What Now

YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO RICH OR TOO THIN.

You know, I don't know who originally said that, but I'm pretty sure they were from Palm Beach, Florida. : ) More about that in a bit.

As you may or may not know, last week I accompanied Steve on a buisness trip to West Palm Beach. We left on Monday, flying all the way down there, and I realized that my attitude about flying hasn't changed a bit since high school. I STILL HATE IT!!! I'm sure it wouldn't be so bad if I never had to take another shuttle like the ones that fly from Huntsville to Atlanta. They are basically the equivelent of an airborn Pinto. Tiny, tiny little planes that sound as if they are just waiting to hit cruising altitude before they fall completely to peices. Steve and I weren't originally seated together, but the kind soul who I was seated by switched with Steve. Personally, I think he thought I looked like I might panic and cause a scene, but I will choose to believe that he was just being nice.

Once we landed in Palm Beach, we were handed off to the car rental place and then we ended up at the hotel. We stayed in the Embassy Suites, which in my opinion is one of the nicer kinds of hotels to stay in. Free breakfast and a little tiny living room. Normally, when you have a hotel room it has your typical two twin beds, a nightstand in between, two ugly prints over each bed, and etc. With an Embassy Suite, you get all that PLUS the little living room, a fridge and a microwave. : ) Hey, I'm easy to please. Anyways, Steve had to attend a class from 8 am-4 pm, so I was pretty much on my own. At first I figured I'd truly be lazy and just lie about, read and watch TV. After about an hour of that, I was climbing the walls. It's not that I don't appreciate not doing anything, but there I was in Florida not doing anything. How could I? But I had a problem. I have NEVER been to a strange place and been alone before. Any time I've traveled, I've been with my family or a friend. Please don't pity me, I know 27 is a little old to be on my own for the first time, but I couldn't help it, I was loved and a little overprotected growing up! So there I was, keys to a rental car, and absolutely no nerve. So I had a long talk with myself (don't be alarmed, I do this a lot). I told myself that I would not be a coward, and that I would get in that car, and I would find out what was outside of that hotel room. So I did. I found out that West Palm Gardens is not quite the kind of place I'm used to. Very beautiful, very posh, palmy and stucco-ey. It was also very...fancy. Normally when I go to a beach town, it's overrun with all of those tacky sea-side souvineer shops and neon and whatever. West Palm Beach was all very...how shall I say it...a very "I'm having lunch with Buffy and Trevor at the club at four, but only if they don't spend all afternoon talking about Harvard again" type of place. I felt like I was practically wearing a sign that said "Makes less than $20,000 a year". Now, I know that's not really a fair thing to say, one shouldn't judge people because of how much or how little they earn, but dang. I felt like I needed a credit check just to take a deep breath out there. When I finally got the nerve to drive, I ended up on PGA Blvd, and this is some of what I saw. A mall roughly the size of Athens (Greece, not Alabama). A row of what I first thought were houses, but they turned out to be some extremely lovely offices and shops. A state park, condos - starting at only $795,000 as the signs so helpfully advertised- and finally a little public beach. I was so excited to find the beach, which in my opinion is the only reason to take a vacation in Florida, but I was SO not dressed for it. I had on jeans, but I rolled those suckers up and walked for a while. I was probably only out there for twenty minutes before I realized that I was going to have a heat stroke, but I still got sunburned a little. After leaving there, I just followed the road until I ended up in what I called the "ghetto" which in fact was actually just a less grand area with smaller houses, and after stopping for some sodas I headed back to the hotel. I was starving, so I figured I would just run through a drive through and take something back, but apparently West Palm Beach feels that fast food resturaunts are coarse and vulgar. No wonder everyone in that town is so thin. You couldn't get a Big Mac there for gold or spices! I had to order room service, which I am still embarrassed to do, and pay way too much for what I could have gotten at Burger King for $5. It was a lovely place, but I felt a little out of place. I also went to the giant mall and got to see my very first actual Tiffany & Co. and Bloomingdales. I, of course, couldn't afford anything in either place, but it was nice to be able browse.
The people I saw there fit into three categories, A) Rich, Thin, and Bored B) Rich, Thin and Beautiful or C) Old. I also noticed that there is an alarming trend among the young ladies down there to wear their jeans REALLY low cut. I mean, REALLY-REALLY low cut. As in, any lower and the whole world will be their gynocologist. Eventually they are just going to be wearing the legs of jeans. I felt like Urkel, and my jeans come below my belly button as it is. They also can do some hard core shopping. I saw people walking out of stores with bags upon bags of things. It was an amazing sight.
Steve was done with his class on Thursday, and he decided that he wanted to drive down to Key West. I was a little shocked. We don't normally do stuff like that, so I was all for it. We were only 232 miles away from Key West, so we got up early Friday morning, grabbed a couple of beach towels, and headed down. It should have only taken us about 4 hours to get there, but right before we got to the bridge at Key Largo, we got stopped by road construction for about an hour and a half. By the time we actually got to Key West, we had been on the road for over six hours. We jumped out of the car and went to the bathrooms to change (yuck, but I will not go into that) and we headed out to the beach. As we were lolling (don't you just love to loll?) we realized that we had no clean clothes and no place to get cleaned up. I tried talking Steve into staying overnight so we could at least have a place to take a bath and whatever, but he didn't want to, so we went downtown all nasty and sandy and had a late dinner at a place called the Roof Top Cafe. The people at the resturaunt kind of treated us shabbily in that "Yeah, we'll let you eat here because we don't have a good reason not to, but we aren't going to make any effort to make you feel welcome." However, we just wanted to eat and leave, and we did. We did a little shoping and made our way back to Palm Beach. We were fine until we reached Miami, and then it was like a roller derby. I thought the people in Huntsville didn't know how to drive, but I'd rather stand in the middle of rush hour traffic here than drive on the highway in Miami ever again. Even the cops are rude and bad drivers! I couldn't believe the people driving clearly 90 miles an hour, not putting on their turn signals, cutting people off and generally being dangerous. It was insane. Steve was nervous and I thought I was going to have a stroke. I didn't relax until we parked in the parking garage at the hotel. We were hungry, but as I said before, there was no fast food places to go to and it was late, so we had to have a vending machine dinner. Saturday we had designated as our lazy-go-to-the-beach day, and we did that with gusto. I had been doing so well all week not getting fried by the sun, but Saturday I left the sunblock on the table of our suite, so I got sunburned pretty bad. It wasn't as bad as I've been burned before, but it itches like crazy. Sunday we had to get back on the planes and come home. I hated to leave Florida, but I was glad to see my dogs and come home.

