Day Ten: Cannonball Run Across Florida

Yesterday was Day Ten of the Epic Road Trip. It started with yours truly awakening an a bed all by herself for the first time in ten days, in a room looking directly out onto the ocean. I felt as though I had woken up in the middle of an Oprah Book Club book, in which an extremely well-to-do woman takes the radical step of moving into her luxurious beachside home for a year in order to achieve self-actualization and pen her inspirational memoirs. I mean this in a good way. We spent the morning with the fabulous Lauren and her adorable son on Crescent Beach, my kids boogie-boarding and Beck doing toddler-type things in the tidepools. You can see from the photos above that the beach was stunning and practically deserted, like an eerie paradisical dream sequence. However, there were many awesome animal encounters to be had. One large hermit crab, a school of small fish being pursued by a large fish in a tidepool, a gopher tortoise who had strayed from his neighborhood (pictured above) and many subterranean clams.

A few words on the subject of Beckett: not only is he adorable, as you might expect a two-year-old would be, cuteness being a standard factory-installed feature of toddlers, but he is also the successful result of a controlled experiment in which a child is shown to thrive when every bite of food that crosses his lips and every cultural product that enters his brain is of high quality and unimpeachable wholesomeness. I will never forget seeing him, on an earlier visit, scarfing down pieces of raw red pepper as if they were candy. Lauren and her husband Clay have WAY better willpower than I have in resisting the urge to give their kid a Snickers bar or let them watch Ren and Stimpy just to blow his freakin' mind. The result of this is, of course, a kid who does nothing but pester you for candy and cartoons. Like mine. Beck inhabits a Shangri-La in which these things simply do not exist, and he - and the world, probably, when he grows up to cure cancer or suchlike - is the better for it. It makes me feel a bit, by comparison, to those parents you see in the aisles of Walmart smacking their kids and letting them drink Hawaiian Punch. (Angry cease and desist emails from both of these companies will no doubt be winging their way to me shortly)
After our beachside idyll, we drove across the state of Florida as fast as we can. The boys did not notice us driving right past Disneyworld, absorbed as they were in the Nintendo DS (see what I mean about my parenting?). We stopped in Sarasota to buy what I suspect was the only issue of the Sunday NYT in the entire Gulf Coast region (they kept it behind the counter at Borders, like pornography), and made it to my mom's at about dinnertime. Above you see a picture of Ike in grandma's pool, the real "Happiest Place In The World." Cousin Eileen is here visiting as well, so the boys have some welcome older-kid company. We'll be seeing Beck and his kick-ass parents again on the swing back Northwards through Florida.

ps if these pictures seem depopulated, it's because (a) the beach was quite empty, and (b) I'm trying not to plaster pictures of my many gracious hosts all over the internet unless they expressly request it without my even asking.