now 10pm local.  We've been flying for about 15 hours now.  The heat is intense.  We're bouncing all over the place, too, and I start feeling queasy, and now I'm burning up and start getting really light-headed.  I rip-off my jacket just as everything turns dark and I pass-out, smashing my head against the chair in front of me...