Sunday, June 14, 2009

Vacation Wrap-up

I'm about to take my third trip of the summer, so before I do that I figured I should probably finish writing about the vacations I have already taken.

First, my trip to Florida. Florida was perfect. We went to Florida immediately after my brother's graduation. The day after the graduation ceremony I got on a plane with Penn, my brother and his girlfriend, and my parents and we flew to Tampa. I wish my sister had been able to come, too, but she was about to start nursing school so she needed to stay home to prepare for that.
We were actually on Anna Maria Island, which is about an hour drive from Tampa. My parents' best friends have a beach house there. They're both really nice people and I basically consider them an aunt and uncle since during my childhood I saw them more often that I saw a lot of my actual aunts and uncles. My mom's best friend, Elle, is completely crazy. When we were driving out to their house my mom said, "Elle will probably greet us wearing her coconut bra." Sure enough, when we pulled up in the driveway she burst out the front door wearing the coconut bra and she'd talked her poor, patient husband into putting on a captain's hat and following her out the door with a tray full of bourbon slushes for all of us. It was quite the greeting, and very typical Elle (I should also mention that this woman is in her late 50s! She is aging amazingly well; her entire bathing suit wardrobe still consists of bikinis and it's not horrifying).
That greeting pretty much set the tone for the four days we were there. The weather was great the whole time. It only rained once, and that was at night when we were eating dinner on a covered patio so it didn't mess up any plans. Everything was just casual and relaxing. We spent a couple of days lying on the beach, we went into Sarasota and shopped and ate at a delicious Cuban restaurant, and we went tarpon fishing. And every afternoon when we came home from the beach or fishing, our host would whip up a different kind of cocktail for the group (bourbon slushes, pina coladas, Seabreezes...) That's the life!
When we weren't relaxing or laughing at made-up nonsense we were being amazed by the wildlife. I swear, every day down there was like something from a National Geographic Special. The first morning I was fishing off the dock behind the house and an enormous blue heron showed up and started stalking me, hoping for a pinfish. We threw him a fish and he swooped down and grabbed it. I also loved watching the egrets run along the beach and I kept spotting geckos and other small lizards all over the place (I don't know why, but geckos don't freak me out as much as mice or bugs. I actually kind of like them). On our first beach day I saw a dolphin making his way up the coast, leaping out of the water. Also, at one point I was out in the water with Penn, my brother and his girlfriend and all of a sudden we were absolutely surrounded by a whole school of tiny baitfish. There must have been thousands of them swirling around our legs. And since it was such a big school all the seagulls and pelicans were following them to feed, so one second we were just standing in the waves and chatting and then all of a sudden we were being divebombed by dozens of seagulls going after the thousands of fish. It was so cool. Kind of scary, but cool. I just kept yelping, "Oh wow! Oh wow!" over and over again. I'd never experienced anything like that before.
But the coolest thing of all was our shark sighting. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Penn, my brother, his girlfriend and I got to spend a day tarpon fishing. We went out on a fishing boat with two young guys who make a living as fishing guides. We had a really lucky fishing day. All of us caught snook early in the morning. I managed to catch a pelican, of all things. I always catch the weirdest stuff when I'm fishing, but the pelican was crazy, even for me (previous catches include a giant sting ray and multiple blue crabs). I felt really bad when I caught the pelican. I cast my line out and the pelican snapped up my bait fish while it was still on the surface of the water, and then the dumb bird wouldn't let go of the fish. We had to reel him all the way onto the boat and our captain had to hold him still and cut the line to free him. I'm pretty sure the hook had to stay stuck in his tongue. I was feeling sad about it until Penn said, "Now he has a badass tongue piercing. He's going to go home and everyone is going to call him Hook Mouth!" That cheered me up. I'm sure he (she?) is going to be fine. Later my dad texted my brother to ask how fishing was going and my brother responded, "So far we've caught two tarpon and a pelican!" and my dad's response was, "Let me guess, *A* caught the pelican?" Ha. Anyway, my brother did manage to get two tarpon all the way up to the boat. I had no clue that those fish were going to be so huge. I had been told that they can weigh between 100-200 pounds, but I guess I hadn't really bothered to mentally prepare myself for exactly how huge a 150 pound fish is. Some of the tarpons were almost the size of my boyfriend! It blew my mind. When we were on the boat we could see them leaping and rolling through the water. I was in awe. And then along came the shark. Penn was in the process of reeling in a tarpon that our captain had estimated was a 180 pounder. Needless to say, reeling these fish up to the boat is not an easy process. You can easily spend half an hour or more fighting the fish and tiring it out enough to be able to reel it in. Penn had been fighting his fish for ten minutes when the whole school of fish began leaping out of the water and swimming across the bay and just generally freaking out. The first mate said it looked like the water was boiling. We soon figured out why the fish were flipping out: a thirteen-foot-long hammerhead shark was attacking them! As we watched from the boat the shark grabbed Penn's fish right off the rod! We could see the shark's fin in the water and then we saw him really clearly as he grabbed the fish and half of his body splashed out of the water. Then after he had grabbed the fish he swam under our boat a few times. We were all so excited. Everyone on our boat was yelling, as was everyone on the boat near ours (even the captain and the first mate were yelling in excitement; apparently a hammerhead eating a tarpon is a very rare sighting, even for them). I'm so glad we got to see that. I also managed to capture it on video!
All in all it was a great vacation. I was really happy to see that Penn fit in perfectly with everyone and genuinely seemed to enjoy himself. I had a feeling he would like hanging out with my family, but it was very reassuring to see that I was right. My family really seems to like him, too. He can talk sports with my dad and books with my mom, he and my brother make fun of each other (the way boys show friendship never ceases to baffle me)...it's just really good. I get along with his family, too, and it makes me really happy that both of our families support our relationship fully. Not every couple gets that lucky.

