We ended the month of April with R&R. After having a boarder for eight weeks and intermittent guests for various periods, we needed to get away. We can now take our R&R ’till we are “R2R” or “Ready to Return”. In this case we had planned to stay until Saturday but the weather on Friday morning changed our minds. We left St. Pete’s on the 24th and drove to a small town on the Panhandle called “Madison”. June had found at one of our rest stops a discount traveler’s book. In it was a coupon for a reduced stay in the Madison Holiday Inn. On many prior occasions we found such discounts but never had any luck in using them. This time we did and it became one of many “firsts” we were to have on the trip. We managed to get a room for less than our usual AARP or Senior discount rate. We also found a family restaurant just down the street that made eating a cheap but delicious endeavor. The other firsts were 1) I visited states where I had never been before, Alabama and Mississippi. June had previously been to Birmingham, but she too was making her first appearance in Ole’ Miss; (2) we changed our clocks while enroute. Three-quarters the way over the panhandle you leave EDT and enter COT. We gained an hour only of course to lose it on returning. I had never driven where that occurred before. We both had experienced it in air flights but never in a car. The last “first” was upon arrival at Biloxi, Miss. to stay at the Grand Casino Hotel we were informed that there were “two” Grand Casino Hotels in Biloxi. One was “lslandview” the other was “Bayview”. After some shuffling we crossed the highway and settled in Bayview. A partial ‘first’ was that all the casinos were on water. You would be hard to notice it except you must step up a bit as you enter the casino area. Under the rugs there is a large metal hinge between dock (hotel) and the boat (a barge affixed to the hotel and the ground). I say a “partial” first since we have been aboard ships with casinos aboard.
We arrived on Sunday afternoon. We saw a great musical revue and show in the evening. The next day we toured the area. It has maybe seven or eight casino hotels. It is spread out over an area of four or five miles so it is not as gaudy as Vegas or Atlantic City. The sand is white, as it is in Jersey and unlike some of it you find along the West Coast of Florida. Around four P.M. we heard from Betty Hopkins that they had arrived. We met them for dinner and caught up on the news. Betty had three sisters also on the trip from Philadelphia by bus. It was a happy reunion. We then learned that they were booked for tours for the rest of their stay. We did see them at 11 A.M. on Tuesday for a bit and then said good-bye to them that evening just before they went into see the show. They were leaving early in the morning to tour New Orleans. It is just a two-hour ride to it. We too left on Wednesday to begin the drive back with a plan to see the panhandle. We left the main highway after Pensacola and traveled through one resort after another to Panama City Beach.
June spent her allotted gambling budget but it took the three days. I got to do some reading like a Parker’s detective story, featuring Spencer, and an Agatha Christie crime story with H. Poroit. l walked to the” Seafood and Maritime Museum”. It was just a few blocks from our hotel. I entered and found no one there. There was a counter to the right of the entrance door and behind it computer running. So I figured someone was there but after walking in a bit and calling out no one appeared so I began my tour. I learned that Biloxi was 300 years old! A Frenchman named Seur d’Iberville discovered it in 1699. It received its name from the Indian tribe that occupied the area. The discovery came after La Salle had come down the Mississippi in 1673 and declared the entire watershed area to be “Louisiana” for Louis XIV. However LaSalle efforts to establish a colony failed and the first one established was that by d’Iberville in Biloxi in 1699. A little side story about LaSalle is that when he came back several years later he missed the shores of Louisiana due to an error in the reading of longitude. He ended up in what is now Texas. His colony and himself were either killed by Indians or died of disease. It was another tragedy at sea due to the longitude problem being unsolved. Walking around the room I followed Biloxi’s history. lt became the Shrimp capital of U.S. and a booming seafood canning industry was established. I then heard some one enter and I coughed up my admission price ($1.50 for the “chronologically gifted”). The history ended around 1984 with pictures of Regan eating shrimp with a crowd in Biloxi. One Mary Maloney cooked and served it. Her family has had a restaurant in Biloxi going back some fifty years and there is one even today.
Twenty years ago this month I celebrated a birthday in New York’s Warwick Hotel with my gang. At the same time we were celebrating daughter Suzie’s graduation from Columbia Law School and her husband Tom’s graduating from Columbia Business School with an MBA. Five years ago we celebrated Tom’s ordination as a Deacon in the Roman Catholic Church. I also celebrated a complete recovery from by-pass surgery that month having had the operation in January. Today, five years later I am back to my fighting weight and my cholesterol is lower than I can ever recall.
Our stay in Panama City as I noted above was cut short by the weather, nevertheless we did have a good time. June got a day in the sun and we took a long walk on the beach. It was tough walking since the sand was so soft even along the water’s edge. We found some great eating spots and I even got four holes of golf in before being told to get off the course due to an oncoming thunderstorm. I did get my money back so I played for free. On the walk we noticed what looked like blue balloons with tails. They were scattered along the water’s edge in various sizes and groups. June noted that they were jellyfish. Lo! The headlines next day of the local paper, “Portuguese ‘Man-of-War’ Invade the Beaches”. Another sight we were surprised to see were ‘breakers”. The Gulf looked and sounded like the Atlantic at Myrtle Beach and Avalon with ‘real’ waves. We thought that maybe it was due to the recent storms in acting unlike it does here on the West Coast of Florida. However an inquiry of our waiter assured us it is that way all the time. It was like being back in Avalon as we went to sleep the first night in our room on the beach. The roar of the ocean filled the air.
May is the month of Mothers. It is birthday month for Marge and I. On Mother’s Day we went to the beach and ate hoagies for lunch. The mother in this house has great taste in food but limits some of those “treats” to days like “Mother’s Day”. For dinner on Mother’s day we had a “pizza”. A real one brought at Poppa-Johns with its special garlic butter sauce for the crust. June’s requests were fulfilled and you can be sure I enjoyed it. The beach was delightful so much so that we stayed till after five P.M. I even had a swim in the Gulf since the water is about 77 degrees. A little walk on the beach put a nice touch to our Mother’s day.
My birthday gift from June is a dinner at the Olive Garden with 15 friends. We are having Andy and Paul as visitors from Thursday night until Sunday. We will try two new golf courses. It sounds like a fine celebration and I look forward to it.
I have gone back to one of my favorite studies, the life of Thomas Jefferson. I have obtained a lecture course on audiotapes of his life. A former Columbia professor gives it. He is now teaching a CCNY. The course includes the reading of a written biography along with listening to the lectures. Happily I have that biography which the professor chose for required reading. I had no idea until the course arrived that it, the biography by Willard Sterne Randall would be part of the course. My nephew-lawyer Frank Allen gave me that book as a birthday gift some 4 years ago. It was the book that began my interest in the author of the Declaration of Independence. What is pleasing is that in rereading I find it just as interesting as the first time.
We bid you a farewell until next time with a hope to add a note.