Travel

Florida and Friends

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3 weeks ago I went to Florida to visit my friends. I left a part of my heart in South Florida, where I grew up, but I never seem to make it there to visit more than once a year. Ever since my family moved to Pennsylvania, I have felt a bit like a kid with separated parents – splitting my time and my holidays between my blood-family and my second-family, my Florida friends! I won’t recount my entire trip here because it would take forever, and also because it was mostly LOTS of drinking, but I will give you a list of some highlights:

  • Rosh Hashana dinner with my friend’s family at Seasons 52. If you don’t know what Seasons 52 is, it’s basically a calorie-conscious restaurant. This one happens to be in East Boca Raton, which means it’s the most calorie-conscious franchise around. The whole menu has the calories on it (luckily the cocktails don’t), and you’re likely to hear nobody order directly off of the menu. It’s more taboo to order something directly off the menu than it is to get a wedding dress off-the-rack. GASP. You absolutely must always use the menu only as a starting-off point, then make sure to make at least 4 substitutions, and order at least 2 of the 4 ingredients on the side. Light on the dressing. 3 drops, not 4. My friend ordered a Bourbon Bramble with Vodka, and apologized 3 times for the liquor substitution. Our server promptly told us that it was the simplest order he had all day.
  • The beach. I love the beach. Waves, warm water, sand in my butt. Ok, maybe not the last one.
  • Chivalry! I almost forgot the concept after living in Florida for so long. I think I may have touched on this in my blog about things I forgot about Florida, but I had to mention it again here. Actually, maybe I didn’t mention it. But you should still read that blog. There were so many chairs given up for me that I lost count. And not only are drinks drastically less expensive in Florida, but they are often free because guys buy them for you. What a fantastic world we live in.
  • Visiting a Rothschild mansion. One of my friend’s friends is the caretaker for an amazing mansion owned by the Rothschilds. They only rent it out 5 days/month, and the rest of the time it is hers! We went over there and got the grand tour. And took photos, because duh.
  • Bru’s Room. I freaking love that place. I dream about their mozzarella wedges. I’m actually surprised I didn’t take a photo of them. I’ll let you imagine them instead – picture this: Mozzarella Sticks, but larger, with more cheese, and stretchier. And then more delicious warm cheese. And did I mention that Bru’s Room also has $5 Skyy doubles? I think I made money just traveling to Florida.
  • Pollo Tropical (I love food, ok?). The main highlight of my trip (besides, of course, seeing my friends), was going to Pollo Tropical. Not just going, but bribing my Uber driver to take me there after a 5-hour-long Happy Hour. I told our nice driver that I would order him anything off the menu if he would take this detour for us. The max price on that menu is $7.99 so I was confident I’d come out on top for this deal. Sure enough, after ordering 4 TropiChops (the leftovers make for a FANTASTIC hungover breakfast), our Uber driver delivered us to our final destination. Best part??? Uber sent me an email the next morning, apologizing to me for my ride taking “longer than expected” and giving me $5 off my next ride!! That TropiChop paid for itself! God is good! And that curry mustard… y’all, I think there is crack in it. You heard it here first.
  • Watching Florida Football with Floridians. New Yorkers are a lot of things, but they are not big college football fans. They just don’t get it. We spent a full 12 hours eating and watching college football. There’s nothing like it!
  • Brunch: seeing my friends and their kids. It’s crazy to think that my partying friends now have little offspring running around depending on their parenting. But as it often is with kids, they grow up so much in so little time! It’s fun to see them grow up, and I always hope they remember who I am. I got to see everyone at a farewell brunch on the beach and it was amazing.
  • Randomly running into people from high school. Moving to a different state, it’s rare I run into people I have known for a long time. It does happen, though, this city is big, but it’s also small. Anyway, I went to a bar in Delray Beach and I happened to know both of the bartenders! One of them went to my high school, and our last names had us seated next to each other in almost every class. The other one was roommates with my first boyfriend when I was 19.
  • Speaking of boyfriends, the best part of my trip was having my emoji-faced bf surprise me by coming for a day and a half! I was hoping he’d be able to come to Florida to meet all of my friends, but he had been so busy with work, I didn’t think he’d be able to make the trip. Sure enough, the first morning I was in Florida, he told me he had a surprise for me, and told me to check his Google Calendar (yes, we share calendars, we are that couple). First, I thought he meant that he was getting the new iPhone (he had an appointment at the apple store), but then he said “no, look at Saturday!” and I saw that he was going to wake up at the crack of dawn to get in to Fort Lauderdale at 9:30 am. What a guy. I loved having him there, and I’m so glad he got to meet everyone from my formative years. He even got a taste of the South Florida club.
  • Visiting my best friend’s mom. Although some of my friends have left to different corners of the USA, some of their families still live in Florida. I always try to fit in a visit or two. This time, I got to see my bff from high school’s mom and she got to meet my emoji-bf for the first time! He even revealed his face to her. Unfort. you guys don’t get to see it here.

