Our winter vacation trip to Florida has come and gone, so it’s time to make it permanent by chronicling all the things. And with Trine finally getting some needed rest, Maddie overnighting at a friend’s house, and Molli out carousing at some party until two in the morning, I appear to have some time while I caffeinate myself and await Molli’s safe return.
This post includes 292 pictures from at least three cameras: the Olympus, the iPhone, and the little Konig underwater camera I bought specifically for the Great Coral Reef Snorkel Tour 2020. I say “at least” three cameras because some of the pictures from my iPhone were actually sourced from others. I’ve lost track of which, so I’m crossing my fingers I won’t get into any copyright problems. Additionally, just prior to putting this thing together I snuck onto Facebook and stole three pictures from Deb’s Facebook feed (sh! don’t tell anyone I was there!). I’ll credit her when we get to them.
Our adventure begins, as so many of them do, back in Denmark. Early February.
Here’s how it was looking out the window at work circa 8:30 one morning a few days before our departure:
That’s about the nicest picture I think I could have taken of Denmark at that time of year. It’s about 8:00 in the morning, the sun is just peeking up over the horizon, and the sky is clear. It looks… tolerable.
In fact I only took that picture because the sun was such a novelty. We hadn’t been seeing much of it, as we were often going weeks at a time under cloud cover. Months, maybe. There hadn’t been any snow to speak of, which I consider a plus, and the temperature hadn’t gone below freezing more than a few times all winter — but after three months of days with only 7 or 8 hours of daylight, most of it suffused through thick cloud cover, I get a little claustrophobic. I was ready for some sun.
It was therefore therapeutic not only getting ready for our February vacation, but making plans for our summer vacation. Just a few days before flying off to Florida, we reserved ourselves a week in July at this place:
It looks like a Lego construction, but it’s actually an aerial view of the Amada Colossos resort on the island of Rhodes.
Maddie, meanwhile, was slaving away at school as a beautician in the Atheneskolen salon. The Thursday before the winter break, parents were invited to stop by and exploit the child labor. Here you can see Trine receiving a quality manicure from Maddie.
Maddie didn’t talk much during the manicure, and only when we got home did Trine realize that our daughter had etched a message in tiny letters onto her nails: “We’re working fifteen hours a day and not getting paid, SEND HELP!”
So she, too, was apparently also pretty ready for a vacation.
Didi got a treat the day before we left: I took her out into the woods for a good long romp. She hadn’t had one in a long time.
Of course, she shouldn’t have had one that day either: I’d forgotten she was still in heat. I only remembered when a leashed little terrier took a pronounced interest in her.
“He doesn’t normally act like this!” the owner apologized.
“Oh god,” I said, remembering.
I leashed Didi, explained my mistake, and fortunately the owner just laughed. (I don’t really know what else he could have done–drawn a gun and shot me?–but Trine was so mortified when I told her the story that I feel it’s important to include the owner’s lighthearted response.)
It was a cold crisp day, and I actually found myself thinking, “spring isn’t that far off!”
…which, of course, it wasn’t. Not for us!
Because by 8:00 or so the very next morning, we were ready to board our flight to Miami–not just to spring, but straight to summer.
We were all tired, but I actually think Trine was flattened not with fatigue, but relief: Maddie’s American passport had expired in December, and I hadn’t worried about it: she could just travel on her Danish passport, right? No biggie.
Except to enter America on a Danish passport, as Trine does, you need the ESTA visa. Trine had an ESTA visa; Maddie did not. Nor could she get one, even in a last-minute emergency, because American citizens cannot apply for or get a visa to enter their own country.
It was the most perfect Catch-22 I’d ever encountered: an American citizen with an expired American passport and a valid Danish passport technically has no legal way to travel into America. And yet no American citizen can be prevented from entering America. And no Danish citizen with a valid Danish passport can be prevent from leaving Denmark.
Fortunately, the situation was so intractable that everyone more or less kicked the can down the road: the SAS check-in people bumped us over to the SAS check-in supervisor, who phoned the airline’s visa liaison, who phoned someone else, who phoned back to the supervisor something along the lines of, “f–k it, let her go and she can be Miami’s problem.”
When we swiped her Danish passport at the boarding gate, we got the scary red light and noisy klaxon instead of the usual green light and chirpy beep. The attendant said, “Oh, she’s the American with the expired passport. Go right ahead.”
Whew.
