Rick Rambles – A blog

Now we have a quandary.  I just found out that Tom (of the Tom and Bonnie that we are staying with) is actually driving to Miami Tuesday.  This is the same day that I planned on beginning my trek to Miami.  What we are saying here is that I could hike, walk, hitch, crawl to Miami on my own or hitch a ride with Tom in his Cadillac Eldorado (I am not making this up) and be there in 3 hours… man oh man oh man.  At this point I wish I had readers to poll….  I think that I am still going to make it on my own, BUT, one is NOT supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth or turn ones back on fate and good luck…  Keep in mind this could be a conspiracy between Marlo and Tom and Bonnie to thwart my foolish cross state adventure…  I don’t think so though…  so do we take the cushy , easy ride over or do I opt for the adventurous way over???

Then we headed back.  After driving 2 of the three hours I ask Marlo if she wants to eat.  Not getting a really firm answer I ask her to ask ANB where we should go.  I am favoring ribs.  Well Rib City is on the same exit that we need to take to get back.  Sounds good to us!  Well Rib City is no longer… I pull into the plaza that it may have occupied when it was and we cruise to the back of the lot to regroup.  Just across the lot is a lovely looking Irish Pub called O’Toole’s.  It looks like the swartz is still with us.  We cruise in and low and behold they are having a rib special.  We order that and an order of fish and chips and we are good to go.  They even have our favorite NA beer.  Score!  The bartender, Jason, is great.  We talk to him about his crazy PREGNANT girlfriend.  They have been seeing each other on and off for 10 years with a lot of off and they have been together for a year and a half, this time…  looks like a match made in … well it was made somewhere.  Him and his father hike the lower Appalachian trail so we chatted about my upcoming adventure.  He was also so on the same page with the Daytona 500 thing.  He called it a bucket list item.  I guess I had to agree.  The food was good and the service, great.  Off we went on the final leg of our journey.  I asked Marlo if she felt like driving and she did.  This way I could write all this blather… aren’t you glad :>  we got home, told the stories, watched  some tv, showered and off to bed.  Tomorrow it is supposed to be 69 (he he)  and mostly sunny…  we will see…

As I type we are on our way.  Now I trust Marlo’s driving…  mostly…  she is driving so that I can write…  I just told her that I get to drive just as aggressively as she does… fair is fair… it did not slow her down :>
So, the Garmin 768WT rocks.  It has traffic, and lane assist and multiple routes, and, and , and …  Marlo wants to keep it.  That is one of the reasons I am not leaving it with her.  It is coming on my trek.  It has walking mode…  three gps’s, a computer, and a cell phone.  I should be fine…  actually Linda mentioned something about seeing 20 alligators in a 5 mile stretch last week… hmmmm note to self.  Get a large walking stick :>
The vehicles in Florida are interesting.  You have the extreme redneck special and the wretch excess models.  Marlo spotted a Maybach yester day.  It goes for about 500k, yep half a million dollars…  then there was the uber-redneck truck.  Big, jacked-up duely 4X4.  It looked like it could tow Rhode Island!  I took a picture, but that was not enough.  Marlo had to take a picture with her phone.  Her phone has no zoom, so she sped up to get RIGHT behind it…
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Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, it’s race day.  Ok, we did it well!!!!  For a last minute, spur of the moment event we could not have done it better.   Our journey began with a cruise across the lovely state of Florida for about 3 hours.  We had little idea of what to expect.  We did have a little insight for a man Marlo refers to as Tire Boy.  He is an ex-boyfriend from long ago that she still keeps in touch with.   He said that we should get scalped tickets when we get there.  Now this is not my best thought, but I go with it… so after the long drive that was actually quite pleasant we arrive.  Marlo and I travel very well together, whether it be by plane, car, boat or anything so the three hours fly by.   We keep waiting to encounter the hoards of…. Those NASCAR people….  Well we are 5 miles from the place and there is no sigh.  We had to get within 2 miles before we saw any sign of the place.  Then things backed up pretty fast.  We see the first scalper on the side of the road with a sign.  Now when I think about scalpers I think of them selling tickets right outside the gate, not 2 miles away.  We process this new information.  We pass one more.  Then we both decide to talk to the next guy and get the low-down.   Well the next guy not only had it all going on he had everything we wanted and more.  He had tickets in the sprint tower AND tickets to the Verizon hospitality tent and what not…  he wanted 300 a piece for them at first.  Now these are 350 tickets so that is not bad, but Marlo and I were thinking $200 a piece.  We could have gotten cheaper tickets, but we wanted to be in the tower and it’s not like we ever plan on doing it again, so hey!  We talk him down to our price.  Actually I think Marlo telling him, no several time and that is all we have, did the trick.  So now we have tickets.  The next hurdle is parking.  This is actually very tricky as we have already passed the park and ride and many of the lots are already full…  we decide to try to get into one of the media gates.  Now what made us think that could happen?  Well, we had these official Verizon looking passes that I really hoped were real.  Well we forged ahead.  We got to the gate and Marlo leans out my window and claims that we are with the EMTs and asks where we should park.  We Mr. gate minder simply tells us to come on in drive around to gate eight and park.  We are in!!! I can’t believe it.  I keep waiting for someone to stop us and ask us for a pass or something.  Nope!  I did make sure I maintained my, “I belong here” face the whole time.  We found a lovely spot RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE GATE!!!  I kid you not, we are talking feet here!  We quickly park, abandon the car and HOPE that it will be here when we come back out several hours later.
Now we have our tickets and a backpack with clothes, sunscreen, camera, binoculars, etc.  They did not even look at my bag.  Apparently you can bring anything you want in this place!  I mean anything.  We found our seats and they rocked!  We read our passes and the “Frontstrech” thing closes when the flag drops so we go to check it out.  We go in and everything in the place is free, we get food and drink and they will even give you several to bring into the place with you.  Again, passing up free beer!!!! Arg!!!  We it is just about race time so we go back to our seats.  We get there and chat with the man next to us and he fills us in about some of the way things go.  They announce the drivers, the jets fly overhead.  We are actually very excited about all this!  They we get the “Gentleman, start your engines.”  40 some cars roar to life!  They make the place rumble.  The pace car drops off (driven by Tom Cruise) and the race is on!  At this point my goal has been accomplished, I am happy.  By this time a group of guys sit down next to us.  They brought their 30 pack in a garbage bag with ice in it.  We thought we were in for something.  It turns out this guy is wearing a Rolex (fakeness not confirmed) and is holding a $300 Nascar monitoring TV device that gives you gobs of information and video from the cars and every other angle and real-time stats and what not.  We decide that the 350 seat rednecks are ok.  He did have his chew though.  He was very nice and was keeping Marlo informed as to the goings ons.
We got out of our seats to attempt to find Marlo’s friends and bam!  An accident right in front of where we were sitting!  Drat!  There was another big pile up just after we left.  That’s ok, we did not come for the crashes… ok, and maybe a little… we left at lap 120 and beat the rain and the crowds.
T

