Sunday, June 24, 2018

Indiantown and Miami

We left Sharron and Tom in The Villages this morning. It's always sad parting. A year is a long time. We headed down the highway towards Laura's Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Lew's house in Indiantown, FL.

A couple of days ago, Laura bought a SunPass and put $50 on it so that we could take advantage of the automatic highway toll system here in FL. We jumped onto the Florida Turnpike to Indiantown. At the first toll station, we passed through the automatic toll and the message "Toll Not Paid" popped up. We have no idea why it didn't work. Nor do we have any idea how to deal with whatever happened at the toll plaza from Spain. Finding help via phone or internet seems to be impossible. Furthermore, the human toll taker we encountered when leaving the turnpike was singularly unhelpful. I guess we'll try to figure it out this week before we leave the country. Yay!

We eventually made it to Marilyn and Lew's house. It's a lovely, secluded home surrounded by well-tended tropical vegetation and a pool. We happened to be there on their 46th wedding anniversary! To celebrate (I say this somewhat sarcastically), Marilyn had the pleasure of cooking us a turkey dinner with stuffing and green beans. Next year, we'll have to take them to lunch. We had a nice visit and left around 5pm. Here are some pictures:
 Lunch preparation:
 A nearly domesticated wild bunny in their driveway:
 A mannequin prop that represents an attempt to get the local fauna to not be afraid of them. Kind of works, Marilyn is able to feed the bunny by hand now:
We continued on down the highway, avoid toll roads now, and made it to Rachel's house around 7pm. We had a pizza at The Big Cheese restaurant near her house.

Her new place is smaller than her previous place, but in relatively good shape and certainly adequate to the task. We were a bit worried about where Rachel would store the scuba gear that Marilyn and Lew gave to her, but Rachel seemed happy to have it and promised to put it to use.

After dinner, we dropped Rachel off back at home and Laura and I walked around campus. This helped us get a little exercise after spending most of the day driving and eating. We're now in our hotel room. Meeting Rachel tomorrow morning and heading down to Key West for an overnight visit there.