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November 13, 2003

I overpack too.

Steve's Mom's blog:

This happens every fall in preperation of my trip to Florida. I took ou t all my luggage and garment bags and now I have to fill them. Every year it gets harder and harder. Every year I swear I will take less but then I see that I have room in the suitcases so I might as well take more just in case I need it. I am down there for four months and it could be cold, it could be hot, it could rain and it could be humid!

I'm hoping Mildred continues to blog from Florida. We can use all the warmth we can get up here.

Posted by jghiii at November 13, 2003 09:05 PM
Comments
Posted by: sherman on November 13, 2003 10:43 PM

Packing for Florida? Yeah, I got a story for that one.

March 1978. Colrain, Massachusetts. I'm at the farmhouse (where Chi Phi would eventually hold their pledge party, Mr. Garfield) and Scotty and Brian are with me. I'm flying out of La Guardia the next morning to go to Florida, and the two guys are gonna use my car for a road trip while I'm gone. It's the night before my 11am flight, I haven't even started packing, I'm about 4 to 5 hours from the airport -- so the only logical thing to do is for me and Brian and Scotty to go visiting with Uncle Ellis. Uncle Ellis D. Boyson was my favorite uncle. We were visiting him a lot in those days. It was a wonderful night. At one point we sat in the field across the road and watched shooting stars --- Colrain being a good 10 miles from civilization and lights. On full moon nights, for the final 100 yard stretch of road on the way home, I would turn off the headlights and drive solely by moonlight. And without any lights around to pollute the view, there were always lots of shooting stars to check out. At another point, my mother called to wish me a good trip, and I gotta tell you -- when you are visiting Uncle Ellis, you don't want to be talking to your mother. We stayed up all night, listening to music, having fun, and somewhere along the way I packed. We left at 5am and I remember that Eddie Money's song "Two Tickets to Paradise" was on the radio and it seemed a good omen. (It wasn't. It was the worst vacation I ever had. It was a combination of bad choices of vacation companions, a doomed liasion with another closet case friend, and the fact that Fort Lauderdale is just a boring place full of parking lots and bars. Disneyworld was half-fun. The first day when I brought Uncle Ellis along was alot of fun -- Space Mountain with Uncle E is pretty cool. The second day without the uncle was boring -- the banjo playing mountain bears were just not worth the E ticket. So much for two tickets to paradise.)


I made the flight easily, but this is a packing story. A packing to Florida story. So it's me and Scott and Brian and the Uncle and it's cold in Colrain -- it had the highest accumulation of snow in Massachusetts that year -- and you need to remember that I was packing in cold weather and Uncle Ellis was visiting and so it wasn't really a surprise when I got to Florida and opened up my bags and found lots of long pants -- long corduroy pants -- and lots of sweaters and probably a pair of gloves.

I had to go shoppng for tshirts and shorts in Fort Lauderdale.

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