Florida Trip - March 2012

It was high time to visit the family down in Florida, so Sage and I decided to make a week’s vacation on the Gulf Coast, including time with family, friends, the Red Sox, and the golf course.

Saturday, 3/17
Whenever we book trips, we have an unofficial rule to try to book the earliest flight we can when we’re going on vacation, thinking that A) There’s less chance the flight will be delayed, and B) If there was a cancellation we’d most likely know about it the night before, giving us time to revise our itinerary. So it was when we booked our Tampa trip…We saw there were only 2 or 3 non-stops from Boston to Tampa on JetBlue and booked the 1st one. It didn’t hit me until closer to departure that the flight time was 6:00 am, meaning we had to get up around 3:00 am to make the flight. Not my best move, but with groggy eyes we made our way to Logan Airport before dawn. Thankfully there wasn’t much in the way of crowds at check in or security, and our flight was uneventful. Landing in Tampa a bit early, we decided to grab a quick breakfast before driving up to Spring Hill to see Mom and Dad. After visiting with them, Vince had invited me to play golf with him and Jake that afternoon at a small, par-3 course in Lutz. A great time was had by all 3 of us, and while I did beat Jake by 2 strokes, I’d have to say that the kid has a lot of natural talent in him and should be breaking 80 in no time.

After golf Sage and I headed over to Vince’s house where he fired up his smoker. Joined by Mom, Lucy, Jake and Mel, we enjoyed a great meal of smoked chicken and potatoes. Afterwards Vince and I hit the grocery store to shop for our big supper the next day of pork loin roast and red cabbage. After the early wake-up call, Sage and I were pooped and ready for an early evening.

Sunday, 3/18
After a great night’s sleep, we drove up to Mom’s house to get ready for a nice home-cooked meal for Dad, who we were bringing home for the day. Vince conveniently had to take Jake to “church”, so I was on my own in the kitchen. I seared the outside of the roast for a few minutes on each side, then slathered it in a rub/glaze of mustard, honey, thyme, rosemary, and whatever else popped into my mind. (Oh, I should mention that I’ve never made a pork roast before.) I then followed Mom’s dog-eared recipe for red cabbage (which includes brown sugar, applesauce, and vinegar, among other ingredients), got the potatoes and salad going, and even threw some cauliflower out there for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Dad made it home with no worries, and it was great to have everyone around the table, and it seemed that the pork came out okay, as most everyone seemed to want to keep stuffing it in. Along with Mom’s white chocolate & orange cheesecake, it was a great meal.

After the late lunch, we stopped by the International Beer Garten for a drink, then met up with Jake, Vince, Mel and Lucy at the local Beef O’ Brady’s to watch the USF Bulls try to make it to the Sweet 16. Alas, they fell short, but the beer was cold, so it wasn’t a total loss. We bid adieu to the family for the time being as we were heading south to Fort Myers the next day for spring training.

Monday, 3/19
We had tickets to two Red Sox games, and the first one was Monday at 1:30 pm. The drive to Fort Myers is about 2 ½ hours, so we were up and on the road around 8:45. The drive down I-75 was easy, and we got to the new JetBlue Park at Fenway South right before the gates opened. The new park truly is Fenway South, as the field is the same dimensions as its counterpart in Boston. They also have a Green Monster in left field, and our seats for this game were in (yes, in, not on) the Monster.

Doug checks out Fenway South

We walked around the park, checking out the new place in detail, watched some batting practice, and ate some overpriced food. The seats we had inside the Monster were a little disappointing, unfortunately. First, they had a net in front of the seats (which is actually in play), and since we were sitting so close to that net, it made your eyes hard to focus on the game. Also, the seats were these annoying metal bar-stool type seats that didn’t have a railing for your feet, which meant they were always dangling. But it was a beautiful day, most of the Sox regular starters played 6 innings, and while the Beantown Nine ended up losing, we had a good time.

We left the game a little bit early as we had heard horror stories of the traffic problems at JetBlue. Thankfully we didn’t get stuck in anything bad, and we headed across town to our hotel located near the entrance to Sanibel Island. After checking in and unpacking, we decided to head over to Sanibel and check out the shelling on the beaches there. We always heard the shells were amazing there, but had never been, not even when we lived in Tampa. Our plan was to find a place to park, walk along the beach, then find a beach bar to eat dinner. As we drove along the causeway into Sanibel, one thing became apparent: LOTS of traffic leaving the island. There is only 1 road on and off the island, and it’s a 2-laner, and it seemed that the traffic was backed up for close to 3 miles to leave. But thankfully going on it wasn’t bad, and after finding one of the few parking lots on the island, we walked down to the beach. The gulf water was beautiful – high 70’s – and the weather was perfect. And I was astounded as to the number of shells on that beach! I had always heard it was amazing, but there were just stacks and stacks of them!

