Florida trip report, part 2

I forgot to mention in the last post that my mom lives in a manufactured home community. We call them trailer parks up here, but honestly, there is a WORLD of difference between the type of community she lives in and our trailer parks. I did see a "trailer park" down there, so really, her place shouldn't even be considered remotely like anything we have here. It was really a retiree community though I did see people walking around that were not old by my standards. It was a lovely place actually, nearly all the homes were double-wide trailers with a lanai (a screened in porch that's really another room). Some of the newer homes were not trailers but actual manufactured homes and looked very different from the older homes. As I said, we walked the dog every morning and evening, except for the evening it rained. Every morning I woke to the sounds of roosters crowing. Roosters? yep, that's right. They live wild in the scrub along the ravine behind my mom's house. They crow all day from the butt-crack of dawn till late afternoon. There are also wild peacocks back there too. I didn't see the peacocks, just heard them. But I saw a rooster. It was black. Though mom technically lives in Sarasota, where she lives is not city but county jurisdiction. So apparently there are not rules about hunting... so people have tried to hunt those wild chickens and peacocks, without success. haha Accross from one of the main roads from my mom's community is a house where some circus folk live. They have a huge trapeze thing in their front yard. Last november when I went down, I saw them practicing, but I guess they are on the road now. Florida is still wintering site for circus folk.

Back to my report!

Sunday 3/16, mom of course wants to show off her grandson at church. Fortunately she didn't expect us to go to bible study. I'd have been bored silly. So we get there about 10:30ish, mom does her Proud Grandma thing before stuff starts. She mentioned there was a nursery, but I didn't feel like leaving him with strangers even if she did trust them (they also supposedly had to go through background checks and such). Anyway, we had a few things for him to play with, and he did fairly well when service started. Unfortunately, service happened during his nap time, and since it was all new to him, he had no desire to try to sleep. I finally had to step out of the sanctuary area to the lobby to get him to settle enough to nap. I was thrilled though, I was getting tired of the sermon... I am not going to diss it, but the topic was definitely NOT up my alley and certainly fit many of the reasons why I don't want to be christian. Other than that though, mom's church friends were very nice and friendly. Easy to be friendly when you never get winter cabin fever. LMAO
After church we went to a chinese buffet for lunch. I think that Kevin has a thing for little oriental women. He ALWAYS charms the waitress girls. Maybe it's because they almost always bring him a cookie after we eat.... They do it up here and they did it in florida.
After lunch we went to Sarasota Jungle Gardens! and we got to meet a message board friend and her hubby and son! It was great to meet someone that I've chatted with for a long while, and her son Kian and Kevin had fun. The Garden is like a cross between a tropical garden and a mini-zoo. It actually doesn't take up a lot of space, the path winds around on itself so that it seems like you are doing a lot of walking, but you aren't going very far. There are every type of palm tree, bamboo, and tropical plants. Interspersed are cages with tropical birds and later in the walk, a cage of lemurs and spider monkeys. The bird pictures I took myself. They have a bird show and a reptile show, and we showed Kevin the crocodiles, alligators and snakes. We also watched the bird show where parrots and cockatoos did tricks. My mom bought some of the bird food and we fed the birds, including a flamingo. The seagulls were LOUD and annoying. We saw a lovely white peacock that I kept taking pictures of, for my friend Melanie. Pmaw and her family had to go after the bird show, as they had a 4 hour drive back home. After we hugged and said goodbye, we went to the gift shop and I bought a souvineer (sp?) tshirt for Kevin and myself, a toy alligator for Kevin and a flamingo visor for a good friend of mine who is a flamingo freak. lol
When we got to the car, Kevin almost passed out instantly. So we decided to drive around for a while on Siesta Key to see some sights, look for a place to eat and then go back to Siesta Beach for the sunset drum circle. That all sounds like it would take little time, eh? No... took us a half hour just to get to the main drive of Siesta Key. Then we drove another half hour to Turtle Beach. But along the way I was able to see Siesta Key's version of "the strip". It was a strip of shops and restaurants and bars, all touristy and according to mom, all pricey. In 1993 when I went to visit them, mom took me to Turtle Beach. The beach wasn't sand, it was broken shells. You have to wear beach shoes to walk on it, it hurts so bad. But the water is fine. However one of those hurricanes that hit Sarasota (Charlie?) totally stripped Turtle beach, and there wasn't a beach left at all. They had to truck sand in and rebuild the beach, so right now it's about 2/3 sand and the shells are starting to come back so it's got about 1/3 shells. Turtles on Little Sarasota Bay is the restaurant we went to, across from Turtle Beach. I was shocked, we said we weren't picky about the table location, so they got us a table right away, and we got one on the veranda with a view of the bay! I was quite thrilled. Kevin was actually still asleep when we sat down, but he woke up shortly after. We had a lovely seafood dinner... I had some sort of fish I'd never heard of wrapped in parchment paper with a sherry sauce. Kevin had "gourmet" mac and cheese. He was happy. But he liked my fish too.
After dinner, we drove back to Siesta beach and regretted not getting there sooner. Parking had been fine when we drove by on the way to dinner, but now it was packed. We barely managed to find a place in the lot very close to where we need to go. So we head to the beach, and get to the Drum Circle. When we arrived, there were about 20 drummers, but more arrived constantly. The Drum circle starts about an hour before sunset and continues well into the night I guess. Mom says that after dark is for the "advanced" drum circle folks, in other words, clothing might come off, and things might get "rowdy". I know I got a whiff of the weed as we looked for a spot to sit. Anyway, when we arrived it was still mostly family-friendly, and people and kids were dancing in the circle with the drumming. I loved it. Kevin LOVED it. All he wanted to do was stand by the drummers and watch them and dance. It was so fun to watch him and fun to dance up there by the drummers. When it got darker, I saw the circle get smaller around the drummers and the families started leaving. Then we got a huge whiff of weed, so we decided to pack it up and head home. LOL It was a packed and eventful day!!

