Let’s drive to Florida. Road trip! It’ll be fun. We can hang out on the beach and get a loverly tan. We can walk boardwalk trails through mangrove swamps. We can dine out in restaurants on the beach. Not last October…

First, on the way down, we were taking a circuitous route through Chattanoooooooga to get to our Best Western motel. I was driving and the GG was navigating and all of a sudden, we took a turn and found ourselves in THIS tunnel. I don’t think I could EVER find it again. He must have taken the pic…

The next day we visited Pengie and cBear at their home in Fla. This is their catsa Citra doing, y’know, what catsas do. We had a great dinner at the Top, then headed down the road to our room at not one of my fave chains.

All of that WAS fun. But. Next day BRADENTON! YAY! Except. A couple things. 1) We landed in a Home Depot parking lot and I looked at my phone and it reported a Red Tide Alert. Welcome to Fla! 2) We had been hearing a suspicious bumpity-bumpity-bump noise in the back of the Frog Hopper for the last two days. I was magical-thinking it to be random crapola floating around. As we got off the freeway at the Bradenton exit, we finally admitted to each other that it was the damn rear bearings. We made it to Mr. Ed’s house (he’s our brother[-in-law]) and he and the GG jacked it up and diagnosed the problem. They hoped. The conversation was laced with “If it’s the U-joint, you may have to buy a new vee-hickle down here”, etc.* The next pic is not from that day (the FH was fixed by then, thanks to a wonderful Subaru dealer near our hotel), it is from when they were trying to get a power inverter working in the Frog Hopper so we could plug oxygen equipment into the car for the drive back up north. These guys can do ANYTHING and they got it working!

It was kinda fun dialing in to work meetings from a hotel in Fla. A *nice* hotel actually (brand new Best Western), albeit in downtown Bradenton, not on the beach. I wouldn’t let him book us a room in the place where the druggies hang out. It was especially fun when this loverly afternoon storm rolled through. Palm trees are not my usual scenery.

We had sorta been on tenterhooks that whole day. In part because we weren’t sure if the dealership could fix the Frog Hopper (the GG kinda begged and they came through with BELLS ON). And he was working on the trailer we were moving our brother out of and that’s about as far as I will go with that. Aaaaaand… When we first got to Mr. Ed’s house, he said something like, “I dunno if you guys have been watching the weather but there’s something going on in the Yucatan.” The Yucatan? I NEVER watch the weather in the Yucatan. Well. Hello, Hurricane Michael. Are we having fun yet? But we still had to eat and some of us were HUNGRY so here is a Large Meat Lover’s pizza at a restaurant near Mr. Ed’s house.

We had originally planned to stay a few days in Fla but with Michael’s approach we elected to scramble outta there. We weren’t worried about Michael hitting Bradenton but we wanted to avoid dealing with heavy rain traveling through Georgia and that looked possible. So here we are at the [hic] HiWay Bar. Okay, we were NOT at the bar, we were at the feed store across the street. And we were heading SOUTH, which is not the direction you want to go to get outta Fla. But we had an oxygen stop to make in Sarasota before heading north.

As we FINALLY got onto the northbound I75 Snowbird Geezerway, someone said something like, “Be careful with my TVs” (they were in the back and they are important!) and we were on our way. Our next stop was Macon and I’ll spare you the details about that, including the flashing dashboard lights that lit up a half hour outta that town (this time it was all okay, we think it was a gas-cap incident). We crossed the Tennessee River the NEXT day and I was so happy to feel free of Michael.

We stayed near Dayton the next night and then the next day… Yay for The Great Lake State! We were going bumpity bump again but this time it was our loverly Michigan pavement, not the Frog Hopper’s bearings.

For a while some of us were obsessed with keeping Fla cockroaches out of our relatively clean little 1959 ticky-tacky house on the western hemisphere of the Planet Ann Arbor. To end that story, “we” seem to have been successful but there are still Roach Hotels hanging around.

*We were thinking about buying a new vee-hickle at that time *anyway* and I would’ve been okay with buying one in Fla but I’m glad we didn’t have to buy a new car under duress. The Frog Hopper made another trip to Fla, a trip to Colorado, and multiple trips north and we eventually we bought Mooon Yooonit (new Toyota RAV4 Adventure) to replace it. The FH was a great car for us and it is still in service within the family, going on camping trips and a trip to North Carolina.

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