Weekend recap

First things first, since some of you only read this for the pictures, they are located here. Be sure to read the captions.

Troy’s flight was’t getting in until late. It turned out to be even later when he called me and said that due to some storms in the south, his connection had been delayed an hour, meaning his touch down time in Fort Myers was a few minutes before midnight, ugh. Oh well, I picked him up and while I was waiting I grabbed a latte from Starbucks. When I tried to fall asleep that night I was cursing myself for drinking it. A dreary eyed way to start the visit.

On Friday we tried to lay out some game plans for the weekend. There were several things we were talking about doing like going to the casino, the beach, and the dogtrack during the course of his visit. However on Friday we elected to do none of these things and instead decided to grab lunch at the beach and then headed out to the airboat place. On the way out I was describing how old fashioned this place was. I had my camera ready to snap a picture of the “DANGER, MICROWAVE IN USE” sign from the 60’s that has adorned the front door of this place for as long as I have been coming. Wouldn’t you know they have started to actually do some renovations and the sign was no longer there, bummer! They had a new door, a new sign and redid the ticket booth as well. However, Troy still could get a good sense of the age of this place by the many things that were still apparently untouched from the 50’s that were everywhere. Even though I probably have been on the airboats 7 or 8 times by now it still is entertaining enough that I don’t mind going again for our first time guests. I also took Troy to see the country’s smallest functional post office as well as quick spin through Everglades City. Everglades City is so small that it has one school for ALL grades K-12. It is another place that looks like it has been largely untouched for 30 or 40 years.

After we got home we had to clean up to go to the ECHL hockey game. It was a pretty raucous crowd considering we are talking about hockey that is 2 levels away frm NHL quality. The crowd was really into it but sadly the opposing team just wore down the Blades and wound up winning 4-1. Troy and I drank a decent amount which meant we made frequent bathroom visits, which in turn meant we waited in big lines. Well in truth my line wasn’t as bad because I decided to take a walk to the practice rinks and go there. However, those areas are VERY cold which made the feeling of urgency multiply exponentially. There was the normal amount of sillyness you would expect at a game, people with colored faces, dressed up in costume and plenty of drunken people to laugh at. It took us a good 45 minutes to just get out of the lot after the game.

On Saturday we had the dog track on the schedule. Troy wanted to go to watch and bet on the Preakness. However in the morning I had to run in to work to address an issue so we got to the track a little later than we expected. I had never been to a dog or horse track before so it was all new stuff for me. My first impression was dubious as we passed two drunken, staggering rednecks on their way back out to their cars while yelling at the little kid that was with to hurry up in language that is not suitable for blogging, nice. Once we got to the clubhouse it was a nice surprise, very clean and modern. I was immediately struck by the imagery of loser tickets scattered about, people intently studying odds books like they were studying for SAT’s and the intensity of people watching the various races taking place simultaneously on the dozens of screens. We settled into a nice spot where we had our own TV’s and a good view of the track. I was impressed by the technology of the entire system. You basically could throw money in a terminal, get a credit voucher and then place bets for this track or any of the other dozen or so that were running instantaneously. It was really cool. If you win the payout was immediatwely reflected when you pumped the winning ticket back into the machine. The amount of ways you could bet and the strategy behind the bettting was way beyond what I could take in during one sitting. I stuck with simple small bets, usually betting on the favorite. I had a few small winners but probably wound up losing 20 to 30 bucks overall. It wasn’t bad for 4+ hours of entertainment. It was really an experience seeing the dogs run. They were much faster than I imagined, they absolutely flew around the 1/4 mile track. They did it in about 30 seconds. It was very funny to watch them gate up the dogs, in almost every race one or more of the dogs had to stop and relieve itself before hand, nerves maybe? Then as the pace rabbits came around you could see the dogs pawing at the door, going crazy to chase it. Funny stuff. Since my new found fondness for dogs I felt a little uneasy because I have heard the stories of how greyhounds have a rough life. However they looked very happy to be chasing that rabbit so I didn’t think of it much. I really enjoyed the track, I am sure I will be back. Saturday night was low key, we ate pizza, drank beer and watched The Rundown on Pay-per-view. It was another late night.

Sunday was the big finale, although you wouldn’t know it. Ali was going shopping with my mom that day so Troy and I had most of the day to ourselves. We talked about hitting the beach, maybe the casino but nothing concrete. It was blustery and raining outside in the morning so we decided to fire up the XBox and play some NFL2K4. Troy and I have a long running football video game history dating back to the early Madden games. During the history of our contests I have a stellar winning percentage with Troy only stealing a few games here and there when I was off my game. However with NFL 2K4, I had only played the game maybe twice since I got it for Christmas and I hadn’t played it for at least 5 months so I was far from polished in my gameplay. It showed in the first game as I suffered an embarrasing loss of 28-3. Of course I couldn’t leave it at that and we played 2 more games that were hard fought but I wound up winning both pretty convincingly by the end. Our mini-tournament took us into the early afternoon and we still really hadn’t done anything. The skies had cleared so we decided to quickly pack up and hit the beach. The beach wasn’t that full so that was a nice change. We went in the Gulf, it was nearly 80 degrees. As we were standing there cooling off, we noticed what appeared to be a large man standing out in the water down from us. As our eyes focused, we realized what we were looking at was in reality a large woman that had her bathing suit top off! It was not an appealing image. She must have been european as she stood out there for a long time in that state. She pulled the suit up to exit the water and then Troy said he saw her lying on her blanket sans top again. Nasty. After some more relaxing, we grabbed a drink at the bar located right off the beach and then headed home.

Ali was suprised by our lack of activity for the day but we enjoyed ourselves so that was all that was important. Sunday night we wrapped things up with a trip to the Snook Inn for a very relaxing and enjoyable dinner. We take almost everyone that comes down there, it is just such a great place. Sitting by the water, listening to live music in open air is just fantastic. On the way back we stopped at a huge beach souveneir place where we had fun trying on hats and checking out all the paraphinalia. Troy wanted to pick up some things for his daughter. Once we got home it was late but even so we had to have one more XBox football match to prove decidely who was the dominant player. I won by 2 scores, however for almost 3 quarters it was a zero zero deadlock so we were more evenly matched than the final score showed.

This morning I got up a little early in order to drop him off at the airport. It was great having him visit, hopefully he gets to do it on a more regular basis. Next scheduled visitors are my brother and sister-in-law memorial day weekend then in June we have my dad and Alison’s brother coming down. We are making up for lost time since we had next to zero visitors during the past year. Today I am feeling a bit drained from a lot of late nights and consumption of much more alcohol than is normal. Long blog but what did you expect?

Oh yea, I finally kicked the cold/flu thing over the weekend. It hung on about as long as any illness I can recall having.