The Florida Trip

Don't get me wrong, I'm as sad as everyone else about the current state of the economy, but being a bit of a social phobe, I have to admit how much I really enjoyed the relative emptiness of the resort we visited. It was pretty obvious that the whole place is set up for crowds. Here are some examples:
1-The bathrooms at Citywalk were down long wide halls and had like a gazillion stalls.
2-The restaurants all had lighted signs announcing seating time and all said "0"
3-That book in the hotel room that explains stuff had "reservations recommended" for all of their restaurants and that was just silly.
4-I never had to wait for a beer, restroom or food anywhere.
5-We had outstanding service everywhere like they were so darn glad to see us.
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You know how when you have great expectations, you seem to get more easily disappointed? Well, to be quite honest, I was all, well it's not San Diego but I'll try to have fun. In other words, I had NO expectations and I had a GREAT time. Even my flight was fine and seemed short. And I loved my driver. He sounded just like Thomas Hayden Church (The cheater in Sideways) and I love voices and I loved that guy's voice, although I couldn't think of the actor's name at the time.
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The hotel was fun. It's like all these little buildings grouped around a large piazza with a little harbor with boats and ducks. The ducks were real. You'll see the "buildings" in later pictures. On the inside were a trillion photo op spots, so I narrowed it down to just a few:

After we walked around and explored the inside, we went out onto the piazza and settled at The Thirsty Fish. We were sitting outside enjoying all the great live music when these ducks came running up:

At first we couldn't figure out why they were so interested, then I remembered that My Sweetie had a got a bit of lime pulp on his lip and had grabbed it and tossed it. I guess that's all the ducks needed to see. We finally went to Sal's and had a light dinner and went to our room to watch "Saturday Night Live." Sunday morning, we went down to eat at the main place and this was my view from our table:
The birds were quite aggressive and one tiny bird settled on top of the seat next to me. I held up a thin french fry thinking he'd fly away, but no! He did a crazy hop toward me flapping like a madman and grabbed the whole fry! My Sweetie laughed and laughed at my shocked expression. Fortunately, the giant glittery silken ravens waited until we left the table to attack it. I would have taken a picture but My Sweetie took the camera back to our room to drop off a shot glass I had bought for Lo and to take some pics of me from our window. Here's three of them (I'm the tiny white line in front of the corner of the restauarant in the first one):

That left set of stools in the picture above is where we sat the night before with the ducks. The music was really great Saturday night. They had just played some song I loved and I thought how perfect it would be to hear "The Girl From Ipanema" and then thought better of requesting it since we were in Fake Italy and not Fake Portugal, then they played it. That was great. After lunch we walked over to the dock to take the boat to City Walk

City Walk was fun. They had music blasting all over the place and lots of fun things to look at and more photo op places like this giraffe:

There was an NBA store/restaurant/bar place that we stopped in for a beer and this was in the bathroom:

Mostly we hung out at Margaritaville although we did stop in at Bob Marley's bar. This is me looking indecisive on the "Porch of Indecision" at Margaritaville:

We were pretty buzzed when it was time to head back and when we walked up to the boat dock there was quite a crowd so we decided to walk all the way back. This was looking back at City Walk from the path:

And those two ducks in the lower right? They were on a boogie board! What the heck?:

We rested a bit after getting back or maybe went to the bar, then we ate and My Sweetie crashed. I watched The Queen on TV and went to bed. The next morning as we packed, I said, "I wish I had called the car service to get that cool man that sounded like that actor." He even let me smoke in the car. Then as I sat on the stone bench out front drinking my last beer, a car pulled up and it was him! And exactly at that moment I remembered the actor's name. We had a nice ride to the airport and a pleasant flight and had plenty of time to get ready to go downtown to see Carol Burnett. That will be my next post.