Every time I leave Florida, I feel nostalgic for the days when I went out every night to bars and of course, out dancing until dawn at the club – all those Fitbit steps before there was a such thing as a Fitbit! But my hangover on the last day of the trip proved to me that I may be a bit older than I was back then. It was nice to get back to New York and lay in bed for a week. That is, until my next trip/wedding in North Carolina this past weekend. Blog about that coming soon!

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Travel

Forgotten Florida Facts

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I lived in Florida for 13 years, and in the 7 years since I left, I forgot a few things. I was lucky enough to spend last weekend (and Rosh Hashanah) in Florida, like 7 million other old Jews, and it reminded me of these unique Floridian things:

  • Beach towels. Bring them everywhere. Do not fret if you forget them, every other person coming to the beach will have a few extras in the trunk of their car. Or an old sheet. You can see from the feature photo that we had enough towels for three of us to lay on. Miss you already, ladies!
  • Publix, Where Shopping is a Pleasure. They now have Wawa popping up all over Florida and you all know I have a special place in my heart for a hoagie. But absolutely nothing beats a Chicken Tender Pub Sub.
  • Publix bags. Everyone has them. Dog poop. Kitty litter. Sweaty clothes. Wet swimsuits. They are so multi-purpose. And you always knows where to find them. Under the sink! In every single house, without fail.

  • Humidity. There’s no such thing as walking in Florida. It’s basically just swimming. Don’t even bother owning a blow-dryer or a straightening iron. Every minute you spend trying to do your hair is just another minute of your life you will never get back. And your hair will frizz out within 10 seconds of leaving the house anyway. Don’t bother.
  • Concealed carry. And I’m not even talking about guns, I’m talking about booze. Since everyone needs to drive to get places, they can’t drink til they get there! Gotta pack mini bottles of liquor in the purse. Then Uber home, of course. What did we do before Uber!?!
  • “Season.” If you are from South Florida, I don’t need to say any more. For you non-Floridians, no, I’m not talking about winter, spring, summer, or fall. One of my friends works at a country club, and she is off for 6 weeks right now, “between summer and season.” This is snowbird season. When the entire 70+ year-old-population of the northeast USA and Canada descends on Florida. This is also sometimes known as Q-tip season, so-named for the white puffy fluffy tops-of-heads you can see barely visible above the steering wheels. Wear your seat belt year-round, but DEF wear it from October-March.
  • The worst drivers in the world. I’m not just talking about the Q-Tips. Drivers in Florida are horrific. I mean, we don’t even have to parallel park to pass the driving test. And we get our licenses when we are 16. And keep them through death. Basically, anyone can pass the test. At least by the second time they take it (cough cough, me).
  • Bipolar weather. The weather in Florida is CRAZY. Unlike anywhere else. One may infer that by saying “bipolar,” I mean that it changes often. Perhaps I should call it multiple personality weather. Meaning it’s a million different things AT THE SAME DAMN TIME. Totally mind-blowing. I remember when I was growing up in Florida, sometimes it was raining in the front of the house but not in the back. I am not exaggerating. On my first day in Florida last weekend, we were driving to the beach and we got caught in a terrible rain storm. So bad that people were driving 15 MPH on I-95. It takes a pretty bad storm for Florida drivers to slow down. See above. Anyway, in any other place, you’d probably abandon your beach plans in this weather, but in Florida, we looked east and realized it was actually beautiful and sunny by the beach. Sure enough, when we got to the beach it was hot, sunny, and I got a great tan.
  • Font size on cell phones. This goes hand in hand with the median age in Florida. People cannot see. If they haven’t had cataracts surgery yet, they probably should. Absolutely nothing that people write on their cell phones is private in Florida, because it can be seen from a mile away. And this is coming from someone with -10 vision. I could read the old man’s text to his son from 4 seats down at the bar. He was wishing him a Happy New Year.

Shanah Tovah betches 😊 NEXT YEAR IN BOCA!! (and more about my trip later this week!)

