Top 10 Things Learned on Florida Trip

It took more than 4 days to get there, including 3 days of delays due to weather in Kodiak and a day and a half in Seattle, but we made it to Florida for our anniversary trip, hog hunting and seeing Robin's mom. Here is what I learned:

1. AYCE means All You Can Eat
2. It's hard to push a 15-passenger van out of sugar sand (yeah, our friend Bob got it stuck but we eventually got it out ... Robin only ended up with a few bites from fire ants, ouch!). It did take 6 if us, however, digging in some scraps of cow-dunged wood and several tries.
   
3. You can survive a 5-hour red-eye flight with a screaming (and I mean screaming) 3 year old right behind you without killing anyone. (He did not let up, either, not even for 5 minutes!)
4. Wild hawgs have vicious teeth and tusks! They can and do kill pit bulls that some people use to hunt them.
5. You cannot keep red snapper when fishing in Florida at any time of year.
6. Robin's predictions of calm seas continue to follow his usual pattern of accuracy (see previous post: Hangs, cobras and hawks)
7. If you distract the person checking in your grossly overweight coolers with bizarre tales from your trip, they just might forget to a) charge you for the luggage entirely and b) forget about it being overweight
8. You cannot have a wine opener in your carry-on luggage
9. Traveling light, by Robin's definition, means two coolers full of 120 pounds of meat, a wheeled luggage bag weighing 60 pounds, a duffle bag weighing 53 pounds (including a ham and some pork chops), gun case with two guns and three carry-on bags.
10. Pizza restaurants in Florida serve something called a "grinder", although we never did learn what a grinder actually is.
    

Hangs, cobras and hawks

We celebrated our 1 year anniversary with an offshore fishing trip while we were in Florida visiting Robin's mom and he was hunting wild pig.

This time, despite Robin's assurances and predictions of calm seas, I loaded up on the motion sickness pills. Perhaps I overdid it but it was worth it. It certainly wasn't calm! Like 6 foot waves and swells, oh boy.

At the end of the day, we used our nifty new iPad to send an e-mail, typed by yours truly. My e-mail said: "Robin got 3 hangs and 1 cobra. I did not get any hawks, but did catch a bunch of little fish today."

Translations:
Hangs = "hawgs" (wild hogs)
Cobra = cobia (a fish)
Hawks = also "hawgs" (wild hogs)

Groundhog Day all over again

This winter has seemed like Groundhog Day, the movie. Snow. Snow. More snow. January was a new record snow month for Kodiak, with 48.6 inches of the stuff, snowballing the old record of 40.4 inches. Total snowfall to date this winter is 85 inches (normal is 34 inches).

So far, 4 boats moored in the harbor have sunk because the owners didn't go and shovel them off.

Robin has been on the snowplow all month, with hardly a day off. So far this winter, he has used:

• 492 gallons of gas
• 105 gallons of diesel
• 60,000 pounds of sand and traction chips
• 1,500 pounds of ice melt (that's 30, 50-lb boxes he himself has spread)

We head to sunny Florida this weekend, weather permitting, for a brief break from the snow.