Florida Adventure

I think I'm going into blogger withdrawal. I wasn't planning to write again until we spent a day at Disney with the Whites, but I've things to talk about. So here we go! I'm going to start with a comment on our flight home from London, after a short jump from Barcelona. We managed to land one of those huge 747 cows of the sky and it was packed. Dawn and I sat in two of the middle four seats, Dawn always drawing the aisle. My seatmate and his wife had the most engaging personalities. Their conversation and social skills were titillating. When they weren't busy pushing the reclining seats in front of them forward, they looked like this.

I will refrain from commenting on the ethnicity of the above-pictured persons. So, after two days at home washing clothes and repacking bags, we hit the road in Jessie & Chris’ Dodge minivan, on our way to Florida where we would finally connect with the Whites and have a Disney adventure. The minivan with little girl seats was to be our Florida wheels. Although we’ve done this trip numerous times in two days, we decided to take three, so as to not be totally wasted when we arrived. We immediately started getting the message that Canadians were no longer traveling to Florida at this time of year. The USA border guard asked pointedly, “Why are you going to Florida now?” Then the toll agent on the Florida Turnpike said, “All of the folks from Ontario have come and gone.” Well, I guess not all of them. Our first night was nine hours out in Lexington Kentucky and the second stop, after a ten hour drive, was Lake City in northern Florida where we encountered our worst traffic hazard of the trip, smoke from the raging forest fires in the Osceola forests. Day three of travel was a short one to allow us time to case the locations of our rented home, Disney and the airport. We also squeezed in some shopping, including a quick stop at the Disney Marketplace.

Since I comment on my blog caption about our culinary adventures, I though that tonight’s dinner definitely qualified. We ate at Texas de Brazil, a style of dining which I’m pretty sure we would have tried in Brazil, had we known about it. Here it was all about the meat.

Although the salad bar shown above, was fabulous, as was the floral centerpiece of the restaurant, the highlight was the arrival at our table of a series of gauchos armed with skewers full of a variety of meats, which were shaved to our plates with impressively phallic knives.

In our opinion, the experience would have been improved by a more paced presentation of these meats, probably our fault since we didn’t understand the red light/green light method of bringing the gauchos to our table. We had these little coloured tags on the table that were to be turned to the green side to summon the gauchos and then we should have turned them to red. Instead, the meat came fast and furious. Fortunately, all of the food was outstanding!

So we waddled back to the Hampton Inn to have a final sleep before connecting with Jessie, Chris, Ella and Sadie tomorrow. Woo Hoo!