Florida Vacation Pics

Here, today, for what it's worth (probably very little) is my vacation blog. Whatever.

I took last week off and went to the Gulf coast of Florida with CHNW to hang out with her dad, a terrific guy and also a professional cartoonist. Getting out of town for a 365-day-a-year deadline person like me is very hard. I usually work 6 to 8 hours a day, seven days a week, so to get ahead by a week I have to double that. It's bad.

The first night in Florida I let loose and relaxed with way too much scotch. The pic above was taken at sunset, holding my camera as still and level as I could. It got worse as the evening wore on. I haven't been that drunk in over ten years, I'm happy to report.

The next morning, bleary-eyed and swollen-headed, we drove down to an old beach resort on Captiva Island. Along the way, CHNW discovered that if she held her mouth open in the wind, it would blow her cheeks out and vibrate them. We all laughed and I wished my headache would go away.

CHNW and her dad, Ralph, have been going to Captiva yearly since she was 5 years old. This was their 30th year. One of the things they always do is have dinner at an indescribably weird place called The Bubble Room. Out in the various parking areas, The Bubble Room leaves nothing to chance with plenty of parking signs. From top to bottom: "Any car parking on roadway will be ticketed and towed," "Bubble Room parking," "You must find legal parking," and "Additional parking across the street." If a person visiting The Bubble Room gets towed or ticketed, they should not be let out of the house without a guidance counselor.

Here is a nice shot of Ashley breaking out of the gorilla cage outside The Bubble Room. We feel confident that no one has ever taken a shot like this before.

Inside, one finds an insanely decorated world of hallucination and chaos. The diner is never left wanting for wacky and kooky things to look at. You can see how much fun I'm having in these candid shots.











One good thing to do at a beach resort is to visit the beach, which we did daily.


To answer a question that I get a lot, yes, I do swim with a cigar.











The dapper gentlemen shown here was screaming at me for "swimming topless again." After some clarification, we discovered he had mistaken me for his wife. He said it was the cigar.









In spite of the fact that I am a huge celebrity, I like to look for shells just like a normal person. When I do this, I call myself Captain Beachcomber. The cape is particularly effective if there is a stiff breeze.













Because we were there the week before Halloween, the resort was decorating for a party. We found the bottom of a mummy in the parking lot and used it for these quaint shots, which make us look extremely thin.

This next sequence shows my willingness to share with the dead. (click it to big it)





And what family vacation destination is complete without a naked, bald, beaten and dismembered woman?









Florida is known for its large bugs, which we discovered first hand when attacked outside our cabin by this spider.






















We also happened across some Xmas decorations stored in a carport. Here are two Santas, one with significant saltwater decay and the other completely out of the closet.












Something we came across in town was this interesting graffiti technique of scratching your message into a leaf. These samples were all found on the same tree. Be sure to click the image for a larger view so you can read them. Locals told us that Ryan left town and is fine.

I have more pictures but they are even more boring than the ones featured here, so I'll end now. I hope you enjoyed my vacation blog as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you.





I will leave you with this picture of me and CHNW's dad, Ralph, as I attempt to prove to him that his daughter did not, in fact, marry an effeminate wimp. I think I nearly had him convinced until moments later, when I attempted to jump the marsh on my rented bicycle. This episode ended with me running from a startled egret, screaming like a little girl.