The flight was unusually empty: we ended up spreading out as a family across twelve seats: Trine and I each taking four center-row seats, and each of the girls taking two side-row seats.
Best flight ever! Trine got a lot of sleep, and the girls also got a little. I didn’t manage any myself, but I did get to see Jojo Rabbit, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and The Disaster Artist. And I took breaks from the movies to lie across my four seats and read some Chesterton. So even without sleep, I felt pretty rested and comfortable at the end of our eleven hour flight, and that was a rare treat.
Despite our lovely flight, Miami was scary: we’d made it to America, but would they let us in?
The customs kiosk accept my passport, and Trine’s, and Molli’s, but not Maddie’s. It wouldn’t take her American or Danish passport. We were herded over to a long line where we anxiously wondered what would become of us. Jesus Christ, this was Trump’s Amerika! Would they seize Maddie, separate us, put her in a cage?
When we got to the customs officer, I tried to set a light tone with a joke: when he asked if our visit was business or pleasure, I said we were visiting family, so it wasn’t business, but as for pleasure, well. . .? (Ha ha ha!)
He took the bait and laughed along with me, although all our relatives will be happy to know the girls gave me some very dirty looks.
He flipped through our passports. I had arranged for Maddie’s to be last and had a fit of glossolalia while he worked his way to it.
“Our youngest’s American passport expired,” I said, “but we have her Danish one. They said we don’t need a visa since she’s an American citizen. Of course she can enter America as an American, or as a Dane, although she doesn’t have an ESTA, but American citizens can’t get and ESTA, and…”
“Mm,” he said without looking up.
It was the moment of truth.
I remember it as a very long moment of very tense silence: in fact it was probably only a few seconds before he looked up and said, “You should probably get it renewed while you’re here,” he said.
And with that he handed me back our passorts and let us in.
From there it was just a half-hour hike and a little “MIAMover” train trip across the airport to the car rental agency, where after a mere half hour in line at Avis I finally got the keys to our big old Ford Expedition. We were finally on our way to Key Largo, for the Great Coral Reef Snorkel Tour 2020!
A short hour’s drive later, we arrived at the Waterside Suites & Marina, where I had prepared a truly indulgent stay for the night: two duplex apartments, each with a queen bed upstairs and sleep-sofa downstairs, each with its own kitchen and two bathrooms, each with a terrace overlooking the marina. The girls would have a whole suite to themselves — and, if they wanted it, a big old bed of their own.
I asked the guy at check-in for two keys to each suite, so each of us could have our own key.
“I’ll give you two keys,” he said, “but it’s only one suite.”
I showed him my email confirmation from Hotels.com and explained that I had very clearly reserved two suites.
Without giving the printout much more than a cursory scan, he said, “Well, yeah, you’ve kind of got two rooms, with the upstairs queen bed and the sleep sofa downstairs, but it’s just one suite.”
That wasn’t how I remembered it, but we were tired and foggy by now, and our feeble protests didn’t seem to concern him. “I’d offer to rent you a second suite, if you wanted,” he said, “but we’re fully booked tonight.”
I was disappointed, but it really wasn’t that bad: we had a big enough space for the four of us, and we’d only be using the suites to sleep anyway: the plan was to go out for dinner, come back to the suite, take a quick dip in the pool, then go to bed and wake up just in time to have breakfast before heading out to the coral reef–the real point of our presence in Key Largo. This was, after all, The Great Coral Reef Snorkel Tour 2020!
And just being in the warmth, among palm trees and sail boats, was a kind of balm in itself.
Here’s the view from our terrace:
You may have noticed some clouds: it was in fact quite cloudy, and windy, a little “chilly” — a mere 23 degrees Celsius. But we were undaunted: surely it’d clear up in time for our Great Coral Reef Snorkel Tour 2020: there was a whole 18 hours to go before our tour was scheduled, the weather would surely change for the better!
With high hopes we took the clerk’s advice to have dinner at a nearby restaurant:
…where yet again Maddie was given the usual vacation opportunity to taste Daddy’s beer.
Do you notice a slight decrease in her repulsion? I do, too. We’re gonna have to keep an eye on that.
It was a lovely dinner, served outdoors.
Trine and I had crab-stuffed fish medallions served under lobster bisque:
And the girls had fish tacos.
…that proved a little challenging to eat.
In the middle of dinner, I got an email from George Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park: due to the possibility of bad weather, it said, there was a possibility our tour would be canceled. If not canceled, it was recommended only experienced snorkelers and strong swimmers come on the tour.
