Another early morning start for me as another beautiful day beckoned. Today was planned to be a lazy day and so there was no rushing around.
I caught up with some admin and sent a few messages. Even though Karen is not the executor of her Mum’s estate there is still lots of paperwork I am trying to deal with on her behalf. I also received confirmation that Ellie’s car had now been fixed and passed the good news on that it was ready for collection and at a fraction of the cost that the main dealer wanted to do the work.
For the first time this trip I even managed to start reading my kindle by the pool and was soon engrossed in the latest John Grisham novel.
The weather was perfect for us, hot but not burning without a cloud in the sky.
We decided to have an early lunch and were ready to leave just after 1pm. We were looking forward to a couple of beach walks and so headed to westward for a couple of miles to the coast.
Our first destination was Manasota Key. This was a bad call. It was firstly battered by Hurricane Helene. Then a week later by Hurricane Milton which made landfall exactly here. It was like entering a war zone. We thought we had seen storm damage a couple of days before but that was nothing to what we now saw.
Buildings were flattened in places, debris and damaged property were still strewn everywhere. The coast road had been under 6 feet of sand which was now piled up alongside it. The storm surge in the houses either side reached a similar height inside. We passed a 30-foot boat still resting alongside the road some distance from the water and could see many others turned over high in the mangroves.
It was a mess. There were lots of clean up activities taking place but it will take months for them to recover fully and rebuild.
Needless to say, the beaches were all closed. We were disappointed but understood why.
We decided to drive to Gasparilla Island State Park about a further 20 minutes away. We got to within a few minutes of the entrance where we were turned back as the roads here had not even reopened yet.
We were now a bit fed but philosophical about it and rationalised that probably no beaches within a short driving distance would be open and so did the only thing left to us and drove to the nearest Starbucks to get Karen a coffee.
After sitting in the now burning sun for a while we thought we would head into the adjacent Walmart to cool down. We bought a couple of things (new belts for me) and then after refuelling at their gas station headed back to the villa where we sat outside again in the now late afternoon sunshine.
Then it was time to just start our packing ready for the move up to Kissimmee tomorrow after we have collected Neil from Orlando airport. It was just a matter of checking things would go back in the cases although this time we did have lots of food to transport as well.
For our dinner we ordered pizzas from Domino’s. There was a very good collection offer so we chose that and drove the 3 miles to fetch them rather than have them delivered. The pizzas worked out about £6 each.
We ate them washed down with a glass of wine.
Just gone 8pm Karen disappeared for a moment and then came back into the room with a big smile on her face. She had remembered that with the time difference it was the day and time that she could check the Premium Bond app on her phone. She loves doing that and was happy that she had had 2 small wins. She got me to check mine but no such luck for me.
Premium Bonds are really a poor and lazy investment. The maths behind it means that only a very few get anywhere near the same return as even putting it in a high street account over a rolling 12-month period. We only have a small amount but Karen gets a real kick out of checking if she is a winner each month of the ones in her name.
After this I put the VPN on the laptop and logged in the UK version of Disney + to allow us to watch the last episode of ‘Rivals’. It has been our recent guilty pleasure viewing. We have enjoyed the trashiness of the story, although I was somewhat disappointed by the ending.
Then we watched some more of the election coverage although it was difficult to find a channel that was independent. ABC seemed the nearest although there was still a definite democratic bias. We found the BBC News channel but it just covered international affairs, whereas we were interested in either just US news or UK news. I am not really sure who it is aimed at and wondered if it generates any income or is just a cost to the licence payers.
I was still awake gone 10pm so my body clock must be gradually adjusting, however I still went to bed at a reasonable time as I knew I would be awake early to track Neil’s flight which was scheduled to take off at 5am Florida time. It had been a good day even though we hadn’t really done much – but isn’t that what holidays are sometimes all about?