Sanibel Beach, with its multitudes of shells

We walked up and down the beach for about 45 minutes, watching pelicans dive for fish and picking out a few choice shells along the way. By this time it was close to 6:30, and we decided to find a restaurant. With so many people LEAVING the island an hour prior, I thought we’d have no problem finding a place to eat. Um…no. We stopped by 3 places, and they all had tons of people waiting outside, and none had space at the bar to wait it out/eat either. We weren’t sure if we wanted to wait the hour anywhere, and decided we’d be better off heading back to Fort Myers and hope the wait was less on that side. Thankfully the traffic had cleared out, and we meandered to Pincher’s Crab Shack.

On the way to Pincher’s, we saw an ambulance heading in the opposite direction from us, and then about 30 seconds later came upon an accident on the other side of the road that looked really nasty…a car went off the road, through a metal fence, and ended up backwards in a grove of trees, with one tree firmly planted through the car. It did not look good, and the police had 1 lane of traffic blocked off. But it didn’t hold us up, and we got to Pinchers to find out the wait was 30 minutes. This was fine, and we were able to find some room at the bar (2-for-1 drafts!) to kill the time. Dinner was great, as I had the local specialty of stone crabs, Sage enjoyed her shrimp tacos (I know – seafood!), and we had a wonderful meal. During the meal we could see the main road out the side window, and the traffic on the road was backed up for almost the entire time we were there…right up to about 20 minutes before we finished, when they obviously opened up the road again and traffic began to move. So we didn’t get stuck in the snarl on the way back to the hotel – a great day all around! (For us anyway…I do feel bad for the person in the car wreck, obviously.)

Tuesday, 3/20
Our tickets to this day’s Sox game wasn’t until 7 pm, so we decided to drive a little bit north of Fort Myers to Manatee Park to go kayaking. Normally Manatee Park is a great place to see manatees in the winter, but because the weather in Florida has been unseasonably warm in March, we were worried that many had already headed out into the gulf since it had warmed up already. We arrived and rented our 2 single kayaks right around 9 am, and were told that unfortunately no manatees had been seen in the past few days in the area. But we were optimistic and headed out anyway. Alas, it wasn’t to be, as we paddled up and down the Orange River, no manatees were seen anywhere.

Kayaking on the Orange River

It was still a fun trip, as we saw a lot of turtles and birds, and the trees and surrounding areas were nice to look at. After about 90 minutes we had enough and headed back toward our hotel.

Since it was still early afternoon, our first thought was to head back to Sanibel and spend an hour or so on the beach before the game. But the traffic coming off the island the day before spooked us a bit, and considering we’re not big beach people anyway, we decided to just chill by the hotel pool for a while, then go out for an early dinner before the game. Which is what we did. After the chilling, we ended up at one of the few restaurants near the new park, Buffalo Wild Wings, where I had bad food but Sage liked hers. Somehow she then talked me into going to Dairy Queen where they had a special offer on Blizzards – buy 1, get 1 for $0.99! Too good to pass up, and by the time we got back to JetBlue Park, we both felt sick from the craptastically good food we ate.

Another night, another Red Sox loss, as it turned out. Our seats this night were better, close to home plate, and even though we were in the last row right under the press box, they were still awesome seats. After leaving a little bit early again, when the Paw Sox came in to play, we headed back to the hotel.

Our seats on the 2nd night at JetBlue Park

Wednesday, 3/21
Our plan today was to drive up to Gainesville and visit with Travis who is at Florida getting his PhD. Another long drive up I-75, and this one took us a little over 4 ½ hours. We arrived around 11:30, and after getting screwed on paying for parking TWICE at the Visitor’s Center (don’t ask), we met up with Travis whose lab wasn’t far away. We had a lunch of sandwiches, and then Travis walked us around campus a bit and showed us the highlights. First stop was the Swamp, of course, which surprised me that it’s right in the middle of campus – very unusual for a 90,000+ seat stadium. Even more surprising was that the stadium was open. It seems that they leave it open during the day so that students can run stadium steps.

After snapping a few photos, we walked around the older part of campus, which I thought was nice and picturesque. Travis also gave us a quick tour of his labs at the Biomedical Research facility, where we saw slides with cultures and a centrifuge. Fascinating stuff.

After Travis left us to get back to work, we explored a bit more of campus (which is HUGE), including a stroll around Lake Alice where we saw turtles and alligators, and a QUICK walk past the bat houses, which I’m pretty sure were empty anyway.

