Cast of Characters (it’s actually a long one)
Me: 33, a school-based Speech-Language Pathologist, Disney Dork, will always find an excuse for Disney if in the general vicinity
Laura: 29: my baby sister, some level of manager at the restaurant of a hotel/conference center associated with that giant university in the middle of Pennsylvania. She’s a graduate of that same university
Mom: self-explanatory...she’s a family and consumer sciences teacher at a high school and has one year left (she thinks) until retirement.
T: my stepdad. Same age as my mom. He works for the postal service. He doesn’t usually come along on these trips, but wanted to go house hunting
Grammy and Grampa: 95, have been married for almost 72 years. Truly the matriarch and patriarch of our family. Born and raised in the northernmost town in NH, they still live pretty far north, so they (still) winter in FL. And by that I mean they leave at the start of November and come back at the end of April. As Depression era folks (and Grampa’s a WWII combat vet), they are about as determined, persistent, and independent as people could get, despite my grandmother showing her age and then some.
I don’t usually write trip reports for my February vacation trips. These trips typically consist of my mom and me flying to FL, staying with my grandparents for a week in retirementville (The Villages, FL), with a couple day excursions for me. But this year’s trip looked VERY different.
Last summer, in between my mom’s multiple surgeries to reconstruct her scalp, following removal of basal cell skin cancer (still 2 more surgeries to go), Southwest put their airfare on sale for February vacation. Although my grandparents had not confirmed their return to FL for the winter (they’re 95 after all), I booked air for myself, suspecting that their determined streak would continue, and not wanting to miss out on the good flights/prices. My mom dragged her feet a little bit and didn’t book right away.
In late September my grandparents confirmed what we were all suspecting; they’d be returning to FL. Then it was a scramble to arrange flights for them...and for mom and T. WAIT, WHAT?! T is coming too?!
Yup, T is crashing the girls’ trip. I received a phone call after one particularly long day of meetings, asking how I would feel about sleeping on the couch at Grammy and Grampa’s for the week. Uh, say what?!
Grammy and Grampa rent a 2 bedroom house in The Villages for the winter. Grammy, thanks to a broken neck a few years ago, sleeps in a recliner in the living room. Always the night owl and losing both her vision and hearing, she watches some combination of Fox News, the Hallmark channel and Mollie B polka in the evenings, at volume 60, until close to midnight. My school year bedtime tends to be about 8 pm. Sleeping on the couch for the week meant not sleeping for a week. I’m not generally picky about sleeping arrangements, but in this school year, not sleeping for a week was not an option.
So, I threw out the suggestion that we use mom’s horrifically unused timeshare points to book me a condo. The Villages is a little over an hour from Orlando, and there are a TON of condo resorts in Orlando to book through RCI. I found a couple along 429, which allowed me access to the FL turnpike without dealing with I-4, and before I could even second guess the suggestion, mom and T had booked a 2-bedroom unit at Silver Lake Resort. 2-bedrooms in case my sister and her boyfriend came along. We came to an (easy) agreement on how many times I would do the drive to The Villages (close to 140 miles roundtrip), and waited to see if Laura and Josh would be joining the party.
In January we finally got an answer. Laura would join the party but not Josh. He has never been on a plane (and has barely left Pennsylvania in his lifetime), and doesn’t want his first plane trip to be to FL. With Laura on board and flying in on Fat Tuesday, I started scheming more.
The days ticked down. The never-ending school work got done enough, and the weather forecast and coronavirus maps were monitored. I got home from school Friday Feb 21st about 3:30, raced around the house packing the suitcase and trying to make it a little bit better for Nick to live in for the next week, and raced out the door again about 4:45, much to the horror of the little dog Gizmo, who has learned exactly what the suitcase means. Nick and I met for dinner, and then I headed for mom’s house for the night. We chatted for a bit, and then I tried to crash. That 3:30 alarm would come early.
Me: 33, a school-based Speech-Language Pathologist, Disney Dork, will always find an excuse for Disney if in the general vicinity
Laura: 29: my baby sister, some level of manager at the restaurant of a hotel/conference center associated with that giant university in the middle of Pennsylvania. She’s a graduate of that same university
Mom: self-explanatory...she’s a family and consumer sciences teacher at a high school and has one year left (she thinks) until retirement.
T: my stepdad. Same age as my mom. He works for the postal service. He doesn’t usually come along on these trips, but wanted to go house hunting
Grammy and Grampa: 95, have been married for almost 72 years. Truly the matriarch and patriarch of our family. Born and raised in the northernmost town in NH, they still live pretty far north, so they (still) winter in FL. And by that I mean they leave at the start of November and come back at the end of April. As Depression era folks (and Grampa’s a WWII combat vet), they are about as determined, persistent, and independent as people could get, despite my grandmother showing her age and then some.
I don’t usually write trip reports for my February vacation trips. These trips typically consist of my mom and me flying to FL, staying with my grandparents for a week in retirementville (The Villages, FL), with a couple day excursions for me. But this year’s trip looked VERY different.
Last summer, in between my mom’s multiple surgeries to reconstruct her scalp, following removal of basal cell skin cancer (still 2 more surgeries to go), Southwest put their airfare on sale for February vacation. Although my grandparents had not confirmed their return to FL for the winter (they’re 95 after all), I booked air for myself, suspecting that their determined streak would continue, and not wanting to miss out on the good flights/prices. My mom dragged her feet a little bit and didn’t book right away.
In late September my grandparents confirmed what we were all suspecting; they’d be returning to FL. Then it was a scramble to arrange flights for them...and for mom and T. WAIT, WHAT?! T is coming too?!
Yup, T is crashing the girls’ trip. I received a phone call after one particularly long day of meetings, asking how I would feel about sleeping on the couch at Grammy and Grampa’s for the week. Uh, say what?!
Grammy and Grampa rent a 2 bedroom house in The Villages for the winter. Grammy, thanks to a broken neck a few years ago, sleeps in a recliner in the living room. Always the night owl and losing both her vision and hearing, she watches some combination of Fox News, the Hallmark channel and Mollie B polka in the evenings, at volume 60, until close to midnight. My school year bedtime tends to be about 8 pm. Sleeping on the couch for the week meant not sleeping for a week. I’m not generally picky about sleeping arrangements, but in this school year, not sleeping for a week was not an option.
So, I threw out the suggestion that we use mom’s horrifically unused timeshare points to book me a condo. The Villages is a little over an hour from Orlando, and there are a TON of condo resorts in Orlando to book through RCI. I found a couple along 429, which allowed me access to the FL turnpike without dealing with I-4, and before I could even second guess the suggestion, mom and T had booked a 2-bedroom unit at Silver Lake Resort. 2-bedrooms in case my sister and her boyfriend came along. We came to an (easy) agreement on how many times I would do the drive to The Villages (close to 140 miles roundtrip), and waited to see if Laura and Josh would be joining the party.
In January we finally got an answer. Laura would join the party but not Josh. He has never been on a plane (and has barely left Pennsylvania in his lifetime), and doesn’t want his first plane trip to be to FL. With Laura on board and flying in on Fat Tuesday, I started scheming more.
The days ticked down. The never-ending school work got done enough, and the weather forecast and coronavirus maps were monitored. I got home from school Friday Feb 21st about 3:30, raced around the house packing the suitcase and trying to make it a little bit better for Nick to live in for the next week, and raced out the door again about 4:45, much to the horror of the little dog Gizmo, who has learned exactly what the suitcase means. Nick and I met for dinner, and then I headed for mom’s house for the night. We chatted for a bit, and then I tried to crash. That 3:30 alarm would come early.
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