Notes of Interest.

~I embarrassed myself fairly badly at the beach on Wednesday, even though I didn't know it until Thursday. I got there on Wednesday fairly early in the day and staked out my lounging spot. I hadn't put on my bathing suit, but I had it with me, so I decided to just slide the top of it on under my shirt and then pull my shirt off. (Don't worry, there is no naked element to this.) Anyways, after I got the top on I realized that something was wrong with it, but I wasn't too concerned. Anyways, I hung out for a while, but didn't want to get too much sun too fast so I got my stuff together to leave. On my way out, I realize the lifeguards are checking me out, and I started feeling pretty cute as I walked past (don't judge me!). Anyways, it wasn't until Thursday that I realize that I had embarrassed myself. I'm in the changing area to go back to the beach, and I'm in the process of putting my suit top on and I realize that the lifeguards weren't checking me out the day before because I looked cute, they were looking at me because I had my top on upside down!!!!!!! Ugh. In my hurry to pull the stupid top on under my shirt, I had gotten the part that hooked around my neck and the part that hooked around my back confused. Oy vey...all I can hope was that there were new lifeguards there on thursday.

~Steve doesn't know the difference between a dolphin and a shark. : )

~Palm Beach is a great place to visit if you need to find out if you have an inferiority complex. Apparently, I have one.

~Most designers don't want to sell clothes to women over a juniors size 12. At least none of the more well known designers do.

~ Tiffany & Co. employs a security guard to watch you during the day while you are shopping. This is a good idea, but it makes browsing uncomfortable.

That is all! Ciao!