January 29, 2014 (Wed) Moore Haven, FL (10) 60/67° - It's been a windy, rainy day. Sitting outside was not an option. It would have been a good day for a road trip though and a jaunt into Labelle to pick up our mail would have been a a legitimate reason to burn the gas. But our mail hasn't arrived yet! Our mail forwarding service always sends it on Mondays (when requested to do so) and, if sent priority it gets to the post office on Wednesdays. For some reason getting to Labelle, FL seems to take longer. We ran into that problem last year and thought it was a fluke. But Mark called the post office this morning to check on it. No mail yet! Since we'll be off to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow, it will have to wait til Friday.
Our data usage allotment was restored during the night so we were able to do some of the things we've been putting off the last few days, the most important of which was updating our financial data. We like to do that fairly often to insure that our bills are getting paid as intended and that our credit cards aren't being used fraudulently. Curious to know what this flurry of activity cost us data usage-wise, Mark checked our usage app as soon as he went off-line. Huge expenditure!! Far more than would have been used even for streaming videos for the same length of time. Verizon, our provider, had no explanation for this but agreed to credit back the morning's entire usage. You can bet we'll be watching very closely for a while. Over spending our allotment can be expensive.
Waiting to enter the locks
Hildene and the greater Miami/Fort Lauderdale traffic patterns seem to have a love/hate relationship. Or maybe I should say court jester/hate relationship. Getting to the motel where Jim & Lois were staying was no problem - except for the insane drivers in the city itself. But the route she plotted from the motel to the Bimini Boatyard Bar and Grill took us east on US-84 about a half mile where we were to make a U-turn and come back west on US-84. Then she wanted us to take another U-turn and go back east on US-84 - passing the motel each time. Then we were allowed to continue past the first U-turn point and on to the restaurant. We decided to follow the directions given to us by the motel staff which was the same minus the U-turns. For our route back to the campground, she took us off I-595 onto US-441 north. When this didn't seem right to us we looked ahead at the directions and saw that she wanted us to make a U-turn up the road a way and come back south on US-441 and back onto I-595. Why she wanted us to do that? We have no idea. We made an executive decision to make the U-turn a mile or so short of instructions. Getting back on I-595 was a nightmare even with Hildene's help - a lot of construction and crazy drivers.
January 31, 2014 (Fri) Moore Haven, FL (12) 61/76° - A call to the Labelle post office this morning revealed that our mail had arrived. So off we went on another road trip. We had so much fun driving yesterday that we decided to go on into Ft Myers so we could shop at the Publix there - a much better store than the Winn Dixie in Labelle. The shopping was a positive experience (because we got everything on our list) but lunch was not. A Chinese Buffet in an Hispanic neighborhood makes for an interesting assortment of foods and tastes. i.e. we had to settle for Louisiana hot sauce instead of hot Chinese mustard. And there was much else to keep us from ever going back again!
Some use the waterway for other pastimes
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