As usual, our flight out of New York meant a stupidly early start, but thankfully we made it to the airport on time even with some very extensive last minute packing. Our flight to Tampa seemed very short, aided by us catching the last few episodes of Lost which Bender had supplied us as AVIs (thanks again!).
After grabbing our luggage, we went and picked up to the keys to our rental car. Oh boy! My first time driving since November last year – and on the wrong side of the road, to boot! Still, the car was nice – a brand new Toyota Corolla – and where by “brand new”, I mean, less than 30 miles on the clock. I’m pretty sure that we’re the first people to rent it!
We took our time driving out of the airport; to an onlooker, it would have appeared as though we couldn’t work out how to get out of the airport, but I’d like to think of it as refamiliarising myself with driving and with the car. But we left our “proving ground” eventually, and made our way to St Petersburg to see Uncle Raymond!
The last time I saw Uncle Ray was 6 years ago when he was in Australia, so it was great to be in his home town this time. Also it was the first time that he’d met Kristy! We spent the afternoon seeing some of the local sites in St Petersburg, and then taking a dip at one of the Sea Towers’ pools.
For dinner, we drove over to my cousin Neil’s house (Ray’s son, brother of Natalie). He too had never met Kristy, and it had been almost 20 year since I had seen him! It was fantastic to catch up; Neil and Hope (his girlfriend) put on an awesome spread that we thoroughly enjoyed.
Seeing our extended family after such a long time was the perfect way to kick off our vacation. We crashed at Uncle Ray’s for the night and were asleep within minutes of hitting the pillow.
You can find some photos from Day 1 on the Photo Albums page.
. But I’m wondering why you still need a scanner? I have downloaded a great scanner app for my phone so I just take...
4 comments
Oh what a feeling!
Awesome dude. I see that you are wearing all the concert shirts you have purchased whilst being over in NYC.<br><br>Nice.
Back in the world of the Corolla huh? It’s almost every day that I see an old blue Toyota Corolla that looks exactly like the one that you had after you left school. Ahhh Memories…
Bender: Yeah, it seems that almost every t-shirt I have these days has a band on it. Kristy reckons I should make it my uniform!<br><br>MCD: A couple of years ago, I saw my old blue corolla at a Shell service station. It was way over in ‘burbs on the south-side. They’d taken off the sports exhaust, so it didn’t have the same prescence as it used to… but it was definitely my old car!<br><br>This one drove and performed somewhat better than my old one, though!