Sunshine State

Well, here I am, safe and sound on the other side of the Atlantic. Above you see the view out my window as we flew over the Florida coast at Cape Canaveral. That's the Kennedy Space Center directly below, where the Apollo moon missions used to blaze upward and hold the country spellbound, where Challenger met its sad fate but many other shuttle missions launched successfully. Back when we did those sorts of things, you know?

It was a loooooong flight -- more than ten hours, I think. Are planes flying more slowly these days? When we checked in, Dave and I upgraded to premium economy seats, which cost us more but gave us more cabin space and little perks like a meal on real china and a glass of champagne upon boarding. It was the smartest thing we could have done. We were much, much more comfortable as a result. I stood up only once during the whole flight, and didn't feel too awfully confined. I did have a rather rambunctious little boy sitting directly behind me, leading to occasional unexpected squeals, bumps and thumps, but you can't have everything.

Of course there was a kid from the school where we work on our flight, with his family. This seems to be de rigueur when we travel.

On the plane I finished "All the Colours of the Dark," which I enjoyed, and watched a very interesting movie called "Nightbitch," starring Amy Adams, about the trials of being a young mother. I was attracted to it because I like her, and I figured she wouldn't make a crappy movie, and indeed it turned out to be smart and surprisingly surreal. I also managed to leave my glasses case on the plane (but fortunately not the glasses themselves). Oh well.

My stepsister and her husband picked us up at the airport, where Phoebe the Flamingo still presides over the terminal:

We drove up to Lutz, north of Tampa, where we're staying in my stepmother's guesthouse. We've seen her and my nephew and we all went to dinner last night. I slept surprisingly well. Today my brother shows up with his family.

At the moment I am, of course, at Dunkin' Donuts, which you will remember is my blogging redoubt while I'm in Lutz. The guesthouse doesn't have WiFi and, more critically, it doesn't have a coffee machine. Fortunately, Dunkin' Donuts opens at 5 a.m. -- which of course is 10 a.m. by my own body clock, well past the time I would normally require coffee!

I do have one more thing to post from London, which I meant to include in yesterday's post but forgot:

This one-minute snippet of garden-cam footage shows both how miserable the weather was last Thursday, and what happened when I put a hard-boiled egg out for the foxes. You see the egg in the first shot, sitting back by the flowerpots and center-left of the screen. It vanishes in the next clip as a fox trots by -- we don't actually see the fox eat it, but I'm sure that's what happened! And then, at 0:35, we see proof that the foxes are making that weird call I've been hearing in the garden -- one trots by and makes the noise as it goes.

I thought about bringing the garden cam to Florida to see what's wandering around my stepmother's yard, but in the end, I just didn't have the energy for that!