Stuff not to do when you travel ...

Here is some stuff I learned not to do from this last vacation we went on down to Mount Dora, FL. to see my brother.

Don't ever accept directions on the way out of town that are hurriedly given to you and pronounced as a short cut. We ended up making it out of town just fine but right before we were leaving my brother offers us a shortcut for our trip. Red flags should have went up, sirens went off, somebody should have tackled one of us, but since none of that happened I was like wow I could save a whole 5 minutes sure let me go the new way and take 15 turns.

Apparently in FL there are 7 or 8 480 west roads off of 448 or something like that. The really confusing thing is that all the 440 west turns do not exit the same direction ... some exit to the right and some to the left. You would think if they are all WEST then they would all go WEST. I know some of you are thinking Jarrett they probably exit the wrong way but loop around and end up going west .... oh no ... this is FL! They do whatever they want. I looked and they in fact do not loop around. There are roads in FL named 440 west that in fact go east. So maybe the overall lesson is don't take shortcuts in FL.

Lesson 2 .... Everything in Fl is different! I have been to the beach a few times in Florida and I even stayed in a hotel in Jacksonville once, but I have never lived for like a week in a normal Florida suburb ... let me just say it is crazy. I was having Mississippi culture shock by the time we got home. Kari and I thought about jumping out and kissing the ground when we saw the big Mississippi sign near Tupelo on 78. I met a lady at Thomas church and she said are you enjoying your stay and I said yes but everything is different down here. She said what do you mean. I said well where do I begin. The houses, the plants, the food, the red lights, the animals, the setup of shopping centers, walmart ... at some point she stopped me and agreed the plants were different. Kari and I looked for a walgreens that I had seen the night before for like 30 minutes while she had a headache because their walgreens stores don't look at all like ours here. They have tolls in FL on their roads. You have to pay to drive on the road! I know they have this many places but I am glad they don't have it around here. Missing the tolls was another reason we took the"shortcut". Everything is more expensive. Suffice it to say FL is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

Lesson 3 don't purchase a massive fountain drink without tasting it first ... you could be stuck for the next 300 miles with a drink that taste like something out of a science lab.

Lesson 4 and the last lesson of the trip ... don't pull your car up so that the front reaches over the curb and rest on the ground. We did that at the hotel we stayed at on the way home. Unbeknownst to us the front of the car was resting in an ant hill. Fortunately it was not a fire ant hill but a black ant hill. Unfortunately the ants soon learned that we had left a sonic bag from the night before in the passenger side floorboard.

Please tell me what do you do when you come out of a hotel ready to begin a 7 hour trip and realize that the car is black with ants on the inside. Also the ants were not just inside the car but they were actually all under the hood as well because we had placed the nose of the car in their house so they decided to invade ours. I don't know what you do ... but here is what we did. I took the floor mats out and beat them like crazy. I smashed as many ants as I could with my hands. I put all of the stuff without ants on it in the trunk and threw all the garbage away. Then Kari and I took the most uncomfortable ride you can imagine a few miles down the road looking for a car wash and a vacuum.

We finally found one at a service station but not before everyone who saw us thought we were high. We were slapping and twitching and jerking our heads around like we had a bad trip or something. After a couple of hours at the gas station, 1 can of ant spray, 1 awesome interior vacuum, and 1 deluxe car wash we were on our way. We still found a few ants and we still were swatting and twitching for the first 200 miles even when stuff wasn't there. If that is the definition of high then I guess we were high on ant spray. Let ants invade your car and lets see if you don't do some slapping and jerking.

That's all the tips I got. I really wouldn't have known any of these before the trip. We did have an awesome time and my brother and his wife were awesome host. I took naps on consecutive days and to me that is a vacation:)