Amazing What A Week Away Does!

I had done some double-duty the week before vacation to get ahead a week in school, have my blog posts ready to auto-post or post on the laptop on the road, I did all, and I mean all the laundry, not one dirty item left in the chute and what perishables we didn’t eat in the days before we left, I put in the freezer. And still, after a fun week away, I’m behind again!

David and I spent the lion’s share of our week away in Florida chasing the Florida East Coast Railroad by day and enjoying some great local seafood many of the nights. I didn’t make a point of telling about our vacation plans before we left because if we don’t have a cat-sitter/house-sitter, I don’t want to broadcast that we’ll be gone! This trip the cats “Grandma” stopped in to make sure they were attended to, but it was just the kids at night. I wanted to be on the safe side. It would be awful for anything to happen while we were gone, tons worse if anything happened to our furbabies!

Some fun trip stats include that I took a picture of the temperature readout in David’s SUV as we were pulling out of the driveway in Toledo on March 27. It was 28 degrees Fahrenheit. The top readout on our trip while we were in Florida was 85!

I took 714 pictures over the ten days we were gone. I love digital photography! I read in the Mensa bulletin many years ago that the key to taking one good picture is to shoot like there’s no film in the camera and throw always all but the really good ones. If you shoot enough there will be many really good ones. Well, now I DON’T have film in the camera! So, 714 photos doesn’t mean I have a 20-minute train show or a heck of a lot of scrapbooking to do. It just means that the train photos I share and the scrapbook pages I do will be great pictures!

We brought home a bag of Valencia oranges and a bag of grapefruit from Harvey’s Orchards and when we were in Georgia on the way down, I bought a box of praline pecans. These pecans weren’t the glazed kind, but coated in real southern praline. David had never tried pralines before and I got him to try the praline pecans when we were waiting on a train signal. We stopped at the pecan outlet on the way home to get a couple more boxes!

My favorite new food of the trip was mahi-mahi. What a wonderful fish! David tried mahi-mahi at a great casual seafood restaurant at the docks in Ft. Pierce. That night I got coconut shrimp. The first dinner I had in Florida the first time I was there with my parents was coconut shrimp, so I just had to have coconut shrimp. David let me taste his mahi-mahi and I knew the next fish dinner we had I was going to get mahi-mahi! His was blackened. The next night we went to a very nice restaurant in Melbourne. He had swordfish and I had macadamia encrusted mahi-mahi with a peanut sauce. YUM! Now I have to decide if I’m brave enough to try to cook it at home. I tried making swordfish when I found it on sale back when I was still in Michigan, but I didn’t like how it tasted. Maybe that was why it was on sale! But mahi-mahi is definitely on my restaurant order-card now!

A lot of the photos I took were of flora and fauna. In addition to some pelican pics, I went a little nuts on all the colors! Springtime in the south is just beautiful. There are many lawns landscaped with the trees that flower the best, but there are beautiful oranges, bright yellows, reds, pinks, purples and shocking white dogwoods all over the wild areas too! This is the only scrapbook page I did while I was gone:

Credits: Blossoms and Butterflies by Nibbles Skribbles

Blossoms and Butterflies is a new kit that came out on April 1 and I wanted to at least get my first layout up for Manda’s launch.

The other thing I went gonzo on the photos of was the palm trees. I love palm trees!! David hadn’t been anywhere with me where there were palm trees before and he chuckled a little at me because I went on and on about the many different kinds of palm trees and how they all looked so different and how much I loved them. I even thought about buying a palm tree to take home from the Florida tourist-trap store, but thought better of that. I will have a couple of palm tree pages to scrap, though!

The one thing I was bummed about was baseball. I’ve wanted to go to spring training for such a long time. I dreamt about going to Florida for a week and seeing one or two games every day as a dream vacation. We were going to catch a couple games when we were there, but I’m the one who said, “no.”

It appears that my dream vacation really was a rich man’s pursuit! Grapefruit League tickets are a little more than twice what I had in mind to spend. I mean, come-on guys! Seriously? $25 for an exhibition game? The marquee players don’t even play all the spring games and they actually have one, some teams two, tiers for “premium games.” I refuse to pay that kind of money for games that don’t even count! For the price of one game, David and I could see three Mud Hens games that DO count and will put the best on the roster out for every game. What was once my dream vacation is now just a greed-fest in which I’m not so interested. We did watch the Red Sox win the Opening Day Eve game! The World Series Champions had the worst record in baseball on Opening Day! The greed sucks, but I still love this sport!

We got home yesterday with just enough time to unpack the car and have birthday cake for Baggle. He had crab and shrimp and shared it with his sisters after we sang “Happy Birthday” to him. Then David went to work and I watched the Reds, Tigers, Braves, Astros and Angels games with a break for the second half of the basketball game when David got home.

Today was studying for the test I’ll take tomorrow, some household chores, making dinner and I need to double up on my layout-a-day goal this week to catch up! It was a fun trip but it’s still nice to sleep in my own bed and cuddle with the cats in the morning!