A gator relaxing in Lake Alice

We then headed back to the hotel as the clouds grew thick, and thankfully missed getting caught in a quick rainstorm that lasted all of 5 minutes – the only rain we encountered all week! (And for us, that might be a new record.) When Travis was done with his work, we picked him up and we headed to the Reggae Shack, a restaurant in town that he recommended. I LOVED the food there, and while both Travis and Sage thought their meals were too spicy, we had a really good dinner. Afterwards we walked around downtown Gainesville (which was surprisingly dead), and then stopped in at Maude’s to grab a drink and play some games. We wanted to play Scattegories, but none of the games had unused sheets in them, and we ended up reading each other Trivial Pursuit questions before finishing with a quick game of Speed Scrabble. It was another long day, so we dropped Travis off on our way back to our hotel for an early night.

Thursday, 3/22
This day was kind of open, but since I hadn’t had a chance to play golf down in Fort Myers, Sage suggested I play this morning, so that’s what we decided to do. We drove back down toward Tampa, and she dropped me off at a local course that I played a few times before, Plantation Palms, while she took the car and headed to the Lowry Park Zoo. My round of golf was fun, as it wasn’t too crowded and I got to play by myself so that no one else had to witness my crappy play. When I was on 18 Sage texted me to say she was just leaving, which was perfect timing. I finished up, grabbed a sandwich in the clubhouse, and waited for her to pick me up.

After getting cleaned up, we didn’t have much time before meeting our friends Nikki and Bruce down in Tampa, who we were heading to a Lightning game with that night. We met up with them near their house at the World of Beer, and after a quick bite to eat we drove down to Channelside to the Ice Palace/St. Pete Times Forum/Tampa Bay Times Forum. It’s amazing how built up that area has become in the past 10 years, and the days of being able to park right outside the arena, on the street, and feeding $3 of quarters in the meters are long gone. But we found a lot not far away and got to our seats in time for warm-ups. They’ve made plenty of changes to the Ice Palace since our days of going to games, and for the most part they’re all for the better. The Bolts ended up beating the Oilers in a shootout, and that was a great end to the night.

Friday 3/23
Vince had made a tee time for the two of us to play Fox Hollow, not far away from where we were staying, this morning, and he picked me up around 8:30 as we made our way to the course. The course is a great layout, and in wonderful shape, and thankfully it didn’t take us too much more than 4 hours to play. We ended up playing with a couple from Ontario, and we enjoyed the outing, even if I did end up 3-putting almost every green. But that’s what Spring Training is all about – working out the kinks! After heading back to the hotel (where Sage spent the day by the pool reading), we drove up to see Mom and Dad again. From there we were able to corral everyone into a dinner at Carrabbas, where on a Friday night at 5:15 pm the wait was already at 40 minutes. Life in Florida! After saying our goodbyes, we headed back to the hotel to get packed up for our trip home the next day.

Saturday, 3/24
Once again we had the first flight of the day, this one at 7:10 am, so at least we were able to sleep in to 4:00 am or so this day. But the day didn’t turn out entirely uneventful. We got to the airport around 5:00 am, dropped off the car, and checked in at JetBlue. We made our way across the mono-rail to our gate area, and proceeded to get in line for security – but boy, what a line it was. It was one of those queues like you see at Disney, where it looks bad, then you go around a corner to find the end of the line, and you see it’s REALLY bad. This was about 5:20 am, so I wasn’t too worried about missing the flight, even tho the line looked to be about an hour long. But there were several people around us, including a couple right behind us in line, who had tickets for a flight to New York that left at 6:00 am. The problem with the security line moving so slow had to do with the fact that they only had 1 scanner open, out of 4 in the area. (I assume they simply didn’t have enough staff to open more at that time.) Many of the NYC passengers asked personnel there if they could move to the front since their flight left so soon, but were told that only First Class or Premier club travelers could jump the line. They eventually did open up 1 more scanner, then another closer to 6 am, but it was just about 6 am when we got through the metal detectors. As we did, we decided to follow the couple behind us to their gate. (Who were growing more and more irritating by the woman getting huffy every 5 minutes and saying, “Why won’t they let us go to the front of the line?”, and her husband trying to explain for the 100th time, “They will only let First Class go!”) So we saw that the flight they were on did leave at 6 am (it was already 1 or 2 minutes past at this time) and we followed them as they hightailed it to their gate. Alas, the plane had already pushed back, and not even the pleading by the man on his knees to let him on the plane would change his fortunes. This was pure schadenfreude on our parts (happiness on the misfortune of others), as I can’t have any sympathy for someone who shows up 40 minutes before their flight to get through security. It’s 2012 folks…plan ahead! Also, we noticed that their airline had another flight to New York at 8:20, so they only had to wait a couple of hours. As we got to our gate, we notice that a JetBlue flight was heading to New York as well at 6:20, and we sat and watched over a dozen people running from security to the gate to make the flight (several in various stages of undress from the metal detector…carrying belts, shoes, jackets, etc). Meanwhile we had a nice, stress-free time waiting for our plane to board, which did on time. And while we may have gotten up at 4 am that morning, we were home in Massachusetts by 11 am. It goes to show you, it’s always better to be way early than a little bit late.