Getting2Work

Got back on Saturday after a week of family get together in Florida. Good thing we only planned to stay for one week and got out just before Fay arrives. While we were waiting for our flight home, it just started pouring so hard and everyone was thinking that Fay had arrived earlier than predicted. Lucky for us that was not true and we got out with no problem and the flight back was pretty smooth.

A bit about the driving around the Tampa area before I get into the vacation itself. Most of the roads we traveled were 3 lane freeways and traffic was not bad in terms of volume. Most drivers were driving pretty normally but some drivers were following a bit close to each other! Saturday on the way to the airport, a big pickup truck was trying to get around the other cars and at one point, cut in front of an SUV and the SUV driver had to break hard and swerved. The SUV almost went off the road. The car behind the SUV was following pretty close but was able to break fast enough and didn’t hit the SUV. I guess drivers are the same no matter which state you are in.

One other annoying thing that happened was that we had rented a GPS system when we got the van from Enterprise. The GPS that Enterprise used was Garmin. Whoever used it last had it set on some British voice. It was not so much because of the accent, but the sound was so bad that we could hardly understand the verbal direction and couldn’t tell if it was a male or female voice. So hubby changed it to something we could actually understood. But the day we went to Bush Gardens, the stupid Garmin GPS kept dying on us. It would lock up in less than 0.5 miles. It was getting really annoying but like idiot robots, we kept resetting it (plugging and unplugging the power) as if that would fix the problem. Good thing we went in two vans and the other van had a GPS that worked. So we were able to follow each other. Another thing was that it only had a couple of choices to select shortest distance or shortest time. So instead of directing us to take the freeway, it lead us on surface road. If you try to take a different route, it just keep recalculating. I know a lot of times it’s a personal preference, but we should have brought our Magellan which is a much better system in our opinion.

So here’s a brief recall of our vacation. We flew into Tampa International Airport and drove to Ruskin FL where we staying at the Little Harbor Resort. There were 16 of us and we split into 2 condo units. It was a really nice place with full kitchen and dishwasher, washer/dryer, the works. That made it easier on both the pocket book and body. Since it was not high season, it was not very crowded. Here’s one of many photos hubby took from the balcony.

We went to one of the world’s top ten whitest beach, Siesta Key Public Beach. The sand was really silky white and was surprisingly compacted which made walking quite effortless. The beach was clean and the water warm unlike our water at the Pacific coast.

Most of the group also went to the Bush Gardens at Tampa FL. It was so humid but fortunately it was over cast.

There was also the aquarium, tennis, swimming at the pool, fishing and a lot of eating (and cleaning) that I don’t have photos to show. A lot of times I wind up forgetting to take pictures on vacation. I had to really remind myself to take pictures. It was on the way to the airport that we remembered that we didn’t even take a group picture. So bad!