What makes our last second jaunt to Florida a bit less nutty is that my dad had heart surgery a couple of months earlier and I hadn’t seen him yet–and he hadn’t seen baby Hot Fireshot yet.
He collapsed one afternoon–in front of a notable doctor, and down the street from a renowned hospital for heart surgery. A 50-something year old guy in better shape than my weight-lifting, running, healthy-eating dad would be difficult to find. Or a 30-something year old, for that matter. But suddenly, he’s on the ground, then in a hospital, and they discover 89%-99% blockages in his arteries and rush him into quintuple bypass.
So despite my parents saying a bunch of stuff about too-far-with-baby-three-kids-we’ll-be-there-soon-too-much-trouble-for-you, etc., I remembered suddenly, “Hey, since when do I do what my parents tell me to do?!” And off we went.
I texted madly with my sister on the way, but no one else knew we were going. (We had to tell someone: “Wouldn’t it be interesting if they were flying to our house to surprise us while we were driving there to surprise them?” Tom mused on the way.) Only my sister knew we were hurtling down the highway. . . without diapers (quick stop at a store two hours into the trip) or a front left headlight (another stop three hours after that) or any idea which way to go–just unblinking faith in the lady in the GPS who narrated the journey. (She speaks, of course, with a lovely Australian accent, set that way to appease Martin’s insatiable obsession with Australia.)
So after leaving home at 2 pm, we stopped around 9 pm for the night and left early in the morning, racing toward Florida, hoping to be in time for Christmas Eve.