We arrived at Tom and Bonnie.  They are Marlo’s friends that she kept from a former relationship.  Hmmm, I guess that I am ok with that…  Let’s see they are really nice people have a lovely house in Florida and best yet, they like me!  The house is a nice Florida style house.  It has three bedrooms, two baths, a beautiful formal living room with vaulted ceilings.  The room that we will be staying in is lovely.  A queen-size adjustable bed, that vibrates :>   Besides Tom and Bonnie, Tom’s mother Millie lives there.  She is 92 years-old, can’t see real well and can’t hear.  She was pleasant and we have not heard much from her.  She went to bed before we  got home and got up after we left.  Yes, she slept later then me.
Now the best part is the pool!  We are talking about a remote control pool, hot tub combination all house under this wonderful screened-in lanai.  A lanai you say, yes a lanai.  It is a fancy name for a fancy screened in porch.  Anyway there is a remote for the controls for the spa.  Sweet!  Actually there are a couple of issues because the builder didn’t completely finish.  One night the tub was a little cool and the next night I nearly roasted Marlo…  So, 109 is hot hmmm, oops…
So we wake up the next day and Marlo calls up her friends Tom and Linda.  These are people that she used to mountain bike with.  Well they really miss the people from up north.  They decided to take a boat ride and invite us!  Again I say sweet!!!  We drive an hour north and meet them Fort Desoto.
This trip to Florida is really a trip to Florida…  most of it.  Well most of south Florida.  We are hitting Tampa, Daytona, and later I will hit Miami, maybe South Beach, and definitely the Keys… back to our boat ride.
They actually come up to the beach at the fort and pick us up.  Nice!  It is a nice open boat.  Probably 14 feet, but with a nice motor.  They took us to this really nice beach on an island.  Problem was that the sun did not cooperate.  That was a mixed blessing.  It was a little cool, but no one got fried crispy by the sun.  I am pacing myself in that regard.  We walked the beach found some sand dollars, saw three cigarette boats, and the remains of the fort.  One of the boats did a HIGH-SPEED run across in front of the beach…  all the guys got woodies :>
The fort was mostly collapsed.  That is not the interesting thing.  The interesting thing was that Tom and Linda’s friends Carl and Donna remember when the fort was not collapsed.  It has only collapsed in the last ten years.  Usually ruins are always ruined your whole life.  Like I said interesting.
So we cruse around in these beautiful waters that look just like Aruba… but without the sun out.  It kinda lost the effect .  it was still nice.  They even invited us out with them to dinner with her mother for Valentine’s day.  It was nice, but we passed.
After the boat ride we sat and ate our grinder and chips.  We took that time to exchange our Valentine’s day cards.  Everyone all together now… awww :>  then I reached into my pocket and told Marlo to look what I found on the beach and presented her with a gold heart with diamonds…  again everyone awwwww….
We stopped on the way home and got 26 oysters for the price of 15 and when we got there Tom had a shirt on the said “Got Oysters?” and he had a big pot full of mussels on the boil.  Sweet.  But better then that, Tom bought a wireless router!!!!  Now we have my kind of excitement!!!!  Last night I was wandering the house with my laptop high in the air praying to the wireless gods to grant me connection to an open router…  the prayers were answered, but I hate to beg!
Well, all of the computer stuff was in Millie’s room and she was asleep…. Grumble, grumble…  I actually did grumble to Marlo…  Bonnie said I could sneak in and hook it up, yea!  I set the whole thing up by the pool and tested it out.  Well this was the latest Linksys wireless N router that supported 802.11 authentications.  Well that is not necessary or good.  My computer would connect and then try to validate.  Tom’s would try to validate before it would connect.  I had to google the answer and disable the 802.11 auth per wireless connection…  that means I had to attempt to connect then disable it.  It took a bit to make it all happen.  They were impressed with my computer  prowess :>
Then I loudly asked Marlo if she wanted to hot tub later.  She did, so we had to turn things on.  Well, when I flipped the breaker I turned the heater up a bit… well it turns out it was a bit too much!  It got to 109 degrees!  Oops, apparently the  101 setting on the thermostat was meaningless…  well it cooled off quickly so we did not boil.  I even helped Marlo into the COLD pool.  She was not overly appreciative of that…  go figure…  but you should have seen the sputtering when she came out…  it was truly funny!!!!  At least I thought so :>
Well now we are connected, the blogs posted, pictures posted, lying next to my girl on vacation in Florida…  life is good!
Tomorrow is RACE DAY!!! Marlo is such a good sport and up for anything.  This is my choice.  The weather is not great.  It is not beach weather, not water park weather, maybe everglades, but this works.  Now we have never been to the largest gathering of rednecks in the world before so we are curious.  I think it will be fun AND it is on my list of great things to do.  New years eve, times square; the super bowl; the Kentucky derby; the world series, etc…  just huge events.  It just HAPPENED to be happening when we were nearby.  This nearby that I speak of is, of course relative…  we have to drive three hours to get there, but hey, it’s a lot closer then Middletown.

