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Vacation!!!

Well, I haven't been online in 2 months! That's good I guess. My husband and I went on vacation for 2 weeks in January - visiting Florida, the Gulf coast and New Orleans. We flew from Detroit to Orlando and spent the 1st night in an Orlando Motel 6.

Day 1: Drove from Orlando to Key West. Nice scenic drive down and around Lake Okeechobee. Went through Pahokee and Belle Glade: crummy little towns really but very interesting with some hurricane damage and sugar cane farms and processing plants all around. Also went through Homestead, which looks pretty damn good considering it was destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in the early 1990s. Got to our KOA campground in Sugarloaf Key and had dinner at Mangrove Mama's across Hwy. 1.

Days 2 through 5: Hung around the keys, spending lots of time in Key West and Bahia Honda State Park. On our last night, we rented scooters and drove around Key West for hours. Too much fun!...but I burned my leg on the exhaust pipe. We checked out the sunset party too.

Day 6: Left Sugarloaf Key KOA, drove up to Pennington State Park and took a glass bottom boat ride to see the coral reef. Barf!! Bought some nice seashells on the way. Then we hauled across Alligator Alley to Naples and stole a camp site.

Day 7: Checked out Naples and the area north - yikes!! Nothing but really old, really rich retirees!! And I mean really old, white and rich! Ancient people driving around in Jags, Beemers, Caddies, etc. Typical Florida architecture...but too much! Lots of strip malls, really crowded and fairly gaudy. So we beat it out of there ASAP. Went back the way we came...eastward across the Everglades, almost to Miami. And then back west across the Everglades (again) to Naples where we started. Very, very beautiful with vast open marshes, cedars, palms, and tons of wildlife including a crazy number of birds and alligators everywhere like cockroaches. We then long-hauled it up to a Motel 6 in Gainesville.

Day 8: Left Gainsville and hauled to Tallahassee, where we cut down to the panhandle coast. We drove along the coast, which was okay...the nicest places were a really cute town Apalachicola and Destin, I guess. We'd driven along the panhandle coast about 10 years ago and had a great time in Panama City and elsewhere, but this time it was kinda bleh. When we were there before, we camped in Gulf Islands National Seashore, which is beautiful!!! But it was closed this trip due to hurricane damage, so we spend the night in a Pensacola Motel 6.

Day 9: Drove from Pensacola along the gulf coast to Alabama and took a great ferry ride across Mobile Bay. We then drove along the Mississippi coast, through the area totally destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, including Biloxi, Gulf Port, Waveland, Bay St. Louis, Pass Christian, etc. It was crazy!!! I mean totally destroyed!!! The whole coast looked like it had been hit by an atomic bomb. Entire hotels, restaurants, and big, old southern homes on the water leveled to their foundations. We'd been on the same drive 10 years ago, so remembered what it used to look like. So sad! FEMA trailers parked next to slabs and surrounded by piles of debris and ruined trees. Sun shining through what's left of the trees, illuminating all the billions of shredded bits of plastic, cloth and paper hanging from the branches. It looked like the entire coast had been put into a blender, which I guess is what happened on a grand scale. Wooded areas destroyed, with more than half the trees either blown down or snapped in half, with piles of trash and woody debris piled very deep on the ground and clogging drainageways. Serious environmental damage. We got into New Orleans just as the sun was going down. Driving in on I-10 was tragic. You could see the ruined neighborhoods. We pulled into a gas station and it was kind of chaotic because street signs and lights were down. We asked a kind gentleman for directions to my girlfriend's bar on Magazine Street, and made our way over there. We got to the bar and I saw a very dear, old friend for the first time in 24 years. I cried buckets when I saw her!!! We stayed the night in her shotgun apartment over the bar.

Days 10 through 13: We stayed in New Orleans, with my friend in her apartment over a hole-in-the-wall neighborhood bar she's managing. Several people were staying in the apartment, including a creole woman who'd lost her home and made us etouffee, and a Houston woman with her mother who was staying with her temporarily. They were trying to set the mother up with a FEMA trailer so she could move back to the city and return to her job at the convention center. We met people, heard their stories, drove around, checked out both the nice areas and destroyed areas, cooked at home and ate out, went bar-hopping in the French Quarter, checked out City Park and Lake Pontchatrain... The downtown and French Quarter were okay, but almost empty. At least 80% of the businesses are closed due to damage, but primarily due to lack of workers. There are signs looking for people to hire everywhere!! But nowhere for people to live...so there's a serious housing and labor shortage. We saw the demolished homes, flooded out cars, markings on buildings, ruined cemeteries, wind and flood damage everywhere you looked.

Day 14: We ate breakfast at Cafe du Mond and then long-hauled it back to Florida to catch our plane home again from Orlando. We got a flat tire in Bay St. Louis due to debris on the freeway and had to buy a new tire outside Mobile. We spent the night in a campground outside of St. Augustine.

Day 15: We spent the morning in St. Augustine and then drove to Orlando to catch our plane home. Great trip!

Bill O'Reilly is Going to Hell

The sight of Bill O'Reilly gassing on about the "war" on Christmas makes me want to kill myself. The intense blast of self-centered, self-righteous, condescending, mean-spirited, nasty, PETTY energy all this whining sends out is not good for my psyche or spiritual health. And it makes the "Christians" that buy into it look really shitty and hypocritical as usual. I'll also add exclusionary, divisive and paranoid (did I mention petty?).

Oh yeah, the word "war" is ridiculously exaggerated - and highly inflammatory. Just feeling the need to point this out makes me feel like I live in an alternate universe (I guess that's good).

Don't Christians like Bill O'Reilly have better things to do with their precious air time and soapbox than browbeat us with this shit? Like, I don't know, talk about helping earthquake victims in Pakistan or people starving in Sudan?