Wednesday, July 21, 2010

My trip to Florida

I took a weekend trip to Florida in June, to see my sister graduate (1). It was my first airplane flight alone, and I haven't flown that much anyway, so there was some stress. I woke up at 4 a.m. to catch the local shuttle for a 3 hour trip to the airport. Made it through security and got my carry-on into the overhead compartment. It was a small plane, with small compartments, so it took a shove or two to get it in. But I saved $30 on Delta's rotten checked-bag fee, so it was good.

I switched planes in Atlanta, where I found that the concourse shuttles aren't kidding when they say "hold on" during acceleration. Not a bad airport. I grabbed some lunch and found a postcard for El Burrito, but couldn't find a mailbox to stick it in. Finally landed in Gainesville, 15 minutes early and 11 hours after I woke up. Gainesville has a very small airport - 3 gates, in one room, and you can walk around the whole airport in ten minutes. No joke. Postcards were wicked expensive at $1 plus tax, and the stamp machine was similarly overpriced - 2 44-cent stamps for $1.50.

I was picked up at the airport by my favorite sister, driving the reason El Burrito has 10 toy Mini Coopers:


The next day, I helped out with her graduation errands and we did some grocery shopping. Florida is miserably hot and humid in June, let me tell you. And the houses down there aren't built to hold the AC in. I was sleeping upstairs, and even with the AC and a ceiling fan, it never got cool enough to really sleep. Blah.


Graduation was Saturday. It's a small school and a very small class. My pictures outside were horribly overexposed:


We partied after graduation, although the graduates were mostly not in a party mood, and there was some drama. I also discovered that I don't like mai tais, mojitos, or cosmopolitans. No surprise there, by Sister can't seem to keep from trying to change people.

On Sunday, we drove over to Titusville and Kennedy Space Center, which was one of my Holy Grails. More on that later, because I took pictures of everything.

Monday, it was back to the airport and home. On the way through town, we saw these markers - one of the local schools has a scale model of the solar system.


These three are Venus, Earth, and Mars. We were driving too fast to see their interpretation of Pluto's demotion.

(1) My sister got a graduate degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine and acupuncture. I'm skeptical about the whole thing, but if that's what she wants to do, and she thinks she can make a living at it, I'm fine with that.

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