[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.]
As it turns out, we don’t HAVE any servants, so we pack for ourselves.
We eat our last meal (this trip, anyway) at Mel’s. The girls are all sad to see us go home. Jackie and Christine conspire to “lose” our check.
Jackie had asked us if we had the Sears ad in our paper this morning. Sears has a heart-shaped diamond pendant on closeout for $19.99 and the girls would like some, but are sure they’ll all be gone before they get off shift. We tell them we’ll check at Sears for them on the way home, possibly before all the little old ladies in Naples descend on the store to clean them out, and promise to buy four for them if we can get our hands on them. We get there at 11:30 and sure enough, the nice lady at the jewelry counter tells us that, indeed, all the little old ladies in Naples had descended on the store and cleaned them out. We return to Mel’s to report failure and say our last “au revoirs”, (not goodbyes, since we will be back).
We then spend some time cleaning up the condo, doing laundry, sweeping, etc. Sally leaves a message for her parents thanking them for the use of the condo. We pack everything into our trusty Blazer and set off for Tin City to blow some time (our flight doesn’t leave until 8PM and we don’t need to have the Blazer back till around 6). We have lunch at Bill’s Pier on 5th. Sally has a 1/4 pound Hebrew National hot dog and fries, I have a HUGE beef BBQ sandwich and fries. We have a table next to the window so we can see what’s happening on the water. Frankly it looks like rain. It does rain on us off and on the rest of the day.
Intent on doing some deep-discount outlet shopping at the Miromar Outlets (between Naples and Ft. Myers on I-75), we head up that way. This is a huge outlet mall, but we don’t actually do much shopping, as most of the stores are the same as we have at Prime Outlets Edinburgh back home. They do have a Bose outlet store, so I window-shop for speakers and home theatre systems that I can’t afford.
It’s on the road again for the airport, but we’re way too early to turn in the Blazer. We decide to look for an ice cream shop, and end up finding a Bresler’s in the Simon-owned mall on the east side of Fort Myers (Edison Mall). We are thinking about visiting the Edison-Ford winter homes but time is a bit short for that and traffic is murderous anyway. So we return to the Alamo lot at the Fort Myers airport and reluctantly bid farewell to our Blazer. A short bus ride later and we’re at the ATA baggage drop, and shortly thereafter at the gate. Sally negotiates with the gate agent to get us into a row of seats by ourselves and succeeds. Our flight is American TransAir 454, departing at 8:00 PM, so we get to sit for a while. While waiting, we meet a couple from the Greenwood area who are rabid Pacer fans. They’re quite nice and we have an enjoyable chat, mostly about Rik Smits’ decision to retire. Sally is very upset, but more upset that people are going to think that Rik strung the Pacers along all summer when in fact Donnie Walsh was trying to get him to reconsider retiring all summer. I just figure we won’t be in the playoffs next year.
Two hours or so of flight time later and we arrive 10 minutes early in Indy. In another entry under the “It’s a Small World” rubric, the lady sitting in the row in front of us is Brenda, the lady who was celebrating her birthday at Mustang Sally’s the night we went down for the show. She’s bringing her dog to board with her daughter, who lives in Bargersville, while she goes on a cruise to Tahiti. What a nice lady…
ATA’s baggage handlers must work on microchip time, as by the time we arrive at the baggage claim area, our bags are already out on the turntable. Quite a difference from Southwest, where if you’re lucky they might get the turntable running 10 minutes or so after you get to the claim area (and that’s after you’ve stopped to get a newspaper and use the restroom and it took you 15 minutes to get off the plane in the first place because you were in the eighteenth boarding group and were sitting in the back).
I run over to the Ramada and grab our car (it’s still there, in one piece, and the tires are still inflated, so I figure we got our money’s worth), then drive around to pick up Sally and the luggage. The drive home is fairly uneventful. It’s nice to be home, even if I do have to lug a sixty-pound suitcase up the stairs. My parents have left us some “welcome home” balloons tied to the rail at the top of the stairs. The cats are ecstatic to see us. Snoopy displays his affection by refusing to have anything to do with us for about five minutes, then changing his mind and deciding he wants attention. Tigger has doubled in size since we left and is starting to look like a fine young cat.
We open the windows to let the place air out a bit (it’s nice to be home where the weather is reasonable) and we fire up our computers to check our email (this takes me a bit longer than it does Sally). Dinner is a peanut butter bagel for Sally and a peanut butter sandwich for me. We’re too tired for much more than that. Visiting Naples was fun; we met a lot of nice people and had a great time there, but there’s no place like home and we’re home. Now I lay me down to sleep on my Select Comfort air bed1 again…Good night.
THE END
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1 In all fairness we no longer have the Select Comfort bed. We traded it for a Thermapedic about a year ago and we like the Thermapedic MUCH better.
A "surly curmudgeon[], suspicious and lacking in altruism." (Robert A. Heinlein)