Plane's Here...

Update: while I was writing the last post the plane pulled in and we appear to be on schedule!

At BOI...

Here we sit at Boise's airport, with half an hour to go before we're supposed to be in the air, with no plane at the gate. This time we're flying on Southwest -- with apologies to my nephew and his wife, both long-term employees with United. But United charged us $300 one way to ship the tandem and Southwest just charged us $50. Heck, it cost us $112 to ship the bike back to Boise from Tampa... the math seems to work out better this time around.

As we drove to the airport we noticed that the temperature was in the high 30's with clouds and fog. In a few hours from now we hope to change all that!

Morning Preparations...

It's getting closer to the time when we need to hit the road and head to the airport... I'm feeling a bit anxious about it because we hardly ever catch an early afternoon flight and I feel like I'm late today! (Normally by now we'd be gone and half-way across the country.)

I thought I'd throw in a picture of a couple of my "customers" from my mail route. Pippi, the smaller horse in the picture, comes running to the fence whenever she sees my mail truck because she's trained me to give her part of the apple I eat every morning. Keebler, the larger brown horse isn't as quick about coming out for a snack. He's 27 years old and doesn't rush for anybody. But if he's nearby when I come past, he'll come up and try to cash in on a handout as well.

Let's get this show on the road!

Back Into Blog Semi-Retirement...

Thanks to those of you who let me know you kept track of our latest adventure. The blog was updated about 90% of the time through my Blackberry, so we now know I don't HAVE to take my laptop with me everywhere I travel. This might make blogging a lot less of a headache for any potential overseas travel in the future.

This blog will now go back to sleep until the next time we take off for points unknown...

Reality Bites...

8:30 AM -- Wow... does reality hurt, or what? Dark cloudy skies, rain, and mail to deliver. I can safely say that our time in Florida is now safely in the "memory department".

I want to go bike riding this morning, just like we did at the tandem rally... Instead I'll deliver mail and start saving for the next bike trip.

Leaving Denver

12:26 PM -- They're herding us like cattle onto a small CRJ200: a regional jet so small that carry-on baggage wouldn't fit in the overhead bins! We landed in Denver I foggy conditions, but the lifted half an hour later and we've been looking at partly sunny conditions since then.

Time to shut off the cell phones and hit the runway...

1:43 PM -- In the air at the moment, thinking about how it will take as long to drive from the airport to our house as it did to fly from Denver to Boise.

2:25 PM -- We just landed in Boise. The trip is over for all practical purposes... Now all we need is for UPS to get the bike here in one piece!

In Denver

9:17 AM -- As I write this the plane is staring its descent to Denver. My stomach did its descent to "hungry" about half an hour ago... so I'll be looking for an eatery of some kind as soon as we hit the ground.

There have been clouds most of the way here, starting perhaps half an hour or so out of Tampa. I wish we had a couple more days we could have spent there as I would have liked to head back to the gulf and looked around some of the beach communities. Oh, well... there's always "next time"!

Here Comes the Sun...

7:15 AM -- It's early morning and we're at the Tampa airport waiting for our 8:00 flight. The drive to the airport was interesting in that people kept flashing their lights at us; it appears that a fuse had blown and we had no tail lights. Other than that we've experienced nothing out of the ordinary.

People have been showing up at the gate, and we're getting closer to boarding time. Someone is packing a small baby with them; I hope they don't end up sitting right next to us so we can listen to it shriek all the way to Denver!

The Beach...

1:43 PM -- We made it to St. Petersberg and finally found a public beach where we could park and go bob around in the warm gulf water for a while. There were small 2 to 3 inch fish swimming very close to the shore (thousands of them along the shoreline) and larger fish were swimming amongst (and feeding upon) the smaller ones.

The sea birds were having a frenzy feeding on whatever they could catch on one of their head-on dives into the water.

All in all it was a good day for man and bird... The fish seemed to get the short end of the stick, but they made up for their losses by sheer numbers!

Tuesday in Tampa...

8:53 AM -- I just spent the last half hour fighting with a sluggish computer trying to get online to confirm reservations and print boarding passes. Mission finally accomplished.

Yesterday we left The Villages and went to visit Valerie's grandmother where she now lives in Chiefland, Florida. This was roughly 75 or 80 miles from The Villages in a northwesterly direction. We went out for lunch, looking for the "perfect" place -- kind of hard when you're a stranger and have no idea of where anything is, or how many (or few) choices will be available to you. We passed by BubbaQue's (although I've included a link because the web site is amusing if you have your sound on) and found a place 10 miles north in Fanning Springs called the Light House Restaurant, which serves steak and seafood. (I couldn't find a website for this place... sorry!)

Valerie tried a fish sandwich and it was one of the best she's ever had -- not a "filet o' fish" by any stretch of the imagination, but a nice fresh piece of fish (probably Grouper) that was lightly breaded (she could have ordered broiled instead). I ran through their salad bar which was actually pretty good... usually small town salad bars don't amount to much more than a bin of lettuce and your choice of two dressings. This restaurant had a good variety of toppings, other vegetables (no mushrooms, however) and pasta and potato salads, fruit, cottage cheese and a few other things I didn't even have the room to go back and try.

The drive home was uneventful, and Valerie napped on and off most of the way while I kept up with the traffic flow on southbound I-75. We stopped off at the UPS store and shipped the bike back to Boise, ran through the Starbucks at the same location and then came home. I went up to the local "Sweet Bay" grocery store and bought a turkey sandwich for my dinner and brought it home. The sliced onion in the sandwich stunk up the whole house, and both Valerie and her step dad were complaining about it. Interestingly, while I could smell it too I didn't really notice the taste as I ate the sandwich. Stealth onion????

What to do today? Who knows... George had a golf game up close to Orlando, so he's gone... nothing surprising there. Golf... George... they both start with "G" -- see the connection? Maybe we'll head over to St. Petersberg and look at the gulf... I would have liked to have visited Busch Gardens and played on their roller coasters, but the price for admission just seemed a little out of touch with reality. Twelve bucks for parking and $69.95 APIECE to get in the gate to stand around in the heat and humidity while waiting to get on the rides... I think we'll pass. A month from now the weather would be ideal for such pursuits... but I doubt the price tag will look any better!

Well... I guess we'd better get around to enjoying our last day here in Florida; tomorrow we'll be held captive in a couple of long metal tubes bearing the colors of United Airlines.