Uh … this isn’t Florida

Back in July, I determined that I needed to use five vacation days or risk losing them at the end of the year. Karen and I threw around many ideas and nothing was coming together. At one point, I think I said what about Florida. Then we remembered that Nana’s cousin Stan has a condo in Riviera Beach and has always said that we could use the condo whenever we want. I asked him if the condo was available the first week of September and he said yes. Great … now we have a plan. We booked our flights with Air Canada ($437.47 CAD / person including taxes) and our car with Alamo through Costco.

At the beginning of the week, we started checking to see what kind of weather we were going to have. We noticed that there was a day where there was going to be over 150mm of rain. As the week progressed, we learned that Hurricane Dorian was heading to Florida. They were predicting that it was going to make landfall at West Palm Beach which is just five miles south of Riviera Beach early in the week.  This would be my first hurricane.

projected path

While at work yesterday, Karen came up with an idea. She suggested that after we land in Fort Lauderdale, we should head to Orlando to ride out the hurricane for a night or two and then head to the condo. I thought that was a great idea since we would be inland. So we booked a hotel for one night.

We were able to get on the road to Toronto around 5:30pm. We stopped and had dinner at Tucker’s Marketplace before checking into the Hilton Garden Inn Toronto Airport ($144.55 CAD including taxes).

We spent the evening reading everything we could online regarding the hurricane … where it was make landfall, how dangerous a storm surge is, etc. While watching the 11:00pm news, they showed how the grocery store shelves were empty of water and how the gas stations either had long lines or had run out of gas. This is when we decided that we would not go.

The first thing we did was call Air Canada and because of the circumstances, they were able to cancel our flight and issue us a credit that we have to use before July 2020. Next we had to cancel our hotel reservations in Orlando and Key West and finally our car rental.

Now we had to figure out where we would go instead. It had to be someplace that we had been before because we did not have time to do any research. We also wanted it to be within a ten hour car drive. It came down to two choices … Cape Cod or Nashville. In the end, Nashville won because there is a Maggiano’s Little Italy. We decided that we would do the drive over two days and that we would go down to Nashville one way and go home another way.

Once we finally got going this morning, we headed over to a grocery store to grab some provisions. The drive to Niagara Falls took quite a while because of the long weekend traffic. We crossed over at the Whirpool Bridge around 12:30pm and stopped for lunch at Olive Garden.

Soup, salad, breadsticks

Two hours into the drive, it was time to stop at the Christmas Tree Shops in Erie, Pennsylvania. From there, it was a one and a half hour drive to Lyndhurst, Ohio to check out a L.L. Bean store. We picked up dinner from Chick-fil-A because it was a one hour drive to the Ohio Station Outlets in Burbank, Ohio and we would have less than an hour there before they closed at 9:00pm. It was a one and a half hour drive to our stop for the night at the Hampton Inn Columbus-South ($120.56 USD including taxes). As we pulled into the parking lot, it was full of people tailgating and playing cornhole. Today was a great start to our impromptu vacation.

Don’t you just love a bargain
L.L. Bean
Dinner in the car

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