That’s Kiwi snuggling with my husband. She’s in luhrv.
We spent plenty of time on the beach and in the water – until we got bored watching the people and fighting the bits of seaweed, that is. We managed to come away from the vacation without burning ourselves to a crisp (to crisps?), which is amazing, considering how god-awful hot that sun was, and how much I was sweating. I got a tiny burn around my hairline, and on my shoulder, but it was nothing to cry about.
The water was awesome and warm, but there were bits of seaweed everywhere, and each time we got back to the hotel room and undress to shower, I found about three pounds of shredded seaweed in my bra and underwear.
What? You thought I was going to wear a bathing suit on the beach. Um, not in THIS life. I wore shorts and a t-shirt, with underwear and a sports bra, and it was fine, except when the water was rough and would push my shorts up my butt and fling my t-shirt over my head. Luckily, with all the shredded seaweed around, no one could really see anything.
Every time Fred saw a fish jump out of the water, he was positive it was jumping to get away from a shark, who was surely headed directly toward us.
Despite my plans to eat every raw oyster Florida had to offer, the first dozen that I had – for lunch Thursday at Gilligan’s – were not very good, and I wasn’t interested in eating any more for the rest of the trip. Hell, I didn’t even finish that dozen, and that’s unusual for me.
I didn’t have a single strawberry daiquiri – but I did have a couple of strawberry smoothies, and they rocked.
Did you know that if you go over the recommended daily dose of aspirin, you might develop temporary tinnitus? Yes indeedy.
The day we went to the Gulfarium – Friday – so that Fred could cavort with his One True Love (see picture above), I sweated so much that I soaked through my underwear and bra in the five-minute walk between our hotel and the Gulfarium. While we walked around the Gulfarium, I continued to sweat so much that even Fred noticed, and I had to go into the bathroom several times to mop the sweat from my face, neck, and chest. By the time the Dolphin Encounter was over, I was starting to soak through my shirt, and ready to sit my ass down in a cool place, eat lunch, and then perhaps go back to the hotel for a nap.
Fred had other ideas. Fred can be similar to a drill instructor sometimes, and he wanted to walk down the road to see if there was anywhere decent to eat lunch, and though we walked by a bar and grill, he was intent on reaching this particular restaurant that he had his eye on, and when we got there, we found that it wasn’t open.
“Well,” he said, “Let’s walk a FEW MORE MILES down this hot, humid, sandy, heavily-trafficked road, where many vehicles will be driven by rednecks who will yell nasty things about your fat ass, and maybe we’ll see a restaurant! And after, say, FIVE MILES, if we haven’t found anything we like, we can turn around and walk back the other way, and maybe there will be a restaurant a few miles that way! Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?!” He had a sadistic gleam in his eye.
“What about that little place we passed on the other side of this building?” I suggested. The headache I’d had when I woke up that morning was back, and I didn’t have any aspirin on me.
Obviously, being FRED, which according to my book of baby names translates to “oblivious male”, he hadn’t seen the bar and grill I’d stared longingly at as we walked by, and so he assumed I was wrong, wrong, WRONG, and had no clue what I was talking about, and thus he did this shuck-and-jive about how that building was closed, there was nothing there, nothing to see, move along, let’s GO.
“There IS a little bar and grill there!” I insisted, my head pounding.
“Okay, fine,” he said. “There is NO bar and grill, but if you HAVE to be a BIG PAIN IN THE ASS, let’s go look, shall we? For I cannot WAIT to do the dance of I am right and you are wrong!”
Of course, he’s never actually perfected that dance, seeing as how he’s so rarely right.
We walked back from whence we’d come, and SURE AS FUCKING SHIT, there it was. The Angler’s Beachside Grill. Which we’d walked directly by. And it wasn’t a small building, either, seeing as how it can seat 200 people. It was a large building, it had a boardwalk behind it, jutting half a mile out into the ocean, and it all but had neon lights with big arrows pointing to it.
“BY GOD, YOU’RE RIGHT!” I bellowed. “THERE’S NOTHING THERE!”
“Do you want to eat there?” Fred asked, ignoring my obnoxious ways.
“Yes,” I said.
