Winter Vacation

[jducoeur]

Okay -- msmemory and I are home again, so it's time and then some for a diary entry.

This past week, we've been down on Sanibel Island, off the gulf coast of Florida. It was a trip entirely unlike any we've had before: relatively spontaneous, unplanned, and genuinely relaxed. I think we need to do this a little more often.

The trip happened because my Dad decided to spend several weeks on Sanibel this year, and leaned on the kids to come visit. He got my stepbrother for a week, my stepsister for several days, and the two of us for the final week. So unlike our usual vacations, planned two years in advance, this one was done with just a few weeks' notice. And because we'd been so busy for the previous couple of months, we went into it having made no plans whatsoever of what we were going to do.

In fact, we didn't *do* very much. It's weird having a vacation that doesn't get a blow-by-blow diary, but there's no point: the days had an intentional sameness to them. I suspect I'd eventually get restless with it, but as a change of pace it was quite nice.

The central activity of each day was a bike ride. Two of Sanibel's distinguishing features are that (a) almost every road has a bike path along it, and (b) the island is very, very flat. Combine that with a near-perpetual traffic jam on the island's main drag, and everyone gets around on bicycle. We rented a couple of cheap 6-speeds (plenty good enough for the purpose), and went out for a leisurely ride each day -- four miles to start with, up to eight once she was comfortable with the bike. (Plus an extra four-mile sprint for me several of those days, to get my blood really moving.)

My family being what it is, we were of course never far from the digital teat. Between five of us there (me and msmemory, Dad and his wife Sandy, and their friend Carol who was also visiting in the middle), we had four laptops, all with Net connections. It was fairly common to find us all sitting around, working online in the middle of the evening -- everyone agreed that we were all daft, but that didn't stop us.

The entertainment for the week was watching my father deciding to buy a condo down there. This was one of those times that demonstrates how true the Waks family breeds: Dad has been dithering about doing this for over ten years now, but once he made up his mind it all went very quickly. He rethought the finances this time, thinking of it as mainly a rental property instead of a vacation home, and concluded that, viewed in that light, the property prices down there are merely silly, instead of downright stupid. The amounts are still stratospheric, but it looks pretty likely to happen.

The condo complex was Pointe Santo de Sanibel. No surprises, but very pleasant overall. We spent some time wandering up the shore picking at the seashells (Sanibel has an insane number of seashells -- the beach is nothing *but* shells in many places), marinating in the jacuzzi, and stuff like that. The complex has a small lagoon in the middle, with a cute family of turtles and allegedly a small alligator. (I never saw the 'gator, but msmemory think she saw his googly eyes sticking up out of the water at one point.) We watched 1.1 sunsets, the national sport of Sanibel. (The .1 was a mis-timing the first time we tried -- we got out to the beach in time to watch the last five seconds of the sun setting.)

We spent one late afternoon out at the "Ding" Darling Wildlife Refuge, which makes up a large chunk of the island. This was curious mostly because the wildlife on the island seems to be almost entirely birds. I kept hearing accounts of bobcats and raccoons and suchlike, but never saw any land mammals other than a few pet dogs. But birds the island has in abundance. The main sport in the Refuge was catching sight of some Roseate Spoonbills, a large pink bird that can be found around and about in there. And sunset in the Refuge was really lovely: we went up in the "tower" (a small open three-story structure on a causeway), and watched lots of birds flying home for the night.

As you'd expect on a vacation island, there were a pretty good collection of restaurants. The places we went:

• The Island Cow is the mellow eatery. Huge menu, with sections of everything from salads to quesadillas to all sorts of fish. (The menu simply prices the fish by category, and posts which fish are in each category today on the blackboard.) Inexpensive and consistently good.


• We went to The Mad Hatter for Valentine's Day. This is the fancy, relatively pretentious restaurant at the west end of the island, up by Captiva. The food is quite good, but the pretension got to me a bit -- the preparations were all these cylindrical things where all the elements are stacked up on top of each other, and the service was rather snooty. Good in absolute terms, but not really quite our taste.


• Much better was The Twilight Cafe. which was excellent in all respects. The foods were intensely flavored from start to finish, the service friendly, and the prices not *quite* as horrid as those at The Mad Hatter. It has special menus for both veggie and low-carb, which appear just as good as the meat-eater's menu -- I had the portobello appetizer, served with mozzarella and tomato, all drenched in an tingly-rich balsamic reduction. Dad says this is the best restaurant on the island, and I see no reason to doubt him on this.

