November 20, 1999

Saturday, November 20, 1999: Back home again

The last night at the beach is always bittersweet--sad to leave, but at the same time, eager to get home. Our flight doesn't leave until 8:45 tomorrow night, so we still have another day here, but the last day is always difficult--sort of spinning our wheels, ready to go home, but having to wait until it's time to go home. Which phrase, apropos of nothing, always makes me think of that Patrick Swayze movie, Roadhouse, where he's training the bouncers to "be nice--until it's time to stop being nice."

I like that photograph above. That was the view from my cabana this morning. I made it into a postcard for the postcard page, which makes me want to get in there and make a bunch of new ones. I need to make one of Dinah, someone reminded me the other day, and I should probably do a bunch of photographic ones, since I haven't done anything with the rubberstamp ones in ages.

We decided to go ahead and buy another half-day's stay here, for tomorrow. It's always sort of difficult to figure out what we want to do on the last day. We fly in to Orlando, spend most of the week there, then drive two and a half hours to Sarasota for the rest of our vacation. Then we have to get back, of course.

That's the hard part. There's an airport in Sarasota, but it's small, and there aren't a lot of flights out of it. I can't even remember if I checked this year; I don't think I did. If we wanted to fly back out of there, it would be something of an ordeal to figure it out, it would be more expensive, and it would almost certainly be a connection rather than a direct flight.

We tried once flying back from Tampa, which is about half way between Orlando and Sarasota (I think), but that was a nightmare. The Tampa airport, for some reason, is almost impossible to find. I say that with conviction, that it's not totally just me, because that particular nightmare has happened to me twice, once with Barb and once with Bob. Granted, I was navigating both times, but still.

So normally we just drive back up to Orlando and fly home from there. But, of course, it's a two-and-a-half hour drive back, so when do we fly back? It doesn't seem right to have to get up at dawn to make a flight back home, and you also sort of hate to waste a whole day. But getting home at midnight isn't a lot of fun, either. It's always a dilemma. Our plan was to drive back up to Orlando and spend the day at Disney World in one of the parks, then fly home. But we did that last year and ended up exhausted and crabby, and swore we'd never do it again. In retrospect, we probably should have taken the flight that Bob's family took back on Thursday, at 2:00, but I just thought it would be too rushed, and I'd be too worried about catching the flight back.

Sunday

Our choice was good, I think.

We slept in until around 9:00--sadly, the only day of this vacaction when we didn't wake to an alarm, showered and dressed and went out to a leisurely breakfast and drove down the Key a little bit, then came back to the room. I changed into my swimsuit and went out to the beach with a book, and Bob stayed in the room and watched football.

A little after 4:00, we checked out and started the drive back to Orlando. We got to the airport in plenty of time to have dinner at a nice restaurant there (a brew pub, actually), got on the plane, and came home, getting here at about midnight. Which is okay for me, since I don't have to go to work tomorrow, but sort of bad for Bob, who does.

The cats were thrilled to see us, or as thrilled as cats ever get. They wanted to be held, and petted, and they purred, and Dinah's on my lap right now, and Pyewacket's with Bob. That's the bad part about vacation--no cats.

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