Vacation. What a concept. It's been so long since I've actually gone on a vacation of more than a long weekend. Convinced by my girl's cousin to go with them to the Gulf Coast, I leapt at the chance to go to Florida for the first time.
What I didn't do was get too involved with the planning. The law of unintended consequences resulted in little work for me in the planning stages but a done deal when it came to the consequences. This started off with a 5.25a flight from an airport an hour and a little away from our house. To reach the airport, we would have to drive through a seedy if not downright dangerous section of town...at about two in the morning, Saturday. The expressways were mercifully clear of traffic, but when we arrived at the exit where we began to thread our way through downtown streets, the fun began.
Within four blocks, I saw a hooker. The first clue was that it was a woman walking by herself with an oversized purse, notoriously high high heels and form-fitting pants in a broad checkerboard pattern. The colors were barely distinguishable in the late-night lights, but think blue and orange...or brown and orange.
A couple of blocks later were guys by themselves in hoodies slinking back to whatever holes out of which they climbed. My girl asked no one in particular from where they'd come and I suggested that the hooker back a few blocks had probably serviced them.
Knowing the city as I do, and despite the fact that the GPS wasn't locating the long-term parking we had chosen, I found the street where the lot was located and turned to the west hoping there would be a reasonable explanation for its absence on the GPS. Sure enough, there was: The street on which the lot was located is the dividing line between municipalities, and the website erroneously named the larger city instead of the smaller suburb.
We got to the airport and proceeded to sit while we waited for departure. A passel of navy swabs fresh out of the local training station were either being deployed to their new stations or sent for further training in another locale. Parents and grandparents were dressed in shirts and caps denoting their relation to the Navy recruit: Proud Navy Mom, Navy Dad, etc. When we boarded, the tears flowed.
The flight was on a smaller jet, but the seats weren't too bad, all things considered. The funniest moment of the flight was at the beginning, when one of the flight attendants was showing how to use the breathing devices that would deploy in an emergency while her coworker explained over the intercom. I'm not sure any of us needed an audible example of how to breath -- for a moment I thought we were getting a very public dirty phone call.
It only took an hour and a half to get to Atlanta. Atlanta's airport is perhaps the largest and busiest commuter airport in the world, and I'm thankful we were there in the early morning. We had to take a train from section D to section C, for crying out loud. But that gave us the opportunity to see virtually every school in the SEC represented on someone's shirt. The Big Ten made a meager appearance, as did the Big Twelve.
We got on the flight for Pensacola with a very nice crew led by an attendant named Darryl who looked just like Tom Joyner, the DJ. The other flight attendant resembled Taraji Henson, the actress. Darryl was a hoot.
We arrived in Pensacola to weather that was definitely un-Midwestern. It wasn't humid, but it was hotter than our weather. We found our car and headed off into the Floridian byways, hoping to find out way to Destin uneventfully. The GPS helps a little, but it's the locals that give us the best dope. Soon enough we're on the causeway headed to Destin. A funny sign greets us before we get on the causeway: Make Sure You Have Enough Fuel -- Long Bridge Ahead. That begs the question: Just how long of a bridge is it?
After we crossed the bridge we made a couple of stops and ate lunch. Since we'd been up since the buttcrack of dawn, we should have been tired but, surprisingly, weren't. After an hour or so, we got into Destin to find ourselves at the end of a long line of traffic due to the annual Seafood Festival that was to end the next day.
Finally, we met up with the rest of our group at a bar and grill called the Whale Tails. The sights along the coastline were breathtaking. The white sand contrasted against the multihued blue of the sky and sea was something I'd never seen before. Despite having been in Spain and seeing the Mediterranean, I hadn't seen white sands like this before.
We got to the condo we were renting and quickly changed into our swimming togs. My girl and I went swimming for a brief time in the Gulf. Finally, I was in Florida.
(c) 2012 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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