Florida: Two More Trips to the Sunshine State

It’s been a while since my last post (about two weeks, yikes!), but I alluded to last time talking about a return trip to Florida. I know I’ve already talked about Florida, but chronologically, it was the next place my family went after our Myrtle Beach adventures.

My parents had just purchased a little drive-in restaurant called Mug ‘n Bun, and while it was a nice change of pace for them, it also made their work weeks insane. Throughout the warmer months, my parents would work crazy 18 hour days and my sister and I would only see them in the mornings before school and a few minutes before we went to bed at night. My aunt who lived next door or my older sister would babysit us when we weren’t at school until the frigid winter months, when the restaurant closed earlier and my parents could afford to sneak away from work to be home with us. Incidentally, our vacations couldn’t take place in the spring and summer, and we started taking winter vacations, which were cool with us (edit: pardon the pun) because we could escape the chilly Decembers of Indiana for the much warmer Florida winters.

Growing up, Dad and his family had gone to a place called Anna Maria Island on the Gulf Coast, and wanted to take us all back there. Another perk of my parents working so much meant that instead of driving, we would get to fly on an airplane instead. Our first trip to Florida was also my first ride on a jet liner, and while I was a little apprehensive, I was also told that flying was the safest way to travel in the world. And, I thought flight was just so cool that I wanted to know what it was like.

We were going to fly Southwest Airlines directly to Tampa, Florida, and I remember waiting in the old Indianapolis International Airport, staring at the ugly carpet and being bored out of my mind when our plane trundled up to the jetway. At the time, Southwest had all their planes painted in a yucky mustard-brown and orange style, and I wondered who in the world had made that decision. I came to the conclusion that they must have been that way because it would impossible to confuse their planes for clouds or sky on the horizon.

We taxied out on the runway after several hours’ delay (I’ve never left on time from Indiana in the winter), and I stared over my little sister out of the window into the pitch black night. I remember the dull growl of the jet engines rev up into a full-on roar as we were pressed back into the seats, and feeling the gentle bump as our wheels left the ground. Mom gave my sister and I pieces of gum to chew to help our ears pop after we had to deal with a different air-pressure. A flight attendant came by and offered my sister and I coloring books and plastic flight wings, because it was our first time on a plane. She also gave us tiny bags of honey-roasted peanuts to munch on, and tiny glasses of sprite. Air travel was pretty great back then; too bad it’s kind of lost its luster for me now!

We made it to Tampa somewhere around eleven PM, and my parents opted to just get a room for the night in Tampa, since we still had an hour’s drive ahead of us to get to the island. After a hasty sleep, we got up and went to the rental car place to get a maroon impala that would take us to our final destination. We cruised along the coastal high way, enjoying the fresh sea air and palm trees, thankful for sunshine and seventy degree weather. We made it to the little apartment-style hotel we had seen in the brochure, but it looked a little different. The building had been painted a hideous rose-pink, and the front office was actually a beat up trailer with plastic flamingo lawn ornaments out front. The owner was a portly man who constantly wore undershirts and hawaiian print tees open in front, but he was a nice guy.

Despite its questionable exterior, the hotel itself was pretty neat inside. It was like a townhouse, with a sitting area, balcony, kitchen and bathroom on one floor, and a spiral staircase leading up to another floor where our bedrooms would be. I remember I spent a lot of time at night in my room, reading the first book of the Harry Potter series by lamplight, and the bed that I had picked was so comfortable. We also spent a lot of time down by the pool, which was heated, and my sister and I pretty much had it all to ourselves since we were the only people staying in the building at the time. We would take these trips the first week of winter vacation, and stay for the week leading up to Christmas. I remember swimming one night during the Winter Solstice, and it was so bright outside, you could see your shadow by the moonlight.

The weather for our first trip down wasn’t the best, and I remember going out to the store with my parents, and an elderly man apologized to us because the weather was so cool. It was 68 degrees out, and we laughed and informed him that it was about 60 degrees warmer there than it was back home. He told us, “Yeah, I figured you were out of staters because you’re all wearing shorts.” We all shared a laugh and he wished us a pleasant stay in his home state.

It rained a lot, and Dad and I bought a cheap plastic chess board, and he taught me how to play when we were cooped up indoors, munching on a can of honey roasted peanuts and cashews. When we could, we would go to the beach and toss a football, and build sand castles, but they were never as grand as the ones we built in Myrtle Beach. I remember thinking the horseshoe crabs that wandered the beach were cool, and we tried to find a shell of one in the little surf shops to take home as a souvenir. Dad finally found a dead crab on the beach and removed the shell for me, and stuck it in a plastic container that was fated to be crushed on the flight home.

I remember driving a lot a few minutes to the south to nearby Bradenton and Sarasota where there decidedly more things to do. We went to a Bird Sanctuary and saw all kinds of exotic avians, but I remember most the raven who had learned to talk. We would be wandering throughout the sanctuary checking out the different birds, and you’d hear a voice a little like Elmo’s call out, “NO FAIR!” which was the bird’s favorite thing to say, according to her handler.

Across the way, there was an Alligator Sanctuary that was the home to several different species of alligators, crocodiles, and gavials. The star of the show was the American Alligator, one of Florida’s claims to fame, and three times a day, they would have a feeding demonstration, where a trainer would drop hunks of beef into the water, and you could see the gators rise out of the water about four feet to snatch the meat out of the air. We wandered the park for a while, and then it started pouring on us, but we had Dad’s huge golf umbrellas in tow. I remember stopping to look at one pen with Dad (the girls had gone to the bathroom) and we tried to find the gator. A flash of lightning revealed a thirty foot shadow lurking below a murky pond’s surface, in a scene that was eerily reminiscent of Jurassic Park. We left the park shortly thereafter.

We went to Florida twice during my junior high years, and aside from the two things I mentioned above, the trips were fairly low key. We hung out and relaxed on these vacations, instead of going out and doing things. It was always a nice escape, and we all got to spend time together on the beach or just watching movies.  It defined for me a new way to look at vacation as a restful affair instead of an active one. They were also the final trips my family would take before they split and divorced in 2001.

The divorce made it even harder for us to go on vacations, but mom still saved up a little bit each year, and by my senior year of high school, we had enough to go out on a trip to one place I had long wanted to visit: Hawai’i. Look for the next entry in a couple of days!

Tags: anna maria island, florida, flying, states, tampa, travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 2:44 am and is filed under The 50 States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.