http://www.brantct.com/pics/v/florida2009

I did not upload them all and even deleted some!

Turns out a friend of Marlo’s live up the road.  Her friend Linda just joined Facebook Thursday.  They invited us to go boating and we had a fine, fine day.  A little more sun would have been nice.

We also had a lovely V-Day :>

Off  to the races!

The flight was uneventful. The best one can hope for. Actually it was pretty good. It was southwest and they have free-for-all seating. Well not completely they board in three waves, A, B, and C. You get assigned these as you get your boarding pass. Well, I guess most of these people know that you can get them the night before on-line… well, we didn’t… so we were in lot C. We get on the plane and there are nothing but middle seats left. I have a dim hope that there are two seats for us at the back of the place… wrong. They lesson is this. If on Southwest get your boarding pass early. If not then take the first empty seat that you get to. I ended up towards the back of the plane sitting next to a larger woman and a full-size man. Towards the front of the plane there were seats with smaller people in the window and the isle… live and learn. On the second leg of our journey we stay on our plane and get the pick of seats. Marlo wants to sit next to me so she sits in the middle on purpose. I think she actually looked at me like I was a pillow once:> the gin and tonic only helped a little.
So we get arrive in Tampa. Hello Tampa. It is warm and sunny, yea! As we are waiting to get out of the plane we talk to the guy next to us who happens to live in Tampa. We (read Marlo) are hungry and we arrive at rush hour. He recommends a Hawaiian fusion restaurant near the airport called Roy’s. Marlo wanted conch fritters… well we wander our way to through the airport to ground transportation. We find the courtesy phone and dial 63. We get the fax machine… hello. I try it three more times with the same results. What is the definition of an idiot again… anyway for no good reason I try a different phone and Marlo uses the one that was using. I get the fax machine and she get the recording telling us to go find the shuttle… brilliant.. Well I think that Marlo half listened to the message and treks out in search of the shuttle. I have this wonderful trait (among many) of being able to ask directions. I will even do it repeatedly. So I ask the crossing guard where the payless shuttle would be and he told us. We corrected out course slightly and journeyed on. I asked the next crossing guard the same question and he gave me the same answer. This in itself is noteworthy. More importantly when he pointed the way to go the shuttle was coming around the corner and I was able to flag it down. Timeing!
We take the shuttle to the office to get our car. We ask if our (Marlo’s) AAA membership gets us anything. Not on the price, but we have a reduced rate on an upgrade… hmmm, ok, I go for it. We get a nicer car. It is a Nissan Altama. It is nice and it has a push button start!
Now on the plane Marlo is asking about directions. Now we had a Garmin for a bit and she loved it. We used my laptop on UTAH and she loved it, not. We ended up using vz-navigator out there. She really wanted a Garmin. Well I told her, actually hinted that she would be so happy when we got the car that she would be giddy. She doubted me. First of all, one should not doubt me… so we get into the car and I whip out a top-of-the-line Garmin and plant it on the windshield. She is giddy! Let’s just say we are test driving it. It is WAY cool though. I selected the female Australian voice, it has traffic, lane assist, and a few other way cool features. It is nice! We are happy.
So we ask everyone at the car place where a place called Roy’s is. It is the Hawaiian fusion place. They have no clue, so we ask the Ausi Nav Bitch (ANB). She not only knows, but it is less then ½ a mile up the street. It boggles the mind how people don’t know where stuff is. I remember when I worked at Seaport Mobile. I actually drove around looking at places because I knew that people would ask… damn yuts!
Roy’s was GREAT. Well except for the btch that cut us off and got the last two bar seats… I felt her pushing by but too late realized her goal… I should have sicked Marlo on her! Anyway, we rearranged a couple of people at the near end of the bar so that we could sit. We ordered a canoe something or other sampler. It was perfect. It had sushi, ribs, lobster something, meatball something… can you tell that I am a foodie?!?? It was so good and looked so good that as soon as the couple next to us saw it the immediately ordered it.
We continued our journey aided by ANB. We were headed for the sunshine bridge and just before we got there we pulled off to a scenic spot and broke out the camera. Oh yea we drove on the beach a bit too… some strange guy was making comments to Marlo about bring me… kinda odd, but harmless. We took some lovely pictures of sunsets and us and … well you know how that goes. We actually deleted some picture so not all of them will make the web site.
Ok, it’s late… more later…