We’re all strong swimmers, but “experienced snorkelers” — what did that mean? We’ve all strapped masks and snorkels and fins on and paddled around in pools and shallows, and Trine and I had snorkeled around Cozumel one summer about… twenty years ago. Did that count?
Well, but surely the weather would change. Great Coral Reef Snorkel Tour 2020 and all that, right?
Trine and I wrapped up the night with a scotch on our terrace.
We woke to a morning that, while still a little windy, looked not at all bad.
I took a selfie on the premise that it might be the only picture of me from the whole trip. (For once a wildly wrong premise!)
With high hopes we made our way to a nearby Waffle House and enjoyed obscenely oversized and wildly underpriced American breakfasts. Waffles! Hash browns! Biscuits and gravy! We noted the calories and realized we were each consuming the better part of a day’s allowance.
And in the middle of breakfast, the proverbial other shoe dropped: I got an email from George Pennekamp Coral Reef State Camp informing me that due to high winds, there would be no snorkeling tours that day, but that we could reschedule or request a refund, yada yada yada.
I wrote back immediately requesting a refund and broke the news to the family.
We decided as a group that Key Largo was a shithole and the sooner we got the f–k out, the better.
(“We don’t always call legendary tropical paradises shitholes, but when we do, we get the f–k out of them.”)
There were just two things we had to do beforehand: we had to check out of our suite that was supposed to be two suites, and I insisted on swinging by a boat I’d learned was docked further down the marina from our hotel.
On checking out, I protested once again that I’d paid for two rooms and been given one.
“Do you actually charge this much for a singe suite?” I asked.
“Yes,” the clerks insisted.
“I just don’t understand,” I said. And then I noticed something: a pile of two or three printouts on their desk, with “NO SHOW” scrawled across them in fat black marker.
And I noticed one of them had a name that looked suspiciously familiar.
As indeed it was. It said: “KAMMER, TRINE.”
Their defense: “You gave us your confirmation number, but we book by name, and you said your name was Nagan.”
“You didn’t ask for anyone else’s name. And my printout shows the name TRINE KAMMER on one of the rooms. And the clerk last night looked at the printout. I think we should have that room refunded.”
“We can’t do that sir, you booked through Hotels.com.”
I won’t get further into it. I’m happy to report that the evening of the day we got back to Denmark I had an online chat with Hotels.com and they refunded us the money within a matter of hours.
We then drove ninety seconds down the street to the end of the marina, where the boat I’d heard about was docked.
Seriously. It was the African Queen.
The African Motherf–king Queen, you guys.
Memory a little fuzzy? Here’s a refresher:
 |
| “Oh, I’m not worried, miss. Gave myself up for dead back where we started.“ |
It was sort of weird seeing it docked so casually, with a captain in a pink-shirt and couple of tourists getting ready for their two-hour tour.
But it really was the genuine African Queen. It was the set of one of my favorite movies of all time.
So I took too many pictures.
I’d considered signing us up for the two-hour tour, but it was awfully expensive and the girls were entirely uninterested in taking a two-hour ride on such an unreliable and ugly looking vessel. They were unimpressed by its history of running gin and evading Germans during the Great War, and had never heard of Humphrey Bogart or Katharine Hepburn (much less Charlie Allnut or Rose Sayer). They didn’t want to hear about John Huston or James Agee or C.S. Forester. They just wanted to get the f–k out of Key Largo.
Which, all things considered, wasn’t really an objectionable plan.
I agreed on one condition: they let me take some nice pictures of them.
So here they are: my lovely princesses in the paradise shithole Key Largo:
They were happy because I’d given in to their requests to drive through Miami on our way to Estero.
“I don’t know why you think it’s going to be any better than this,” I said. “It’s just a big stupid city full of drug dealers. We’ll probably end up getting shot.”
And shot they were. Repeatedly. With multiple cameras. In South Beach, where we spent a lovely couple of hours that need very little commentary.
The Great Coral Reef Snorkel Tour 2020 was finally over. Long live the Great Two-Hour Walking Tour of Miami Beach 2020!
See Molli in the shot below?
No, you don’t. But we all noticed that girl, and we all thought she looked like Molli, and we were flabbergasted when they walked by us speaking Danish.
Spooky. I told them Miami was a crazy and dangerous place! Drug dealers and dopplegangers!
