So this past week I went to Florida for Spring Break. I realized the whole time I did my first undergrad I never traveled anywhere for Spring Break (with the exception of like a day trip to Chicago) and now that I’m back in school I did observe Spring Break and go to Florida and wanted to document my experience.

Now before anyone gets too excited thinking I went to Miami and did shooters and blasted my nips for all to see, lower your expectations as I was in the exotic location of Englewood, Florida: The unofficail birthplace of the strip mall.

Like a true episode of The Kardashians, my sisters joined me on this exciting journey because TWIST our parents live in Englewood.

The players in this story are our parents (Bob&Sandy), my older sister Sam and my younger sister Mary.

First things first: our flight was at 6 AM which meant we had to be there at 4:30 and leave our hour by 4. It was cute.

 

Plane was busy af but we seriously made it by the hair of our chinny chin chins. We landed in sunny Punta Gorda (Spanish for Fat Tip, so have fun with that).

^^ I don’t know who that person is in front of me but give me a break it was 8:30 in the morning and I had been up for forever and just needed a good blog picture.

 

Then like lost little chickadees we found our parents.

We haven’t seen them since roughly Christmas. My little sister Mary is running right for Dad and my mom is clearly getting ready to throw a little shade at something we are doing. Cause I learned “Florida Sandy” is a secret shade queen.

Also due to peer pressure from Mary, I decided to trail a mustache in Flordia (which might what my mom is reacting to in the previous picture.

Still collecting data on whether it was a success or not.

 

Shade did come with breakfast while we looked around the condo. (we had all been there before at various times but it had been a bit).

Mary immediatley fell asleep and I noted all the new mermaid decor.

There was sooooo much more but I was as tired as Mary and that’s the best I can do. Lady loves scales and swimming.

 

We started most our mornings off with a bike ride which while very windy was my favorite way to start the day.

One of our favorite adventrues is to go to Lizard Cove (we named it that ourselves). It’s a fishing bridge with a shit ton of lizards and Sam was on a real creature hunt this trip.

 

Spent some time at the beach at Boca Grande

 

While Sam and Mary thrive on the beach, I am reminded for the umpteenth time I am not a beach person. I’ll just never get the appeal of walking on uneven earth and baking in the sun. I can hang there for like 40 minutes max but the rest of the Dines set up camp.

 

By this point in the trip, being with our parents has completly reverted the three of us to acting like we are adolescents. Getting mad for taking the last piece of toast or giving side eye when somebody is making too many comments during a viewing of Jumanji. On the other side of adolesence we are just acting like total spazzes.

 

The Next Day the Dine sibs took their adventure on the road. We headed to Orlando to Disney but the night before we headed out to Downtown Disney. Which was an experience.

It is a lawless place where people have no sense of traffic flow and will wait in line at a Ghiradelli’s for a free chocolate for over an hour for something they can get for like 25 cents. Then like true tourists we ate a Rainforest Cafe where I’m pretty sure our server needed to be talked off a ledge as she did about 7 different birthday songs over the course of an hour for different screaming families.

 

We went to Disney world the next day. We started at Epcot and we had a great time and did an Orlando walk around the world and by Canada my bloodsugar dropped and I demanded some poutine. My friend Nick joined us because you can’t go on a rides as a threesie. You need an even number. We hit up Magic Kingdom and ended up doing 30,000 steps and had to bolt out of there like a bat out hell after the parade to beat all the traffic.

We overestimated our youthful energy and only had a hotel the night before Disney and for sure thought we could handle driving back 2 hours to our parents. Since it had been 9 hours isnce our last meal I forced Mary to stop at fast food. She already didn’t want us eating in her new car and this particular McDonalds took about 30 minutes and when we got our food, it was just a random assornment of McDonalds treats and not really anything we ordered. We were hungry enough we just didn’t care and ate it.

 

The next day after our Disney hangover we basically napped and swam the day away. We went with our parents to the Moose Lodge to do their weekly trivia (they are just living it up right, eh folks?). The Moose is a members only bar where you do a group prayer at 6 PM followed by The Pledge of Allegiance and you can also smoke inside so you get the picture of what I’m working with here. We got second place in trivia all because I’m too gay to properly know Arnold Schwazenegger movies and I was too obssessed with the WB lineup to care about middleschool geography.

 

The last day of the trip was Sam’s birthday. We went to see some dolphins at the pier, then went to Venice, Fl. Which if you have never been I highly reccomend it if you are completely out of seashells or scented candles because it’s all you can buy there. Then we sang a quiet happy birthday to Sam while my dad slept on the couch but did eat some delicious cheesecake and started to eat it before she got in the room. We might not be the best family. Then we all got in the backseat of our parents’ minivan and headed off to the airport.

 

After a long day’s journey into night, we made it back in one piece and very slowly rejoining the world.