The Return to Florida Post

Last week Sarah and I where in Orlando paying the sunshine state a visit. Bruce was kind enough to let us stay in his pool house for the few days we where there which was great. It was nice to see everyone back at the office and to see that I hadn’t been forgotten. We caught the tail end of the space shuttle launch from the top of a multistory parking deck. Its one of the last few shuttle launches out of cocoa so it was a pretty big deal and had people coming from out of state to watch it blast off. Being a light launch you can see if for hundreds of miles as it lights up the night sky. We spent some time chilling down in Kissimmee with Sarah and Neil as well as grabbing some food at Elephant Bar with Tony, Amanda and Fabbio. All in all I got to see a lot of my Florida people while in Orlando and had a really nice time.

After Orlando we headed down to Tampa for Sarah’s bio availability conference which she was working for HGL. She spent long days down at the conference center manning her booth and playing ‘booth babe’ for the crowds, leaving me to my own devices for the majority of the trip. I have to say, Tampa is rather dull for a major city, and surprisingly quiet. I was expecting to blown away with things to do in the area, but found that everything was largely closed on weekends and only commuting office workers pay the area any attention. There where some great little venues, bars and restaurants along the channel, but everything was deserted which was rather disappointing.

We did catch a Tampa Bay lightning match though which was pretty cool. Even cooler was the fact that I got cheap nosebleeds for eight bucks at a special fan rate because I was at the box office early after walking Sarah to the conference hall. Then when we where inside getting our grub on before face-off a stadium employee came over and traded us our tickets for seats six rows from the glass. Nothing quite like getting $200 seats at nosebleed prices! Our last day in town we drove out to St. Pete and visited the Salvador Dali museum, which I had long wanted to check out after hearing about it in Orlando. The museum itself was rather drab considering the subject matter they had on display, but getting to see so many of Dali’s original works was very cool. I was heartbroken to find that they didn’t have ‘Les Elephants’ though, which is my favorite Dali piece. It was really nice to get to spend some time with Sarah though and we had a great time overall.