I'm glad to hear the trip worked out in the end!
A couple of quick translations:
Mercury is the upmarket brand of Ford just as Lexus is a Toyota brand. From the photo it looks like they gave you the Mercury version of the venerable Crown Victoria, much loved as a Police car, though I thought it was now out of production.
Your ginormous bed was almost certainly a US-sized King - in the UK a "King" is about 5' wide whereas in the US it's pretty much square at 6' 6".
It's quite normal for meeters and greeters to be at the baggage carousels for US domestic flights, so it's no great surprise that your bags were accessible to everyone. The attitude of staff at the US "legacies" varies a lot, just as it does at BA. My guess is your bags were put on the plane with no special handling - there's no bag matching on domestic flights so they can carry anything. In most cases they'll sweep unclaimed bags into storage after a while, but there's no way of telling how long yours were sitting there.
Oh, and I loved first picture - THAT is a Merkan!