Vacation Blues

Vacations are great! I’m always so excited when it time for a vacation, until the days arrives. Vacations can be as stressful or more that my regular job. There are the travel plans, having to spend all that money, and then the travel home. I like to drive instead of fly. It’s a way for me to get closer to the world I live in. It allows me to see things that I would never get to see from a plane.
My wife and I recently took a week off and traveled to Florida. So the day finally arrived and it was time to go. We got in our SUV, and hit the road. First stop our son’s house to drop off the dog. No big deal you say, our son lives 5 hours from us. So we pack up the car/truck and hit the road Saturday morning. We get to Chris’ house and stay the night, leaving the dog behind the next morning. We drove for about 12 hours, making frequent stops along the way, since we didn’t have to be in Orlando until Tuesday. We stopped at the Visitor center in Mississippi, after driving through New Orleans.
New Orleans still looks bad from I-10. There are abandoned apartment complexes, that look like they belong in a war zone. There were still quite a few buildings with blue tarps on the roofs.
Once through Mississippi, we stopped at the visitor center in Alabama, and drove on to Mobile. We stopped in Mobile and took a tour of the USS Alabama. We then travelled on to Quincy, Florida. We stayed the night there. Monday morning we both awoke early and decided that we still had a day to get to Orlando, that we would drive down to Tampa and go to Busch Gardens.
We arrived in Tampa about 12, and were in the park by 12:30. Fantastic park. Much better than Busch Gardens Williamsburg, in Virginia. My wife and I are amusement park nuts, we love roller coasters. We had a great time at Busch Gardens and got quite a few pictures. Being only an hour from Orlando, we decided that we would drive about halfway and stay the night. We spend Monday night in Plant City.
We drove on to Orlando the next day. Checked in to the visitor center, per our vacation package, extremely early. We then went to the hotel and hoped that they had a room for us and we didn’t have to come back 5 hours later. Luckily, our room was ready, so we checked in and got some rest. Wednesday. The day had finally arrived. We got in the car and drove to Universal Studios. Nice park. It was very clean and we had a great time. Just not enough thrill rides, we thought. We enjoyed Busch Gardens more. We were scheduled to go back to Universal the next day, but realized that our tickets were for only one of the two parks and not both. We had ridden all of the rides and saw all of the attractions the previous day, so we decided to check out and head home.
I drove straight through to our sons house on Thursday and we left early Friday morning. Man it was good to get home. I didn’t do anything for the next couple of days, I was so tired. I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation. Finally it was back to work on Monday.