Friday Feb 4th.

Started out a bit late this morning after breakfast at Rainy's. We shot down Rt 75 and then took a side route by the coast. We stopped at two nature preserves to shoot. At the second we met a very nice fellow in an official Fla truck. Hank asked him about local eateries. Turns out the fellow was from Willingboro. His kids never had Rainy as a teacher because they went to Garfield and were there before the PATS program. One of his children is now a teacher.
Having met, yesterday at lunch, a man who used to work in Marlton and a woman who was raised in my home town - the dentist's daughter, I'm beginning to suspect that all Jerseyites end up in Florida. Oy!

We somehow missed the recommended ABC place for lunch and stopped at Emily's Family restaurant in Palm Harbor. Hank wanted to cross the big bridge outside of St. Petersburg so that we did and we were well impressed.

Today we saw a sign saying there was a hundred dollar fine for running through the toll booth without paying. We had to do that yesterday because there were only two lanes, one for sun pass and one for exact change. We had the exact change, but that lane was closed. We had no choice but to go through.

We stopped too late in Bradenton to get a good motel and are at the Motel6 - the good part is the lighting and shower are good. Everything else is shoddy at best. I want to adopt the rule we needlessly adopted in Spain - use only hotels with some star power. No more Motel 6 for us if I can avoid it. I'd rather have a few days less and stay at the Holiday Inns or the like. We'll see.