I left for Florida the first week in February, spent two weeks there, and have been home for a week now. I’m finally getting back into the groove of things. I had mountains of correspondence piled up along with a good amount of website maintenance that needed to be done. My trip to Florida was unplanned a buddy of mine was moving back to Florida from New York. I took the trip to help him drive down and get setup in his new apartment, stayed a week then took Amtrak back.
The trip was nice overall, 24 hours straight through in a car was no picnic but as they say “You gotta do what you gotta do”, I had a blast with my friends kids’. They’re all young, between 2-6 years old so I have lots of fun playing with them. The worst thing about Florida was the limited internet access I had. I could only get online at his mother’s house which has DSL but the speed is only marginally better than dial up. Then there’s the kids — you try getting anything done on your laptop with 3 kids running all over the place. :p I’d rather hang out with the kids then muck around on the computer anyway. I was able to keep up with my email on my cell phone at least.
Every time I go down to Florida I’m reminded of how much I love it down there. I lived down there for a few months in 2008 but my job didn’t pan out. The weather is always nice even though it was relatively cold this time around but still a helluva lot better than New York’s weather. 
People seem to be much friendlier. Friendly almost to the point of being nauseating but you get used to it. I’m trying to convince mom to make the move down there, she wants to get away from the cold weather too but mom’s not quite sold on the idea yet. I’d save up and make the move myself but mom’s not in the best of health and I’d rather be close to look after her.
The trip home was uneventful other than someone on the train getting alcohol poisoning and us having to make an unscheduled stop but that unscheduled stop turned into a smoke break. I guess that serves him well, his party bought all the alcohol on the train before we were even out of Florida. I couldn’t even get a beer before going to sleep. 
Despite everything bad I’ve heard about Amtrak I’ve traveled to and from Florida 3 times and had no issues other than the train being a little bit late. 24 hours on the train is a bit much but not to bad considering they have regular smoke breaks and a dining car. When the train stopped in DC to switch to electric power I got out for a smoke break and seen the snow. Ick, I hate it! I got off at Newark Penn Station instead of my normal New York Penn Station thinking that I could more easily catch the NJ Transit train up to Port Jervis near my house. I still had to switch trains twice so it wasn’t much different other than me getting a little lost because I’m unfamiliar with Newark Penn Station. It turns out I’d been misinformed and my train to Port Jervis still runs out of Hoboken and I would’ve been better off just going into New York Penn Station like I normally do.
Sure enough while I was in Florida I missed two snow storms. Last night we had about 6 inches here, I just shoveled out from that and now tomorrow night into tomorrow we’re supposed to get over a foot of snow. Something tells me I should have stayed in Florida.
Anywho now that I’m back home and online you can look forward to seeing some more blogging from me as well as me being more active on the sites I regularly haunt. How is everyone’s winter going so far?