And as if to prove it, a squad car came tearing by us on the beach with flashing lights and roaring sirens.
I include the following picture only as a reference to where we were– otherwise the best I can do is say, “that Art Deco neighborhood in South Beach.”
It’s not a great pic, below, but it does have a sand car and a skateboarder cruising down the middle of the street.
The car was pretty impressive.
…but I sure hope the passengers got out before it got covered in sand!
We were a little hungry, so we settled into a little Mexican cantina for a light lunch and some drinks.
We walked around a little more after our snack (my beer wasn’t gonna metabolize itself!), and some of the pictures you scrolled through above came from that latter walk. (Chronological purity is tricky with the different cameras because I never changed the time on the Olympus, and never set the date on the Konig, but the iPhone made the time zone adjustment automatically.) Finally we piled back into the truck and aimed her northwest.
Two hours later, we made landfall in Estero.
My first human Estero picture is worth keeping for the sheer weirdness of it.
Fate was handing us a lesson: it was sunny in Estero, and five degrees warmer (Celsius) than it had been in Key Largo. And almost windless. Moral: always go to Estero, go directly to Estero, do not pass Key Largo…
Now: I am trying to keep things chronological, but at this point things get really weird with the alternate time settings on my various cameras. This is a long post, and Molli’s due to be home in about an hour, so we’re going to agree, you and I, that there are going to be some chron issues ahead and we’re simply going to accept them.
For example, I seem to remember that on our arrival in Estero, we settled into our various rooms–Trine and me in the guest room, Molli in the den, and Maddie in the Harry Potter Room Under the Stairs — and then fairly quickly sat down to dinner with Nana and Pop-Pop, after which it was too late to swim. I believe we walked Winnie, watched Jeopardy and a little news, then went off to our various beds to sleep off the remains of our jetlag.
So although the next three pictures are, I’m reasonably sure, from that first evening:
…I’m pretty sure the following pictures were taken the following morning. (The position of the sun is a pretty good hint.)
I know that most of the “underwater” pictures were taken that first day, so I’m inserting all of them here.
I also know for a fact that some of these pictures were not taken that first day — as will become very obvious to those of you who were there and know who was where when — and have decided not to give a damn. We’re just going to call this the “Underwater Camera Entr’Acte” and unload the entire contents of the undated Konig pictures right here, right now.
(Note: the underwater camera also works overwater.)
There are a lot of underwater videos, as well, but you’re going to have to wait for them. I hereby solemnly swear I really will make a video from all the videos from the trip, and soon, but it’s not going to be part of this post.
We had a big steak dinner that night, but this next picture is from our dinner at Tijuana Flats, whose staff had clearly been recruited from Key Largo.
There were may ice-cream trips over the course of our trip.
Here’s one of them.
Have you ever seen bluer ice-cream?
Or lips?
I really love the Olympus. All of these pictures are fantastic in full size, but I especially love the field depth effects of the next two:
Across from Sunshine Sundaes is, of course, the world famous Vanti nail salon.
Funny thing: cameras are like guns in Chekhov plays: once they come out, they have to go off.
Hannah arrived on the 12th:
Hey, look — it’s me!
Depth of field again:
Dinner that night was at the Italian joint next to Publix. (Marsala?) Hannah and Molli somehow induced a laughing fit from Maddie, I never really figured out what was going on, but they were all laughing so hard I never really cared (no pics of Hannah because she was right to my left and impossible to photograph, even though she was instigating a lot of the merriment).
…no pictures of Hannah, as I said, but a few of her artwork:
Pool interlude:
And now it must be the 14th, because the cast of characters has grown again!
Inexplicable chronological hiccup:
…and back to Deb and Sophie’s arrival.
(Hiccup: heron or something mulling around by the CVS.)
(End hiccup.)
And now the Great Lover’s Key Beach Trip 2020!
The Olympus finally allowed me a picture of surface-skimming pelicans like I’d tried so hard to get last year at Bonita Beach:
(It’s cropped here, but the full size picture is really striking.)
Is this Maddie holding a transluscent shell in front of the sun, or Maddie illuminating the world with the Sacred Crystal of Luminosity? I’ll never tell.
Dear lord, my daughters crack me up.
So does my mom.
Ah, yes — Saturday night, pool party barbecue chez Beth!
(No, I have no idea what Sophie and Molli are looking for.)