She forgot her liquids in her purse…  silly girl…  we had a nice chat with the TSA guy though.  Turns out that he wanted to know about a Clive Cussler book that I had read :>  We had a nice chat with a couple on the shuttle to the airport.  They are going to Vegas on “business”.  They would like to move somewhere warm, but the insurance industry is here…  they have also gone to Paris and gave us some good insight.
We dropped the car off at Roncarie and Marlo is getting the works done!  It should be sparkly clean when she gets back.
I am all set with planning for my trek.  Nothing but relaxing for the next four days!  Here is the plan…
Saturday, walk on the beach and look for shark teeth, all lovey-dovey like.
Sunday – Race day!!!  For the record, this is not Marlo’s thing, but she is going ‘cuz I want to.
Monday, Tuesday – Nada
Tuesday late morning… the trek begins.  Marlo said that it was ok to give up if it was too hard… hmmm, that sounds like me :>

AND one of those beeping carts made our ears bleed again!

Thursday.  Ok, just barley Thursday.  Still the day before our next adventure.  We are off to Florida.  We are going to be staying with Marlo’s friends for a few days.  While we are down there it turns out that there is a big race nearby.  You may have heard of it.  I think that it is in Daytona.  It is a long race.  I think that it is rather long.  Maybe 500 miles or so.  Now let’s put this together, it’s in Daytona and it’s  500 miles.  Yup we are going to the Daytona 500.  Why you may ask.  Neither one of us really care about Nascar, but it is the largest spectator sport in the world and this is the big event A ND we just happen to be there that week.  We are in!  After that we might go visit the everglades.  I have always wanted to do that… and we are going to be down there.  So we will go.  Now these are both significant thing there is one more thing.  I plan on backpacking from Venice Beach Florida to Miami Florida.  After I get to Miami I plan to get a car and spend a few days in the keys.  Don’t you like the sound of that…  in the keys… :>
The aforementioned backpacking is more like a long walk across the peninsula that we call Florida.  According to Google maps, that now has walking as an option, it could only take 2 days and 16 hours.  I think that means 64 hours of walking.  That would be 8 days of 8 hours… hmmm, Delormes, said 4 days.  It also sent me through the alligator infested everglades…  we won’t be doing that.  Anyway, it should make for some interesting writing…
Some, ok probably everyone, wonder why I would do such a thing…  well the short of it (I will leave out the long of it) is that the opportunity has presented itself and it should be an interesting adventure.
I plan on hitching, sleeping on the ground, walking A LOT, and going to those all night diners that you read about.  It should be … urban survivor.  Maybe I can sell the rights…  I am currently making a list of things that I need.  The short list is GPS, Cell Phone, a camera and Laptop.  Maybe some clothes, a tarp, a raincoat, flashlight, matches, a lighter…  I will make a complete list.  I will take some pictures and make some videos too.  It should be amusing…  that’s all for tonight.