Bonus Beach Weekend

Well this worked out well.

What was supposed to be four days of trucking south trying to get to the southern tip of mainland Florida has fortuitously turned out to be a weekend on Daytona Beach and two full days to cover the rest.

Switching modes, we shipped home clothes and conference goodies, headed over to the coast, and got to spend an evening walking Main Street, which we discovered to be closed off for Jeep week.  A drink or two, and a reasonably early night, a day of work Friday, and in the hotel pool with a Mai Tai by 4:05 Friday.

Friday night on Main Street turned into another one of those stories.  We had worked our way back to the far end and the Boot Hill Saloon, which has become Donna's favorite bar on Earth.  The setup there is that it has its own little parking lot which becomes part of the scene, and on this particular evening, a'69 Coupe DeVille convertible gliding in silently in captures a glance.

I couldn't help but make a comment to the cool old cat and his cute younger wife as they made their way inside.  Before you know it, we were buying rounds and telling tales over another great long-haired rock and roll band.

This would have made for a good story, except for what happened next.  Before long, they asked us if we wanted to go for a ride and check out another place.  A couple hours and 2 or 3 bars later, we opted out of breakfast at Perkins and stumbled back into the Fountain Beach Resort with plans for tomorrow seriously in question.

Beach Bound

Getting ready here to get the bikes up off the kickstands for the first time since Monday, when we decided to use them, instead of donkeys, to pack our stuff across the highway to the swanky Marriott World Center for an IT conference.  We've been living it up here since then, Kev working the days away from the room while Donna attends sessions downstairs.  The laptops are the only things left to be loaded.

At first, said conference was an inconvenience, having come up just as the plans for our Key West trip were being finalized and rooms booked.  Donna was suddenly looking at flying home from Florida on Thursday prior to our vacation, having to immediately do laundry and pack again, this time for the bike, to turn around next day and ride her ass right back to Florida. What was originally said almost as a joke ended up becoming reality: since I work from home more days than not to begin with, let's try to put 5 of them together and ride down a week earlier.  Why not?  If I could get that approved, we could easily make the trip over the weekend, and maybe get a head start on Friday.  We got both the approval and the head start, and now we're one work day away from starting our vacation at a pool bar on Daytona Beach 4:01 pm on Friday, as if Jeannie had blinked us there.

In the meantime, we made the most of our evenings, Lyfting around Orlando and working in a fantastic dinner in Disney Springs with an old friend who had handled service on Donna's first bike before I landed the job. We promised to visit him after he moved back home to Florida, and we did!

We're taking a different route around Orlando to avoid having to deal with all that nonsense again, plus rush hour thrown in.

Chillin'

It stormed pretty good again overnight, but Saturday morning, we woke up to sunshine, to 200 miles in our pocket, and to newspaper stuffed in our boots.  Outside, plenty of dense clouds remained, but the sky was otherwise blue and the humidity was gone.  So, we felt pretty optimistic, leaving dry with jackets and heavy gloves, and with dry roads under our wheels.  Back up on 81, southbound, hammer down.

The only truly large city on this route is Charlotte, as opposed to I-95 whose only purpose is to connect a never-ending string of them.  We (I) avoid that bullshit at pretty much all costs, and in fact this route adds ridiculously little mileage to a 1,000+ mile trip, waaaaay outweighing the rage it saves.  Let's keep this our little secret - K?

Before we got out of Virginia, however, the gray skies and mist returned, followed eventually by more rain.  Temps dropped into the 40's. We were bundled up and fighting cold all the way though Columbia, SC and the short leg of I-26, where we stopped again for gas and booked a room right below where we'd be soon be dumped onto 95.  There, we were greeted with a Cracker Barrel 2 doors down from our budget-friendly Days Inn, right alongside the shoulder of the interstate.  We got dinner out of the way, checked in, and stayed in.  Aside from the party-girl sistaz from Miami that ended up sitting on Donna's bike for a selfie, the only action was getting showered and staging everything for an easy escape in the morning.

Leaving after a leisurely breakfast, again with jackets and optimism, it was a hot minute to Georgia and not even noon when Florida arrived in view across the St. Mary's River.  Jacksonville is the only city left on 95 aside from its terminus in Miami, and is where both nav systems, set with our destination so we'd have the arrival time, lost their minds due to the road construction leaving the route alignment as a work in progress.  We can still read highway signs, though, and highly recommend doing so to everyone.  Traffic itself was typical weekend, busy but tolerable, and the turn onto I-4 for the run inland to Orlando was less than an hour off from here.

I-4 through downtown Orlando right now is a ridiculous mess of temporary roadway, itself the slightest of improvements over dirt biking through a cornfield.  Nonetheless, we survived and pulled into the Holiday Inn Waterpark Resort under a warm sun, still actually wearing jackets and still wearing smiles.

Before long we were chillin' again, but this time poolside with a nice beverage.  Tomorrow I'll log in for the day's work like any other Monday, except not like any other Monday.

Business or Pleasure?

How about both?

We decided last year that 2019 would be our Key West trip.  Like our Texas trip 2 years ago, we were not going to attempt this in the middle of summer.  Unlike our Texas trip, we were able to make spring happen, and will not end up leaving in peak hurricane season.

So, instead of hurricane tracking, today we are spending Good Friday in Winchester, VA, more or less unable to watch anything on TV other than tornado warnings.

Vacation doesn't actually start for a week.  But Donna needed to be in Orlando for a conference next week, and would have been flying from Florida next Thursday to do laundry, pack her bike, go to bed, and turn back around to head right back.

I regularly work remotely, and getting some special dispensation on the two in-office days next week was a pretty easy deal.  Remote is remote, right?  Show me where it says where "remote" is.   And so, Donna ended up saving the company some plane fare, and herself some extra travel, and we'll put in the miles a week early.

We took a half-day Friday to get a head start, and then spent the week watching the forecast deteriorate into a day of thunderstorms and tornadoes.  This morning's actual conditions were slightly better in the short term, and our decision ended up being whether to ride into the weather Friday afternoon or leave home in rain Saturday and ride out of it.  Come lunchtime, we were caught up with work and getting restless, and figured any head start we could get would be money in the bank in case the weather ended up not improving as the weekend went on.

We left at lunch and got to Carlisle before having to gear up, and then got through Maryland and West Virginia before hell broke loose.  We've been through worse at least once, but bashing through blinding rain is never a great day.  It was coming down in sheets and even cars with with the wipers on warp drive were going 45.  We passed a tractor trailer that had just run off into the median and down the bank, and the driver was thanking his stars it was only stuck and not on its roof.  After a second Biblical downpour episode, it was time for us to call time out and get a look at the radar.

We got off, found a Sheetz and booked a Candlewood one exit south in Winchester.  By the time we finished our coffee, the rain had paused and aside from being soaked inside our rainsuits, the ride was drama free.  So here we are, in early, organized, 200 miles ahead of the game, and looking at a dry morning.  More rain was right behind, and the only thing on TV is said tornado warnings, but we're showered, fed, have seen no lightning, and disaster is looking pretty unlikely in our particular location.  And my drawers stayed dry.  You may not know how huge of a statement this is, but let me tell you that's the line between somewhat tolerable and Lord you can take me any time.  Donna's entire groinal region was soaked, for the record.  If it gets in, that's where it ends up.

Anyway, tomorrow we should be out on the road early and hauling ass.  We've done basically this same trip in 24 hours on Sportsters, so doing it in 2 days on actual touring bikes with a 200-mile head start should not be too daunting.

So far, so good.