Visiting the Good Life

This was a solo trip, leaving a warm husband and a cold New England to visit friends with second homes in Florida.
I recall conversations with an acquaintance with the good fortune, or good planning, to have someone to visit when the weather in our area got ugly. I used to wonder how a person managed that, and now here I was, on my way to West Palm. Actually, I owe it all to golf lessons and sheer luck. A year ago I not only acquired a new pastime, but two new friends as well.

          It was truly a girls’ week – one hostess’s husband was still in Massachusetts and the other kindly endured two chatty ladies and the risks of losing a wife to two full days of shopping trips, touring, and dining out.

          The Florida weather was unseasonably cool, but to me it felt downright tropical to walk around in only two layers.

          I spent two nights at house number one on Florida’s east coast and then my hostess and I packed up for a road trip to the other side of the state. Three and a half hours later and we were there for our stay of two more nights.

Highlights:

• Eagerly photographing tropical birds of a wetland  only to see the same ones later pecking at a hamburger bun in a gas station parking lot
• The endless number of silly little dogs in strollers, complete with hats and sunglasses
• Sparkly clothes and oversized jewelry
• Vast expanses as far as the eye can see of empty land filled with scrub grass and two cows, the local strategy being to qualify as a lower-taxed agricultural zone
• Assuming those brown people strolling by are well-heeled residents until you realize they’re all tourists, just like you. The truly wealthy are lolling about somewhere else doing whatever it is the truly wealthy do.
  

It was a highly successful trip. Not once did I have to bare my problematic upper arms and never was our shopping, lunching and touring slowed by the elements. And most importantly, the ominous ache in my upper left molars that of course kicked in the night before my trip never developed into the screaming agony that I worried it would.