Friday December 28, 2007

Today was a sad day - all of the kids had to leave to go home. We got up early so we could see Laura and Nick and the kids off at 4 AM. The next to leave were Doug, Caroline, Lauren, Jaime and Dotty Jo at 7:30. At 9, we got a call from Laura saying that they had landed. We had checked the weather channel and saw that there was snow in Chicago (Amy and Dean's connecting city) so Dean called the airline and found that their flight had been canceled! They decided to go towards the airport and find a motel. They got a new flight for tomorrow morning and hopefully would go this afternoon to Downtown Disney. Better to have a layover in Florida than Chicago. We all got going at about 10. Dave and I stopped to checkout and then headed for Tampa to meet up with our good friends Lana and John King who have been visiting with Lana's daughter Kelly. We hooked up by phone and decided to meet for lunch at a restaurant called Castaways located on the causeway to Clearwater. We were a little late as the navigator (Sandie) took a wrong turn, but we did finally get there and had a wonderful lunch on the patio overlooking the beach. We left Lana and John and continued into Clearwater to pick up route 19 north. We stopped at a post office as Alex had discovered that Dan had left his homework in the bedside drawer and we needed to mail it to him. The route was a good one for looking at our surroundings - low speed and through lots of little towns. We ended up staying in Crystal River again (where we saw the manatees about a week ago). We were so full from lunch that we skipped dinner and took a lovely long walk instead. The motel we were staying in advertised hi speed internet, but it wasn't working so I am actually writing this on Saturday.