Recent Travels

This time I have a really good excuse for the delay in my posts, I have been on vacation for almost two weeks! My time away has given me much material, expect pictures and elaboration soon but here are some strange highlights in no particular order.

In the last two weeks I have seen most of my relatives including three brothers, two parents, one sister-in-law, four uncles, three aunts, four first cousins, three cousin-in-laws (is there such a thing?),eight second cousins and one second cousin once removed (I think).

In twelve days I have been in five states (okay, I never left the airport in Colorado or Georgia). I have slept in five beds including a twin-sized dinosaur bed that belongs to a six-year-old boy. I have seen giraffes, alligators, polar bears, bald eagles, scores of crazed college basketball fans and flamboyant older men clad in fluorescent Speedos (only in South Beach). I watched a little bit of a triathlon, saw the Duke Blue Devils win a national championship for the second time in my life, went to the last ever regular season game to be played in Amway Arena and somehow found time to go to a T-Ball practice.

I have flown three different airlines, took a taxi, driven in the back seat of a convertible without a seat belt, rode in an air boat through what I prefer to think was the Everglades instead some run of the mill swamp in central Florida and perhaps most memorably traveled through the bowels of Orlando on a broken down bus traveling at 10 miles per hour for well over an hour.

I lost $140 bucks playing blackjack in a place called French Lick, was exposed to chicken pox, was rained on, read a wonderful novel set in New York City, did the electric slide, had a mean rooster jump on me, was rained on, got a facial, unsuccessfully flew kites one of which got stuck in a tree, saw the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, eaves dropped on a phone conversation with my aunt and Kathy Lee Gifford, sized-up my sixty year-old cousin’s latest crush, put up a bouncy house, ate gazpacho, was rained on, carried around a box full of baby chicks for about an hour, and met the owner of the Orlando Magic. Who am I kidding; I have enough material for a short novel. My one regret is that I didn’t go swimming.