Settled in Naples, Florida

Wow! Does life just get a bit tougher...in general...when one hits 'Senior-dom'? I prefer to think not but day-to-day can be a bit challenging and I was either too busy with kids/work/life to notice it before or I don't cope quite as well now. All is good and we are pretty much settled into our condo. Here's how we made out.......


While we were sitting in iHop having supper Wednesday night, Wayne says to me, "If we got up really, really early tomorrow morning and drove hard to Virginia, we could get on the Auto Train. Watcha think?"


The Auto Train loads cars into covered railroad cars while all passengers settle into compartments (if you book months in advance) or relatively comfortable seats (which you need to book months in advance). However, there are always a few left-over seats so the idea here was to drive like hell and hope there was a vacancy. Oh, and we wouldn't arrive at the Amtrak location in Virginia until about an hour or less before they stopped taking more cars/passengers. The big draw was that the train would travel from 4 pm until 10 am the next morning and you get off in Orlando vice driving for 2 1/2 days to get to the same location.


"Sure", says I and we go to bed early, get up at 5 am and are on the road by 6 am. Neither Wayne nor I are still feeling all that great...both coughing and hacking...but we manage to get to the Amtrak station by 2 pm after a very long day's drive. We are fortunate to get just about the last seat on the train and go in to the station to wait for the boarding call.


I swear....of the 535 people waiting to board the train....if one of them was under 65 yrs of age, I'd eat my hat! There were wheelchairs, there were walkers, there were depend bags (vice diaper bags) and they were all coughing, sneezing, blowing, etc. Germaphobe Lynne is so happy she is almost ready to give her own eulogy! Despite curling up into some pretty amazing positions to sleep, we arrived in Florida by 10 am the next morning and it was about an hour's wait for our car to come out for pick-up. Note to self: if we ever do this again you can pay $50 and be tagged a 'Priority' so your car comes off first.


We got to our condo and Lucy the Landlady met us. She informed us that she no longer took credit cards and Canadian cheques were too big a hassle at her bank. Our problem for the next morning was how to get $5k in cash or cashier's cheque for her. After lots of phone calls (I hate you TD bank) our last option was to get a cash advance on our Visa (I love you Chase bank). All those tv commercials about Visa saving your 'whatever' are absolutely true.


Even before we tackled the money issue, we had to contact our medical insurance company because, in true form, my cold and/or flu was officially turning into something really nasty and needed to be looked after. Again, lots of 'toing' and 'froing' and 'Sorry, you're not covered' to the point where they realized we've paid a King's ransom for the privilege of seeing a Doctor outside of Ottawa and give us the thumbs up to get some help. We went to the closest ER and got the most wonderful help. They staff were awesome and I saw a Nurse Practitioner, got a chest x-ray, a couple of prescriptions and was out within 2 hrs.


The last order of business was to get a couple of cheap cell phones so that we can call each other in these mega-malls and just generally be in contact because the condo has no phone. I went into Walmart and luckily got the sweetest kid who obviously has a Gramma he loves and asked for the cheapest phone with the best service. For $10 each, I got 2 Samsung phones and for $29.00 each, a card for 120 minutes which doubles to 240 minutes when you load it! I can call Canada, Canada can call me. It's still charging but I think it even has voice msging. As long as we keep unused minutes on it, we can use it forever. Wayne said we could have coordinated our getaway and just thrown the phones away after robbing the bank but luckily we both know we can't run fast enough any more! lol


It's been a full day and we haven't even unpacked the suitcases yet. I'll send our phone numbers to those who need to know. Until next time, love and hugs to all.