Well….. I have to finish off our exciting interactions with the Sun Pass customer services department last night. To make it plain, Sun Pass is the card you need to have attached to your windscreen here in Florida (and some other states) to pass through the toll booths along some of the highways. It’s a bit like the toll payment for the Dartford Crossing in the UK except you actually have to have a transponder card on your car, you can’t just have an online account linked to your car registration number. You have to have one because most of the toll booth stations are now both unmanned and cashless. You have no choice.
So…. according to various websites you can buy the transponder for $4.99 in any number of places, including online and then you have to activate it. We bought ours in Publix and brought it back to our hotel intending to activate it online. This proved to be massively problematic. In fact it was even more problematic than trying to buy a ticket on Indian Railways online. At least in India, you only hit a problem when you have to give a phone number and it doesn’t deal with anything other than an Indian telephone number. In Florida – IN FLORIDA – which must be the most heavily touristed state in the USA, the system actually doesn’t only not deal with a non-US telephone number, it also doesn’t deal with a non US address….. This took ages to tease out… Not only did the online activation system not work for foreigners, it actually didn’t deal with people who’d bought their transponders in person….. activation online was totally linked to buying a transponder, you couldn’t separate the processes. The website says you can activate in many retail outlets that have kiosks. None of the ones we telephoned had kiosks anymore, if ever. There are walk in centres you can visit. Our nearest was an hour north of here. And involved driving on a toll road that we had no means of paying for. It was desperate. We resorted to calling the customer services department.
Like all customer services departments, this was terribly difficult and involved talking to a machine and I mean TALKING or sometimes typing codes. And you won’t be surprised to hear that the talking option didn’t work too well with an English accent. Bob had long given up in total fury and left it to me. Eventually by combination of typing a number of random codes in I was connected to a human being. It seems wrong to complain about his accent after all I’ve said about the non-recognition of my own…. however this gentleman clearly came from the deep country south. “Cain iyee heelp yowu” he said… We went from there in mutual misunderstanding but he did manage to set up our account – it involved us spelling almost every word using the phonetic alphabet….. then we hit the address issue. This is when Danny my almost-nephew came to the rescue. Whilst talking to Captain Cracker, I was simultaneously messaging Danny and he supplied address and telephone number we could use.
Final obstacle came when the system wouldn’t accept any credit card except an American credit card….. more frantic messaging and Danny once again saved the day….. phew….. We now have an activated Sun Pass with $20 on it. Unfortunately our Southern Friend has not followed up by sending our account name and password so we will have to call him again to get them otherwise we can’t monitor our spend….. A task for another day…..
Today we had a fabulous day on the beach near our hotel. We took our new loungers down there. Bob sprang manfully into action and deployed them and we both lowered ourselves successfully into position. After a while we decided to go for a swim and I adopted the sit-up-roll-sideways onto the sand-kneel up- stand up method and achieved uprightness with dignity and did not collapse the lounger. Bob adopted a different method, collapsed his lounger and scraped his elbow, resulting in much irritability and muted cursing…. It only happened once. Second and subsequent times, he achieved uprightness with dignity, no injury and no collapse of lounger…… We had a lovely day, multiple swims…. much reading. We utilised our new Cooler bag thing too and took our lunch and cold drinks down there.
Came back at 3pm, had a lovely facetime call with Stuart and Fi. Also multiple calls with the girls all day. Have enjoyed our few days here. The sea is quite lovely and this little hotel has been good, quiet, comfortable and well positioned. Tomorrow we drive across the swamps to the west coast and a week in Fort Myers Beach. Read on to see how we get on…..