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Miscellaneous

Hurricane Irma

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Ladies and Gents, it’s looking more and more likely that the deadly Category 5 Hurricane Irma is headed toward South Florida and I am terrified for all of my friends. Also, I am GLUED to every meteorologist on twitter (Bryan Norcross, anyone?? What a silver/blond fox). Personally, I have been tracking the storm since Saturday, paying closer attention to the direction of the “cone of uncertainty” than I paid attention to any of my classes in college. Or high school. Or anything in my life, TBH. The one class I did pay extreme attention to in college: Extreme Weather; thanks UF for those interesting GenEd Science credits. I took that class the year of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Wilma and I remember tracking them in class using cold and warm fronts, air pressure, wind speed and direction, altitude etc. Something about hurricane-tracking is mesmerizing. Maybe it’s the fact that we don’t really know where it’s going. We’ve all seen the meme about weathermen constantly being wrong.

Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s the one major devastating weather pattern that we can actually track days in advance. Talk about Must-See-TV… The Weather Channel LIVES for this! And one week after Hurricane Harvey, too. I didn’t forget about the thousands of people affected by Harvey, but I have a much more personal connection to Florida, so Irma has been catching my eye.

Irma is already record-breaking, with sustained wind speeds of 185 MPH. As a point of reference, the Saffir-Simpson scale, which measures hurricanes (common knowledge for a Floridian), has 5 categories of hurricanes with 5 being the biggest. Category 4 is 130-157 MPH, which is a 27 point range. Category 5 is over 157. Irma is 185, 28 points above that. Basically, if a category 6 even existed, it would be that. That is terrifying.

I moved to South Florida in 1997, hot on the heels of the last huge category 5 hurricane that hit Florida, Hurricane Andrew. Andrew hit in 1992, so you may argue that 5 years later was not “hot on the heels,” but I would disagree. I remember specifically the real estate agent mentioning hurricanes when we were looking at houses, because it was still on everyone’s minds. Would a house withstand wind gusts of 100+ mph? If we get a house with 20-foot ceilings and 20-foot windows, as almost all two-story houses have in South Florida, who would put the hurricane shutters up? Are the windows hurricane-resistant? I distinctly remember these questions.

If you didn’t grow up in South Florida, or any hurricane-prone region, you probably think I am nuts. Alternatively, you think Florida peeps have it all figured out because you have seen all of the memes that Floridians post about “preparing for a hurricane” aka buying beer and wine and downplaying the whole thing. But I can tell you from my very selective Facebook sampling of my South Florida friends – they are all officially freaking the f*ck out. Many of them are using the popular hashtag #Irmagerd. I had one friend who saw two armed police officers guarding the new supply of water at the grocery store. I have another friend who woke up at 3 am to try and beat the lines and fill her car up with gas, only to wait 45 minutes in line and then find out that all of the pumps were empty.

Social media can be both bad and good in these times of crisis:

Bad: Group hysteria. Horror stories abound. Also, sometimes fake news is shared. Don’t tape your windows guys, come on. I thought this was common knowledge by now.

Good: Keeping in touch with friends (until power goes out). Sharing preparedness tips and tricks, like this amazing quarter on a frozen cup of ice trick. Crowd sourcing any stores that still have water or propane. Finding AMAZING stories on twitter, like about the Delta pilot who flew his plane in and out of Puerto Rico yesterday between the bands of the hurricane. What a crazy person. Separate but related: I had my #bestdayever on twitter yesterday, I got 78 likes on a tweet about this pilot. I barely have 45 followers! P.S. FOLLOW ME!

My Famous Tweet:

I have some fond memories of my hurricane-preparedness in South Florida, and luckily, a big one never hit. Rather, I should say I never personally experienced one. Hurricane Wilma was pretty big and my family lost power for over a week. Also, the back windows blew out and my mom and brother evacuated to Atlanta. I was already at college at the time, so I didn’t personally feel the effects. But the fact that a big one didn’t hit when I lived at home doesn’t mean we didn’t prepare for a big one more than once. I remember filling the bathtubs with water, filling the cars with gas, stocking our canned goods and readying our internal camp-out room. We used to uninstall the shelving from the closet underneath our stairs, line the floors with cushions, pillows and blankets, and settle down in our window-less bunker, waiting for the hurricane to pass. My brother and I used to love hanging out under the stairs. Once, we even convinced our mom to keep the pillows and blankets in there as a play fort for an entire week after the storm. Luckily for us, it was all fun and games. And luckily, we were smart enough to be prepared every time.

So to my Florida BFF’s, BE SAFE OUT THERE!! And keep making memes. If you laugh, it’s harder to cry. And if, FINGERS CROSSED, this thing takes a sharp turn east and misses you, please still prepare next time. Better safe than sorry. Build your blanket fort and grab your beef jerky and transistor radio. I’ll meet you under the stairs.

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