Last weekend we got to take another fun mini-vacation. My friend's husband's boss (got that?) let him use her house on the Chesapeake Bay for the weekend, so she invited me and Penn and Nicole and her boyfriend for a "couples' weekend." I felt like such a yuppie telling people I was going out to the Chesapeake for the weekend with two other couples. I was imaging that the house would be a small cottage or a cabin. I was not expecting the house to be what it was, which was AMAZING. It was like walking into a catalog. Everything was perfectly designed, right down to the magazines artfully fanned out on the end tables in the living room. Have you ever looked at a catalog and thought, "Now who in the world has a scale model of a sale boat in their living room?" This woman, that's who. I can't even explain the extent of the decor in this house. None of it was from Ikea, I can tell you that much. I'm pretty sure the owner just gave a designer an enormous sum of money and said, "I just bought this house, please decorate it for me." Every room had something in it that made us gasp and say, "This must have cost a fortune!" The framed mirrors in the bedroom and dining room alone must have cost thousands. Penn's favorite thing was a blown glass bowl shaped like a fish. I estimate it cost at least a few hundred dollars and it was being used to hold washcloths in the master bathroom. That's what this house was like. And it was huge. Penn and I got to use the master bedroom because we had the Meatball with us and the master bedroom was where the dog crate happened to be. And of course the dog crate wasn't a wire crate with a blanket thrown over it, oh no. It was made out of wicker that perfectly matched the rest of the decor in the bedroom. Anyway, the master bathroom was easily the size of our current bedroom. And the bed was perfectly fluffy and king-sized (not that Penn and I need a king-sized bed because fifteen months into this relationship I still sleep pretty much on top of him every night; we're the only couple I know that can sleep perfectly comfortably in a twin bed) and from our bed we could look through French doors out to the hot tub, swimming pool, and down a rolling green lawn to a river. It was beautiful. And the house was so big that when the other two couples went to the bedrooms upstairs (both of which were huge and as lushly furnished as the master bedroom) we couldn't hear them talking at all. The lawn furniture alone probably cost more than all of the furniture in my current apartment. And when we ventured down to the house's private boat dock on Saturday afternoon, we found a sparkling boat that had sleeping quarters on it! (We didn't have permission to use the boat, but I was just amazed that it was even there) The Chesapeake Bay house is this woman's second home and it's so much nicer than my only home will ever be. Why does anyone need that much money?! I'm just grateful that I know people that know millionaires who let us use their fabulous homes for the weekend. It's highly likely that I will never have millions of dollars myself (and I'm well aware that more money=more problems so I really shouldn't wish for it anyway), so I guess being a couple of degrees of separation from the millionaires is good enough.
I'm pretty sure we could have spent the entire weekend at the house going, "Oh my god, did you see these dishes?" or "Is this a remote control for the swimming pool?!" (it was), but we decided we shouldn't spend the entire weekend testing out the lounge chairs and drinking in the hot tub (I know you're not supposed to drink alcohol in hot tubs). We went kayaking for a few hours one day, we went out for soft shell crabs (they were so good, I can still taste the Old Bay. And cracking crabs is fun!), we made a fire in the backyard fire pit (of course there's a fire pit!) and had s'mores. Oh, and I saw a bald eagle fly through the backyard! How often does THAT happen? I'd never seen a bald eagle outside of a zoo. It was so, so cool. Late Saturday night as everyone else was trying to get the fire started, Penn and I walked down to the boat dock. It was two flights of stairs down a steep cliff, so once we were down there we were all alone. I could only faintly hear our friends laughing up by the fire. We stood there on the dock and even though there were no artificial lights in sight the full moon was making it almost as bright as day. All around us we could hear fish leaping and splashing back into the water. It was as if we were in another world.
All of us agreed it was a weekend in paradise. At one point as we were kayaking my friend turned to me and said, "I'm so glad we were able to do this," and I said, "So am I. I really love this phase of life." And I do. It's definitely better than being in high school, when you still have to go home to your parents' house every night and you don't get to make all of your own decisions. It's better than college because there's at least a semblance of certainty about relationships and career that was utterly lacking in my early twenties. Plus we may not be rolling in money, but since most of us are dual-income couples we have the money to splurge once in a while. At the very least we have the money to spring for a better beer than Keystone! And since we don't have kids yet, there is nothing stopping us from jumping in the car when a friend unexpectedly gets a vacation house for the weekend. I'm trying to savor this time while it lasts, because I can't imagine it getting much better than this.

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