Party Like It’s 1999! (Part II)

May 29

Meanwhile, back at the Coronado Springs Villa & Gardens . . .

[The Super came down the water slide . . . ]

[Then I came down the slide . . . ]

[There wasn’t enough water to keep me moving – a kid slid into me from behind . . . ]

A reminder of where we were coming out of Part I:

FLORIDA TRIP – March 20 -31, 1999

Day 1: To Charleston, SC – 8 1/2 hours (525 miles)

Day 2: To Orlando, FL
Arrive St. Augustine – 4 1/2 hours (285 miles) – 1 hour stay
Arrive Kennedy Space Center – 3 hour stay
Arrive Orlando – 6 3/4 hours from St. Augustine (175 miles)

Day 3: Disney – Epcot, Norway dinner, fireworks

Day 4: Disney – Magic Kingdom

Day 5: Disney – Animal Kingdom

Day 6: Disney – MGM

Day 7: To New Port Richey – 2 1/2 hours (110 miles)
New Port Richey Beach

Day 8: Friday Final Four practice – drove Outer Banks from Clearwater to Ft. De Soto –
dinner @ Columbia in Ybor City (oldest restaurant in FL since 1905 (still going 2021))

Day 9: Around St. Petersburg

Day 10: Clearwater Beach – Dolphin boat

Day 11: Same as above

Day 12: To Fayetteville, NC – 13 1/4 hours (660 miles) – stops @ Jekyll Island & Hilton Head

Day 13: Arrive home – 5 hours (307 miles)

MGM

From the pancake house I drive directly to the county morgue. The contrast is not especially striking. ~ Carl Hiaasen

[Looks like a nice place for a nosh, but I don’t remember it . . . ]

He paused and manufactured a chuckle. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Truth hurts. Maybe not as much as jumping on a bicycle with a seat missing, but it hurts. ~ Lt. Frank Drebin

If I’m not back in five minutes, just wait longer. ~ Ace Ventura

My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far I’ve finished two bags of M&Ms and a chocolate cake. I feel better already. ~ Dave Barry

How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’? ~ Jay Leno

Miami … the floating-human-body-parts capital of America. ~ Carl Hiaasen

To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! ~ Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis)

My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne. ~ Tina Fey

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well. ~ Mark Twain

St. Petersburg

As noted in our trip log, technically from Orlando to New Port Richey (where we stayed for the Final Four), 2 1/2 hours over 110 miles. The daily trip from New Port Richey to Tampa-St. Pete was a horrific trip of 40 miles of stoplights and strip malls . . . ]

Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. ~ Oscar Wilde

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. ~ Groucho Marx

The victim’s hand was contracted into a fist except for the middle digit, which was rigidly extended. ~ Carl Hiaasen

The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions. That’s from Emerson . . . ~ Carl Hiaasen

We get along fine. In return for food and shelter, they give me unconditional indifference. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Love isn’t about thinking. You should know that by now. ~ Carl Hiaasen

She awoke with renewed certainty that Carl Jung was full of shit. ~ Carl Hiaasen

[That first day we drove the Outer Banks from Clearwater to Ft. De Soto . . . ]

[To the Final Four . . . ]

[I’ve been to 26 Final Fours. The first was in Philadelphia in 1976 when Indiana became the last team to finish an undefeated season. Our last Final Four was in Indianapolis in 2010. We eventually learned it was much easier and more comfortable to watch the game at home on a big screen TV sitting in a Lazy Boy . . . ]

I have warned many times about the guaranteed dangers of betting with your heart instead of your head – big darkness, soon come – but every once in a while you get a fair chance to have it both ways, and the annual NCAA basketball Tournament is one of them. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

The NCAA is one of the worst organizations – maybe the worst organization – in sports. They certainly don’t care about the athlete. ~ Stan Van Gundy

[ESPN, made famous by Final Fours, here with Dick Vitale and Digger Phelps . . . ]

The one thing that saved me is that in 17 years of coaching I never had an NCAA investigator talk to one of my players. I lost games, but I lost the right way. ~ Lee Corso

I got some cash from agents. I’ve talked to the NCAA. I think that should be legal. I want some money, too; everybody else is making money. I want to go on dates. I want to go buy myself some new suits. I want to buy myself some new sneakers, and I paid the agents back. ~ Charles Barkley

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society. ~ Mark Twain

[I have no memories whatsoever of this tournament. I don’t even remember being in Tropicana Field, the most loathed major league baseball stadium. This is one of two Final Fours Basketball Dan missed over the last 60-some years – even he recalled that Connecticut won in 1999. He was right, they beat Duke. The other two teams were Ohio State and Michigan State. Duh! . . . ]

