This past month, Southern California witnessed a fairly uncommon event — a tropical storm hitting its shores. Since 1900, only three such events have happened in California, though worth noting is the fallout from Tropical Storm Fabio, which in 2018 made Bricole’s outdoor wedding just a little bit more stressful. Having flown in and out of tropical storm Hilary, one might think that was enough of a thrill, but nay! I had postponed a visit to the dentist in Florida on three separate occasions, and not even Hurricane Idalia could stop me.
We departed from LAX for Orlando on the same morning that Idalia was expected to careen somewhere between Tampa and Tallahassee. On the plus side, there were a lot of empty seats on the plane. We shared our section of the plane with some FEMA employees getting themselves into position for the aftermath of the storm. It was somewhat foreboding. Nevertheless, we arrived in Orlando without incident and were at the gate and ultimately the exit shortly thereafter.
It rained a good portion of that night and the next morning, but eventually subsided and began to clear. I received a new camera lens in the mail that day and was able to play with it a little bit as the sun set. The following day was the dentist. They noticed “notching” on some of my teeth and I was required to come back that afternoon to get that sorted out. They numbed what seemed like the entire lower portion of my face so much so that I couldn’t really sense textures of foods or chew normally. Nicole treated me to some frozen custard because I was so brave and well-behaved.
I eventually regained some feeling and could go on living my life like a normal human. We went onto the rat’s property at Port Orleans Resort to stroll along the riverfront. I brought my camera to play around a bit more.
It was expected that we would have to head back to Los Angeles after just a few days due to my ever unpredictable flying schedule. Alas, someone picked up my trip at last minute. We had initially hoped that perhaps we could jet off somewhere else by combining that with my days off in early September, but it was already a day or two too late to pull that off. As further events transpired, that may have been for the best. As a sort of compromise with our extra days, we decided to rent a car and drive to St. Petersburg to make sure Idalia hadn’t taken the Donadio Condo away with it. Maybe I’ll start calling it the Conadio. Yes. I like that. Details on the adventures to the conadio on the next post.
passports & pepto bismol 