Technology Failed Us & Travel Thoughts

We are back from my business trip to Miami, FL. Finally. We flew down in early February to meet with family/relatives as well as to visit our building lot in north western Florida to attempt to judge whether it was an acceptable location for a snowbird house.

We traveled much more than we ever anticipated (2,465 miles) which was at least partially offset by being able to drive a familiar vehicle: a 2006 PT Cruiser (Turbo Touring Edition).
The vehicle averaged about 27 mpg or about 10% better than our non-turbo 2001 PT Cruiser (Limited Edition). A few travel observations follow:

1. The PT Cruiser greatly enhanced our travels.

2. The center of Florida is a HUGE vegetable and fruit garden! Avon Park
actually tempted(s) us.

Orange Trees










3. Tampa/Clearwater are absolutely gorgeous, however, are W-A-Y too crowded.








4. Miami is a great spot to visit but would be a horrible place to live, IMO.









5. Miami's Bayside Park has a very comfortable tourist spot on the north end that is VERY reminiscent of Faneuil Hall/Quincy Market and appears directly patterned after Boston's fabled attractions.


6. Miami to Maine is really not a two day drive, especially starting the first day after Noon.



7. The Everglades appear to me to be over rated - it's a huge swamp. A tired-looking huge swamp. Though I grant that it has very interesting fauna.
Alligator









8. It appears that there are NO native palm trees in Florida. If they are not "planted" you simply don't see them. Palmettos are a very different thing - they are even growing on our building lot.

9. Northwest Florida may not be as warm and tropical as Miami, Punta Gorda, Tampa or even Avon Park, but our property has a really good "home" feeling to it.


10. We saw one of Jean's uncles, an aunt, two cousins, one first cousin-once-removed (a cousin's son), 3 cousins-twice removed (cousin's grandchildren), one sibling & brother-in-law, two nieces in our travels and last of all, our daughter in college.

Finally, I noted in the title that technology failed us. Our GPS did not "accept" the detailed street level maps of southern Florida that I thought I had installed on it. We had nothing. I tried to change it on the road from the laptop without any success. If Jean had not been able to get down to AAA in the Greater Miami area we would have been in trouble for our trip home.

We did not find that we used a mini-DVD player - we preferred to just talk with each other. We never used the DVD/CD player on the laptop and didn't use the radio on the car except for travel notices on the interstate traveling home and a rare time of trying to tune in news/weather which was not very successful.

We had internet access twice - we were not going to pay $11/day for internet access with our vacation going way over budget with our driving the rental car home after flying down (long story and it's bedtime). I tried to connect to work email and was unsuccessful - my password appears to have expired and I need to log onto the company's intranet to update it and I didn't have my work laptop to access the company's VPN.

The only tech items that got regular use were our cell phones. We used them frequently.

More later. I hope. It's bedtime already and tomorrow's my first day back to work.