Quote of the Day:

“Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don’t eat has been proved to be indispensable for life.  But I go marching on.” George Bernard Shaw

TB’s sittin on a balcony in Fort Lauderdale this fine morn overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, a bright, hot sun still rising and cooled every few moments by a series of marsh-mellowy cumulus clouds slowly drawing across a palette of pure blue. The clouds are all fat today, some light, white and fluffy, others dark,gray, and bloated  and your chronicler is right there feeling kinship with the latter. We dined in Ybor City Sunday night at the Columbia, supposedly the oldest restaurant in Florida. For TB, a crusty-soft loaf of bread to sop up flank steak cooked in a mixture of rioja soaked mushrooms, peppers, tomatoes, onions, potatoes and chirizo, all washed down with a pitcher of table prepared brandy spiked sangria. Then last night we ate at Casablanca Cafe on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. It got worse, in the “even better” sense of the word. I started with a spinich and ricotta ravioli in homemade marinara and then switched gears to an unbelievably fresh and flaky dolphin, lightly roasted and topped with pan-seared blue crab over whipped potatoes and cooked in some sort of light sauce that it seemed to me was an orange creamsicle base. My palate isn’t sophisticated enough to describe that any better. Suffice it to say, me and those clouds, we know what it is to be over-inflated this day, plodding slowly and satiated across the south Florida landscape, like a dirigible non-commitally searching for a destination but satisfied to simply survey what is beneath for a time.

Today we pick up the rest of our gang, but later. First there’s swimming and shopping–TB ain’t on this trip solo after all. After completing what I have decided is now one of my top five favorite drives–crossing the Everglades on the Tamiami Trail watching the alligators and the birds-tomorrow we start on one of my more established top five drives, down the A1A to Key West for Thanksgiving where I plan to drop a pound or two picked up this week while dining on a charter boat’s version of turkey and trimmings, or more likely ignoring them for the assorted water sports they offer. I just hope I don’t get harpooned when I remove my shirt.

Here’s hoping everyone in the TBU has a Happy Thanksgiving too, and take it from TB–one more helping of sweet potatoes, one more slice of pie, yeah, they’ll hurt a little, but look at it this way–proportionally you’ll probably be holding serve with everyone else. Excepting TB, of course who will have some work to do just to stay even.