A Trip To Florida

I don’t know if anyone missed me last week…but I was not at the newspaper, as Jimmy and I took a Florida vacation.

Jimmy is going to retire real soon, and he wanted a two-weeks paid vacation before then. His boss acquiesced. So we were headed to Florida. He has been off a lot lately, so I told him, he could plan the trip.

Well the first stop was Ocala, and the Don Garlits museum. Jimmy said he’s always seen it on the side of I-75, and wanted to go, but never stopped. So we planned ahead this time, found the price for senior center admission, and said, we can do that.

When Jimmy was a youngster, he had an uncle who owned race tracks, and he hung around them some. He remembers watching Don Garlits race, and he remembers sitting in one of his black cars one time. He couldn’t pick that car out at the museum, as there were several black ones. A google search shows Mr. Garlits is worth some $15 million, and he has a lot invested in the museum in Ocala. In his 80s, he still offers personal guided, monthly tours of the museum, the shop which was not open to the public, as well as the adjacent car museum.

I’ve never been into drag racing, but it was still interesting to see all those racers, and just wonder how small and/or agile those racers are to get down in those cars. I enjoyed looking at the cars, and I really enjoyed the adjacent car museum which had all kinds of cars from the Model T to a 1964 1/2 Mustang, and so many more. They were very interesting to look at and see how the automobile has evolved. And $15 (for us old folks) got us into both areas.

After our stop, we continued our travels, making it almost to Tampa, which I said I would not do in a day.

Let me interject here, that Jimmy’s idea of fun is riding around. He has a bum knee and doesn’t like to walk. Even when we go to the beach for a week, he has to get in the truck every day and go somewhere! Kathy’s idea of fun is to get out of the vehicle and stay put. I get stove up mighty bad after riding a few hours. When we go to the beach for a week, it suits me never to get back in the vehicle until we go home.

So, this was Jimmy’s vacation, and I tried not to complain too much. And, the stop in Ocala made the extra miles easy.

So we stopped for the night, and the next day we were headed to an old friend’s house. Janet and Brian live in Port Charlotte, but unfortunately Brian had been called away to work. Janet was there though, and a delighful hostess. We arrived there the second afternoon, and set on her porch and visited for hours before she treated us to a steak dinner. We spent the night there, then headed a little further south to Ft. Myers and Sanibel Island.

If you’ve never been to Sanibel Island it is beautiful, and we have history there, because his mother took us there when we visited here while she lived in Ft. Myers (she was a snowbird), and Jimmy and his children had also been there before the untimely death of his first wife and their mother.

So we rode the island, and managed to find reasonable accommodations, which was good because it cost $6 to get on the island, and we sure weren’t leaving and coming back, but we hadn’t seen all we wanted when it was getting dark.

We left there the next day and headed across the state and stopped in Deltona and visited with a friend for a couple hours before moving on up the road. The next day we met up with other friends and had lunch and visited with them a while. Then we rode along A1A for a while enjoying the view. I fussed because Jimmy wouldn’t stop and let me walk on the beach, but in reality, it was only about 45 degrees and quite breezy.

All in all we had a good week. We got plenty of rest (something Kathy thinks a vacation is for and Jimmy does not), and plenty of good meals.

Jimmy overheard me telling someone we didn’t do anything and it hurt his feelings. But, we did indeed to something, and now I’m rested and raring to go at work after my lovely respite from the routine.