If you make every game a life-and-death proposition, you’re going to have problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot. ~ Dean Smith

[Why it makes no sense to watch a basketball game in a football stadium . . . ]

They have all those McDonald’s All-Americas. We have four guys on our team who don’t even have a McDonald’s in their town. ~ Rick Majerus

Florida cop claims Burger King put dirt on his food – investigation revealed it was seasoning. ~ New York Daily News

[That evening we went to Ybor City for Cuban dining at Columbia, the oldest restaurant in Florida, since 1905 and still going in 2021 . . . ]

[I wore the shirt I purchased at the Rainforest Cafe at Disney, and that shirt is still in my summer rotation to this day. Always the fashion trend setter . . . ]

[Dolphin boat rides out of Clearwater Beach . . . ]

[The Pittsburgh Pirates arrive for spring training . . . ]

Thousands of gun owners in Florida planning to ‘shoot down’ Hurricane Irma. ~ INDEPENDENT

Mickey Cray had been out of work ever since a dead iguana fell from a palm tree and hit him on the head. ~ Carl Hiaasen

I’m waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh’s pharmacist writes a book. ~ Carl Hiaasen

There’s nothing wrong with you that an expensive operation can’t prolong. ~ Graham Chapman, Monty Python’s Flying Circus

You can only be young once. But you can always be immature. ~ Dave Barry (Mr. Barry, incidentally, is exactly 2 months and one day older than me)

There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it. ~ Mindy Kaling

[Voted number one in a poll as most obvious tourists . . . ]

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells… to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin. ~ Dave Barry

I married an asshole, she thought, knifing into the waves. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects. ~ Dave Barry

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. ~ Dave Barry

The real threat to whales is whaling, which has endangered many whale species. ~ Dave Barry

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. ~ Dave Barry

[This was neither Ruthie nor I, but some poor guy from Iowa who believed in the old axiom that if your life bores you, risk it . . . ]

The detective had moved to Fort Lauderdale from St. Paul because his wife had inexplicably yearned to experience humidity. ~ Carl Hiaasen

The information encoded in your DNA determines your unique biological characteristics, such as sex, eye color, age and Social Security number. ~ Dave Barry

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it’s open to anybody who owns hideous clothing. ~ Dave Barry

Since the medical board was made up mostly of other doctors, Rudy Graveline had fully expected exoneration–physicians stick together like shit on a shoe. ~ Carl Hiaasen

The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs. ~ Dave Barry

Buck stared incredulously. “This is the first time you ever fired a gun? And you live in Florida?” ~ Carl Hiaasen

The dog proved to be as dumb and stubborn as a mud fence, so Stranahan had named him Strom. ~ Carl Hiaasen

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. ~ Dave Barry

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around. ~ Dave Barry

The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America’s values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company and not the other way around. ~ Carl Hiaasen

The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates. ~ Dave Barry

Detective Karl Rolvaag belonged in the Midwest. This he knew in his heart, and he was reminded of it every day when he went to work. ~ Carl Hiaasen

Florida needs a special prison for tourists. Not all tourists—just the ones who trash the place, rob, shoplift, vandalize, drive drunk, assault the cops, puke in the alleys, pee in the medians, and so on. ~ Carl Hiaasen

We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth. ~ Dave Barry

[On the road again (in my 1998 Ford Expedition purchased to deal with Minnesota winters in our retirement two years hence). We’re heading to Jekyll Island . . . ]

[Jekyll Island is located off the coast of Georgia, in Glynn County. It is one of the Sea Islands and one of the Golden Isles of Georgia barrier islands. The island is owned by the State of Georgia and run by a self-sustaining, self-governing body. At the end of November 1910, . . . a secret meeting to plan the country’s monetary policy and banking system, formulating during the meeting the Federal Reserve as America’s next central bank. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, the 1910 Jekyll Island meeting resulted in draft legislation for the creation of a U.S. central bank. Parts of this draft (the Aldrich plan) were incorporated into the 1913 Federal Reserve Act (Wikipedia).]

Have you noticed that whatever sport you’re trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? ~ Dave Barry

“A well-regulated militia,” Bode added, “like they talk about in the Second Amendment.” “Oh,” said Shiner. He hadn’t read the first one yet. ~ Carl Hiaasen

I’ve always enjoyed making people laugh. But in order for me to be funny, I have to get ticked off about something. ~ Carl Hiaasen

It’s easy to get distracted by the vaudevillian aspects of the healthcare debate. ~ Carl Hiaasen

In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid. ~ Dave Barry

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West. ~ Dave Barry