Monday 3/17 we didn't do a whole lot during the day. Mom had a chiro appt so she dropped Kevin and I off at a big bookstore that reminded me of B&N. I let Kevin have the run of the store while we waited, which was good for him, he needed to run. That bookstore was in a shopping center that had a few stores I wanted to see, so we did a little shopping. I found some jammies for Kevin cheap, and a few things for me, cheap. When we were done there, I needed to pick up some more milk for Kevin. My stepdad drinks some sort of soy type milk (gross) and my mom drinks some sort of fat free (not just skim) milk that is so fat free that it's not even proper white. blech. We went home and had some lunch, and I put Kevin down for a nap. Mom and stepdad needed to go to the airport that night to pick up a friend of thiers to get her home, and since I had a friend that had moved down to florida 6 months ago and she wanted to get together, I borrowed mom's car and drove up to Clearwater to meet up with her and her sons. She knew of a great Persian restaurant, so we went there and had some fantastic food. Shish Kabobs, chicken kabobs, beef kabobs, veggie kabobs, hummus, baba ghanoush, dolmas, felafel, tabbouleh... oh I was in heaven! We also tried a couple deserts among the 5 of us, persian ice cream (ice cream with saffron and maybe cardamom? in it) and some sort of other desert that tasted like lemon sorbet but wasn't, quite. Then Annette took us all down to Pier 60 to see Clearwater beach, and it turned out that there were sidewalk performers and a craft show. We saw a guy dressed up like Captain Jack and I took a picture of everyone with him. Kevin played on the gym equipment on the sand with Annette's boys. Then we walked down the pier to look at the craft booths. Mind you, this was after dark! Almost 9pm. Annette, the trooper, insisted on carrying Kevin most of that time. She just loves little ones. Eventually though, Kevin insisted on getting down. He then ran almost half the pier, oooohing and woooing every time he went to the railing and saw the water below. Any attempt to pick him up elicited a fit of temper. lol... But, the night had to come to an end, Annette got us back to our car by 10pm and we hugged and went our way. I got us back to mom's by 11:15, not too bad.

Tuesday 3/18 was our final day, we had to be at the airport by 5:30. So we hung out at the house, letting Kevin play, packing, eating. It was a quiet final hours. We got to the airport, and after I checked in and mom and stepdad left, I discovered the plane was running late due to bad weather elsewhere. But I also found out that I would be on the same plane from Sarasota to my home airport, so I asked if there were any available first class seats that I could upgrade to. There were! it cost me $60 to upgrade to first class. Totally worth it too, she gave me a front row seat which has the most leg room and no one in front of me, so I could put Kevin down after take off and let him play in front of me, my leg was enough of a fence to keep him in. Plus, drinks (booze) was complimentary... as much as I wanted. Being a little concerned (ha! understatement) about turbulence and flying through rough weather, I started out with a vodka/cranberry and moved on to Bailey's. I had a lot of Bailey's. I was quite relaxed by the time we landed in Atlanta (no weather). I had to switch from the vodka/cranberry because Kevin was totally into the cranberry. He'd never had it before but the color attracted him and he threw a tantrum when I wouldn't let him have any. Honestly... I might have let him have a sip if I didn't think my seat neighbor would have called me a bad mom for letting my kid have booze. I was tempted... maybe he would have calmed down and slept? oh well, I will never know. However, he did fall asleep while we sat at Atlanta waiting for the plane to load. That was nice, he slept most of the last leg of the trip, waking just before landing. We were only 10 minutes late, which was better than last time. We got home by 11:30pm and Kevin went straight to bed (he was awake all the way home), then so did I.

It was 35 degrees when I got home. :(