Making the trip
For once, we were on time to the airport and had a relatively pleasant wait at the Pittsburgh airport. Kind of surprised by the number of people there at 3 PM on a Wednesday, but it's a big airport... No wireless: I thought by this time airports would all have wireless. I'm new at this, though.
Renting a car
When I rented a car I looked around at a few aggregators and, except for companies I'd never heard of, they were all clustered within $5 of each other. So then I went back to my airfare reservation listing and saw they had some sort of deal with Hertz -- discount plus some miles, winding up around $24/day with all the taxes Florida puts on tourists. Making the reservation was a piece of cake and we were set...
But when we got there they notified us that adding an extra driver (my wife!) would be $7 a day. Son of a bitch! I could see if we were two 21 year-old frat guys with entirely separate reponsibilities. But this is my wife! Bastard assholes. I hate starting off on the wrong foot.
It's always happy hour!
After we finished there we wanted to get something to eat. Unfortunately the only places in the vicinity of the airport are the national 'family restaurant' chains -- Chili's, Tony Roma's, Bennigans, etc. We picked Chili's since mexican-type restaurants usually have at least one or two vegetarian dishes.
Fortunately for us, they had a two-for-one happy hour special on. Of course, that wasn't really hard since the hours for the special coincide with the hours the restaurant is open. And the two whatevers you get are 10 oz glasses, getting charged five and a half bucks for Sam Adams. That's pretty expensive for 20 oz anyway...
It's been a while...
We got to my dad's place without much of a problem -- Florida highways are constantly undergoing construction. I think there must be a correlation between the ability to work on roads (and other projects) year-round and the lack of planning that leads to such junky places around Florida.
My dad mentioned we'd go out and play some golf and I got a little nervous. It's been at least three or four years since I've played, and even that was just a family scramble game. (Much less pressure...) So Thursday was a beautiful day and we drove the five minutes to the local course. (It is Florida...) I figured we'd hit some balls at the driving range first since it had been a while. Nope -- first tee, let's go!
The guys we played with weren't any great shakes, which made it easier to suck as bad as I did. It actually wasn't too bad -- once you play a few times it's pretty easy to pull at least the rough memory from your muscles. And the course wasn't too hard either, although I went out of bounds once and into the water twice. I did sink a really long putt (25 feet or so) and had a few nice shots. Plus: I'm walking around in short sleeves in mid January. How bad could it be?
More boring, banal stuff soon...