Our team of Scott, Tom, and Anthony Pinos (Scott’s 19 year old former Little in the Big Brothers program) flew to Orlando on Wednesday June 7th. The weather was hazy with smoke from the Canadian wildfires blanketing the Northeast with stinky and irritating blanket that made visibility limited – in fact, the next morning visibility would be so limited that PHL airport would put a ground stop on arriving airplanes.
Our first lesson for Anthony, who was taking his third airline flight, was on packing. Scott has assumed that Tom and Anthony would have checked luggage since we would be going for 18 days. However, each packed only a carry-on size bag, so we decided to take everything on. Anthony had dutifully packed all his full-size liquid toiletries in his bag, so we forced him to give them all do our driver (Karen McLaughlin, who did an excellent job driving us to the airport) so we did not have to check anything. Tom tried to explain the concept of “travel size” to Anthony.
Anthony was not Pre-check, so we sent him by himself to “standard screening” in Terminal B while Tom and Scott breezed through pre-check in C, and went to the Admirals club to await Anthony’s arrival. Turns out he did fine though they made him throw one liquid item he forgot. Flight was on time and comfortable, as was the pickup by our gracious and extremely helpful neighbor Denise. On the way down Denise complained that an Armadillo had moved into Scott’s yard.
At Scott’s Kissimmee house Anthony was amazed at the pool and performed a lengthy swim. Scott went for a walk and met the Armadillo who posed for pictures before disappearing into the bushes. Both the Jeep (which has been untouched since January,) and the Winnebago (which had been sitting for a briefer period) started up. We ate dinner from frozen food in the fridge – Anthony cooked far more hot dogs than we could eat – and Scott and Tom watched an episode of Yellowstone to get us in the Sheridan mood. Then we fell into a deep sleep.