Sophie and Molli were kind enough to pose for me with unusual patience, but I couldn’t get the camera to take the picture I wanted! I got the clarity I wanted in the picture above, the pose and lighting I wanted in the picture below, but what I really wanted was clarity, pose, and lighting in a single shot. (Sigh.)
The morning after the Pool Party at Beth’s was the day of the Great Grandezza Brunch 2020.
Maddie’s in a lousy mood, it seems. As has been true forever, Hannah knows just how to turn that frown of hers upside down:
After the brunch, the family portraits. Unfortunately the Olympus was unable to get a single shot in the following sequence where everyone had their eyes open and smiles on their faces. I’ve written to the manufacturer about that, but to compensate for the camera’s defect I’m including all of the least bad images it recorded.
It’s difficult to blame the camera for Nana’s cane flying over the rails, however.
Deb got a nice version of a full-family shot (I assume Beth took the pic with Deb’s camera) that I was able to steal from her Facebook feed:
Okay: back to my own photos.
One set of sisters first…
Then two sets of sisters — note that the camera’s defect kicked in again here (and note that it also failed to correct the girls’ squints from the sunlight–really disgraceful!), so I include all the least bad shots:
I love what Deb did with her version of this picture, so that’s one of the shots I stole off her Facebook feed:
And lastly, a brother breaks into the sibling sequence.
And yeah, sure, we planned the wardrobe ahead of time. Let’s go with that.
The clubhouse brunch and photo op at an end, it was time for the long hike back to Calice Court.
…for most of us, anyway.
As we neared the Calice Court poolhouse, Maddie reminded me that when I’d allowed Molli to drive us home from Beth’s the night before, I’d done so with a promise to her, Maddie, that she would get a chance to drive the cabriolet around the pool the next day (if Nana and Pop Pop would let her).
They assented to this very dangerous proposition, which I’m not sure I would have made had I known their assent would be granted, and Maddie took the wheel.
See how well Nana conceals her terror!
You’ll also note that Sophie leaped stealthily aboard, prepared to incapacitate her cousin should circumstances require it.
Fortunately, circumstances did not require it.
No property damage or injuries, so we have to call her maiden voyage a success. (But the way she tried to wrest control of the taxi from the driver on the way home from the airport suggests we may have let a genie out of the bottle…)
Trine and I brought the four cousins to the Miromar Outlets that afternoon, but not long after our arrival there Hannah was picked up by the Honor Guard for escort to the airport. It had to be a very quick goodbye, which was probably for the best — these things have a history of getting very teary.
After seeing Hannah off, the girls got right back to business.
It had been Deb’s very fervent wish since the moment of her arrival to have a chance to unwind in the jacuzzi with a tropical drink. It was a wish we very heartily wished to help her fulfill. That Sunday evening, her wish came true.
I also commandeered a nice pic of our little nuclear family from Deb’s Facebook feed:
Sitting and soaking with our tropical drinks was so pleasant we repeated it the very next evening — our own last night in Florida — when we also had dinner by the clubhouse pool. But we’ll get to that later.
We “closed the pool” that night in very high spirits all around.
Our penultimate day wasn’t very photogenic: there was a lot of running around shopping and doing errands. My only pictures from all that were of the Very Large Flag flying near the Publix parking lot. I don’t get to see our flag much; it always makes me happy to see it.
Besides all the shopping, we also made time for splashing around beneath a blazing sun.
In the following sequence it’s kind of interesting to watch as Pop Pop gradually sidles from left to right and Maddie sinks slowly into the water. I don’t know why he’s sidling, or why she’s submerging, but not knowing is part of the fun.
Our last night, as I already mentioned, we once again wrapped things up with tropical drinks in the jacuzzi–after which we dined al fresco at the poolside café.
We had the whole spread to ourselves.
If you look really hard you can see our clan gathered around a dinner table just to the right of the building. If you have one of those CSI-style, physics-defying digital photo enhancement programs, you can probably zoom right in and see what each of us is having for dinner. (If you can’t, I can tell you: it’s almost all cheeseburgers.)
And all it once, it was the morning of our departure.
We had come to Florida with three fully packed roll-aboards and a single checked suitcase containing yet another packed roll-aboard. Roughly 30 kg of stuff.
We’d thought with four checkable suitcases (we bought three at Walmart the day before) and four roll-aboards, packing for the flight home would be a breeze and we could for once easily avoid the usual last-minute hell of weight distribution adjustments.
We were so very wrong.