As we headed for the door, he smiled and said “You sure do get grouchy when you’re hungry.”
Which is when I killed him and fed him to the dolphins.
If Tubby were sealife, he would look like this:
Speaking of Tubby, he was so happy to have us home that he showed his joy by laying on his back in the middle of the floor all day yesterday and doing his bitchy “Meh. Meh. MEH!” until I yelled “Shut UP, Tubby!”, to which he responded “Meh.” and then shut up.
Do any of you Floridians know what this is?
I’m just curious, because Fred passed a bush like that when he was out jogging and said it smelled really good. (Note: I’ve since learned that it’s an Oleander and comes in many different colors)
So, our last night in Florida, after spending a couple of hours on the beach – Fred made sure to point out every man who walked by with an abdominal six-pack, and I made sure to point out every girl who walked by wearing a yellow bathing suit – we showered and got ready to go out to dinner. We thought we would eat at a Mexican restaurant in Fort Walton, not far from the hotel, but as we pulled out of the hotel parking lot, we saw that the traffic going left – which is where we’d have had to go – was at a standstill as far as the eye could see.
“Let’s just go into Destin,” Fred said. Destin is maybe a 10-minute drive, and has plenty of restaurants and stores (including a Super Wal-Mart – obviously a town after my own heart). We turned right and drove toward Destin, and were dismayed to find that the traffic going from Destin to Fort Walton was backed up for miles and miles – and soon enough, the traffic going into Destin came to a standstill as well.
“Maybe it’s just rush hour,” I suggested. “And it’ll clear out by the time we’ve finished eating.”
It took us perhaps 40 minutes to make it into Destin instead of the 10 minutes we’d expected, and we stopped for dinner at The Lucky Snapper.
I highly recommend the cheese bread at The Lucky Snapper, though the shrimp po’boy was a little dry.
An hour later we finished eating and stood up to leave. A few tables away, a guy who slightly resembled Mark McGwire stared at me. He continued to stare at me until we were past him, and I suppressed the urge to say “Take a picture, dude!”
The traffic coming from Fort Walton into Destin was, if anything, worse than it had been. Fred dug out the map and looked for another way to get back to Fort Walton.
We had come from Fort Walton into Destin via route 98, and after studying the map, Fred decided that we could drive through the rest of Destin, take a left on that green road – I don’t recall the name of the road – hit highway 20, then meet up with highway 85, all the way back into Fort Walton.
It took us an HOUR to get through Destin. An hour. And the entire way, I could feel Fred’s blood pressure rising. I sat happily and stared at the people in the cars around us, the condos, the beach, and hoped that the top of Fred’s head wouldn’t pop completely off before we got back to the hotel.
An hour and fourty-five minutes later, we were arriving back at Fort Walton. We’d left the hotel shortly before 5, and it was 8 when we got back.
As we drove across the bridge into Fort Walton, I said to Fred “Take a right onto Santa Rosa Boulevard. I want to see the houses down there.”
Fred had jogged down that road and told me there were some crappy houses down that way, as well as a little family of cats in one of the yards. Since I’m a sucker for cats (I know that shocks you), I wanted to check them out.
We didn’t see any cats, but we saw some crappy houses as well as some nice ones, and several hotels, including the cruddy one we stayed in when we were in Florida 5 years ago.
We came to the end of the road and turned around. Ahead of us was a car that was driven by someone who apparently didn’t know where exactly they were going. I wasn’t really paying attention, as I was checking out the hotels we were driving by, so when Fred stomped on his brakes, I reacted as I usually do when taken by surprise – I flailed my hands around like a spaz.
“Nice JOB, buttfuck!” he snarled at the idiot ahead of us, who had stood up on his brakes to make a turn into a hotel parking lot.
As we continued driving, Fred started laughing really, really hard.
“What?” I asked, sure that he was laughing at my previous spazzy flailing.
“I couldn’t think of anything horrible to call him,” Fred gasped, wiping tears from his eyes. “So I called him a….hee hee hee… I called him…heh… I called him a fuckfuck.”
Naturally, we’ve spent the last three days calling each other “You fuckfuck” and giggling our asses off.]]>
2002-07-08