[I kept a bit of a diary of our honeymoon 10 years ago. I think I will share it, sort of “as it happened”. There are 11 installments. Enjoy.]
Sally is up early and heads to the beach to do more shelling (she will do this every day we’re here unless it rains or there’s another hurricane, so I will probably stop making reference to it). I get up, too, and clean out my various email boxes since last night the phone line was so hosed I could barely get a connection.
Sally comes back from the beach and we head out for breakfast in our environmentally-threatening-but-truly-fun-to-drive Blazer. We hit Mel’s Diner on Tamiami and both have eggs, bacon, and potatoes; Sally has iced tea and I have the first cup of decent restaurant coffee I’ve had in months. It turns out that in the past year, three of the waitresses have gotten married, one just about a week ago. We are applauded and our waitress brings us two roses in a styrofoam to-go cup. Breakfast at Mel’s is only about a dollar more than breakfast at Burger King, and both the food and the ambience at Mel’s are going to make this our preferred breakfast place for the rest of the week. We refrain from using our 20% off coupon this time; since everyone was so nice we felt it would be kind of tacky.
After breakfast we decide to head down Marco Island-way. For one thing there is a Prime Outlets mall about halfway in between, where we stop and shop for a while. We purchase a Panama Jack’s hat for me and a Mikasa vase for the roses we got at Mel’s. To our surprise this is a relatively small Prime Outlets, especially when compared with the one in Edinburgh back home.
We then head for Marco Island proper. Marco is a cute little place that is in essence a suburb of Naples (I’m sure the residents would resent that, but given that the Marco Islander newspaper is a section of the Naples Daily News, I rest my case). We make only a couple of stops–one at Tigertail Beach on the northwest corner of the island, where we walk the beach for half an hour and do a bit of shelling, and the other at Mustang Sally’s,* a restaurant/bar we saw on the way in on North Collier Boulevard. Sally insists that we have to stop so she can get a t-shirt or ball cap, so we do. The ambience is that of a small-town bar (well, everything down here is small town anyway), and it’s cool and we’re both hungry, so we decide to stay for lunch. I have a cheeseburger, fries, and a Bud, while Sally has twice-baked cheese-stuffed potato skins and iced tea. We are amazed at the quality. Henry (the proprietor) tells us that everything is made from scratch–no frozen institutional food here. He also tells us that he serves better ribs than the local rib boutique Michelbob’s, primarily because their ribs are actually made at the store in Naples and driven in rather than cooked on the premesis. We’re both inclined to believe him on the basis of the food we’ve just eaten. After finding out that we are newlyweds, Henry tells us that we must come down sometime between Wednesday and Sunday for the evening entertainment and he will serve us dinner on the house. (We are finding that everyone in the Naples area is very, very nice, and even nicer when they find out we are newlyweds. We make a note to be sure to trade on our status wherever possible :).)
On the way home we stop at Wal-Mart to pick up a few things we need. Wal-Mart in a small town is not the major pain in the arse that it is in a large town, say, Indianapolis. We’re in and out fairly quickly, to our surprise. We then stop at the little shopping strip near the condo where there is a huge Books-A-Million bookstore, where I want to take a look around, and a little beach shop (the Hurricane Beach Shop) where Sally wants to look at a few things.
We then pretty much crap out for the rest of the evening; frozen pizza for dinner and both of us spend the evening reading and relaxing.
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* Sadly, no longer there. Closed in 2002, I believe.
Funny. We did our honeymoon a few hundred clicks south of that location.
Looks like ya had a great time.