We also went several times to Pinocchio's, the local island ice creamery. You remember how I said that we were doing eight mile rides the last few days? It's not a coincidence that Pinocchio's is four miles away from the condo where we were staying. Everything there is great, but the winner was the Dirty Sandollar ice cream, which seemed to be a light mocha base with malt balls and chocolate chips: absolutely luscious.

The travel itself was generally pretty unremarkable -- United's theoretical bankruptcy didn't affect us except by giving us a pretty good round-trip fare. Only notable leg was the final one last night (Chicago to Manchester). Due to mechanical issues, we were stuck on the tarmac for the better part of two hours. However, the plane was deserted (maybe 50 people on a 757), so we claimed a spacious exit row, let ourselves be plied with the free movie and drinks and food the captain authorized, and actually had a pleasantly mellow time of it.

So -- home again, home again, jiggety jig. A little more relaxed, which we definitely needed. We're going to have to re-examine how we treat vacations: while we enjoy going places that are exciting and cool, I think we need to do nothing a bit more often...

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Lucky re: the last leg, actually. Most mechanical issues are "not enough people to actually pay for the flight" according to a commercial pilot friend of my mom's. Looks like you had a real mechanical issue!

[jducoeur]

Yaas. Indeed, there was no real point in lying to us -- the flight was made up almost entirely of airline professionals flying back to Manchester for the next day's shift, far as we could tell. It was amusingly chummy back there.

It actually wasn't a mechanical problem with the plane's main systems per se; rather, it was a test problem. The reports coming back from the cockpit were a bit scattered, but I gather that the system that *tests* the fire extinguishers in the cargo bay was broken, and returning false negatives. But it still needed to be replaced (cannibalized from another plane, I gather) before we could take off...

[jducoeur]

And in fairness to the airlines, I suspect that "most" is an exaggeration. I've been stuck due to mechanical difficulties a fair number of times, but none of the flights have ever actually been cancelled as a result, which is what I'd expect if they were trying to pull a fast one like that. (Indeed, at least a couple of times I've been stuck on the tarmac after leaving the jetway, so they couldn't even pick up additional passengers.)

So while it doesn't surprise me that it happens sometimes, anecdotal evidence indicates that it's probably not *too* common...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

You've flown more often than I, especially recently, but all my such cancellations have been clearly last-tiny-leg situations. And then they bus you to your destination for two hours.

[jducoeur]

Interesting -- I've only had to be bussed once, and that was a flight that was completely cursed. (A mid-air mechanical failure that set the plane down an hour into the trip, leaving us running for a flight that went to the wrong airport plus a two-hour bus trip to the right one.)

Don't know why the different observations. It may vary depending on the specific airline or destination -- it wouldn't surprise me if some carriers and routes were more prone to this hack than others. I haven't had much call to deal with tiny final hops, which may have something to do with it: they might do this more for a hundred-mile puddlejump than for more substantial routes...

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I suppose the way to find out for sure is to tie down a current airline pilot and ask him/her -- Mom's info is a few years old.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

I kept hearing accounts of bobcats and raccoons and suchlike, but never saw any land mammals other than a few pet dogs. But birds the island has in abundance.

And, deprived of that experience, you spend Sunday in Dorchester. I see racoons almost every time I come home at night. There's alos the ocassional possum. I've heard the coyote, but I've never seen it.

[hfcougar.livejournal.com]

Yes, to read the Melrose police log in the town newspaper, apparently they have an enormous rogue raccoon problem. Very little human crime, though.

Sounds like a great vacation!

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

That sounds really great to me! :) Glad you had a good time.

[kellan_the_tabby]

Doing Nothing every once in a while is a truly lovely thing. I've a quote from a friend on the topic...

Most people, when they gather together, are planning to Do Something. They get together for a purpose: going out for dinner, seeing a movie, shopping for something, spending a day at an amusement park... And then if things don't pan out as they plan -- the restaurant was closed; the movie was full; they couldn't find what they were shopping for; the park was rained out -- they get upset.

Well, we specifically plan to do Nothing. Oh, there are things we'd like to do, such as hit our favorite used book store, re-watch Life of Brian, compare cellphone plans...and we're definitely not going to miss out on meals. But we're planning nothing. We're just going to let things happen as they may. And if we end up spending the whole of Saturday in our pajamas doing nothing but reading books in the livingroom, well, Nothing is precisely what we planned to do.

I think more people should plan to Do Nothing in their lives; there would be fewer ulcers that way. Actually, a lot of people I know think it's a good idea, but they still don't plan to Do it. I'd invite them over if I had more room...

A whole vacation of doing that really does sound like a lovely thing...

Ding Darling

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Link to the site for the wildlife refuge: http://dingdarling.fws.gov/
Link to Island Cow: http://www.islandcow.com/