The morning devolved into the usual hell of packing and weighing and unpacking and repacking and reweighing, until at last we were left with four fully-loaded suitcases (two of them containing fully loaded carry-ons) and two carry-on bags. Roughly 105 kg of stuff. We were bringing home about 75 kilos (165 pounds) of stuff we’d accumulated in the states.
At baggage check in, we found our checked luggage, with a maximum weight of 23 kg per suitcase, weighed in at 23.0, 23.0, 22.5, and 21.5 kg.
(“Aw, darn,” Trine lamented, “we could have bought another three pounds of stuff!”)
As a consequence of our last minute baggage drill (and of the Olympus having been packed), there are only two photographs from the morning of our departure.
One:
And two:
An interesting feature of our drive back to Miami was that the SunPass tolls didn’t seem to recognize our SunPass–something I’d paid Avis seven dollars per day to include.
I therefore took two defensive pictures of our SunPass properly deployed against the possibility of Avis somehow trying to hold us responsible for the many tolls we must have blown through illegally over the course of our stay.
We were told at check-in that our flight back to Denmark was fully booked, which was disappointing in that there would be no acres of seating for us to sprawl across this time. That disappointment aside, we had the best overall check-in process of our traveling life as a family: there was no line at SAS check-in, no line at security, and as a Dane with a valid passport traveling to Denmark, there was no anxiety about Maddie’s passport situation. Win, win, win!
To celebrate, we had lunch at the airport food court McDonalds.
It was a long flight, and although it was a red eye (15:45 departure, 07:00 arrival), none of us got any real sleep. (The Last Jedi, Denmark, and Downton Abbey, and the venerable GKC kept me entertained, though.)
But with the help of earplugs and “Mickey Mouse ears” (paper cups stuffed with wadded, wetted paper towels), Maddie managed descent without too much pain… even if she may have felt a little silly.
We arrived to a familiar landscape: cold, gray, and wet.
And that was that.
It was really a wonderful trip, especially nice being able to bring family together in such a warm and sunny location when most of us live in horrible winter climates. It surely would not have been as pleasant had we all come together for a February week in Deep River!
We’re planning to make a return visit next February, and are already looking forward to it!
# # #
A couple of postscripts.
On our first family trip to Estero, back in May 2019, we made the trip from Ft. Lauderdale airport to Estero in the middle of the night and took a final bathroom break at a truck stop in the middle of Alligator Alley. Two bubbling cauldrons on its counter caught our eyes: asking what they were, we were told “boiled peanuts.” As indeed they were. We’d never seen anything like it. I’d never even heard of boiled peanuts. In the course of our visit, we saw them a few more times, but never tried them. We meant to on this visit, but never got around it.
And yet we may be able to right here in Denmark, because I managed to look up and save a screenshot of the very simple recipe:
So apparently the recipe for boiled peanuts is, “Boil peanuts.” Who know?
I’ll be sure to let you know if we ever manage to try them.
Also, my favorite tweet of the (admittedly young) year appeared during the course of our vacation:
I still giggle every time I think of the organic farmers harvesting their gold ethically, or of unsustainable diamonds. I realize I’m not the “greenest” guy in the world, but I’m perfectly sympathetic to people trying to improve our environment by reducing pollution and waste. I’ve never littered in my life, I recycle, I try to do my bit not to muck the world up any worse than I found it. I also feel that people trying to appear “green” by bragging about their enviromentally conscientious use of gold and diamonds deserve all the mockery we can muster. Especially when those people have been in the news lately for flying back and forth across the country once a week just to participate in street protests. That someone could be as tone deaf as this just stuns me.
Another tweet that caught my attention during our vacation was this one from Ricky Gervais:
Now that’s satire. It’s so perfect, and so British, on so many levels that I lost count.
And Kevin Harding, whoever he is, is proof that satire remains what closes on Saturday night.
# # #
It’s been a long post, but that’s it. (Full disclosure: Molli got home about two-thirds of the way through this monster, so I finished it up on Sunday.)
The pictures may not look like much here on the blog, and I’ve certainly had a good time making fun of my camera for my own shortcomings as a photographer, but having reviewed all of these pictures in their full glory on a big screen, I should say that some of these pictures are, in full form, among the best I’ve taken of our family (or anyone else) in a long time. If anybody wants a full-sized version of any of the pictures here, just let me know and I’ll be happy to send them along.
And I really am serious about putting a video together… maybe next weekend?
Thanks to everyone for such a great week in the sun!
