quickie from the land of milk and hunney

I had a decidedly non-culture shock return to the US.  We were greeted at the airport by family and friends; the same friends as last year, so that was comfortable and known.  I managed to get a bottle of Havana Club smuggled through customs so that was sweet.  And I now much prefer the Cuban rum to the Nicaraguan Flor de Caña.  Honestly, I don’t think my Dad really liked the rum I kept foisting on him, but he was a good sport and drank his poison.  The Havana Club is some sweet sipping rum though.

We fell in LOVE with our hotel and highly recommend them to families and really anyone.  We generally don’t stay at name brand hotels (other than Motel 6 ) but we’re getting to the point that the boys really don’t enjoy sleeping on the floor and sneaking in and out of places.  And the US is getting so regulated that they get really upset when you stuff more than 4 people into a room.  So we got a 2 bedroom, livingroom, kitchen “suite” that was really more like an apartment.  It came with a DELUXE breakfast (eggs, bacon, sausage, pan dulce, panqueques, french toast, fruit, juices, Evil Empire cawfee, salsita for your eggies, dry cereal, bagels, whole wheat and white and another bread for toasting).  I only normally eat oatmeal so I had the eggies and salsita and looked and looked for corn tortillas but used toast instead.  And drank buckets of Evil Empire cawfee.  They had The Most Comfy KING sized beds this side of the Mississippi.  They had free internet but for some reason the email only worked about an hour out of the 3 nights we were there.  If we make this Turkey Day visit a regular one we’ll definitely be back.  Well, actually we WILL be back as we had (still need to remedy this) only pesos to tip the maid with and need to go back with dollars.

Our flight was excellent, but one of these years we’re going to have to try Really Really Hard to stop visiting the east coast on the way to California.  It was lovely to fly into Miami; we loved flying over Cuba and seeing the keys and the approach to Miami was absolutely gorgeous, but the flight was a Six Hour Tour that was about five hours too long.  We started our day at 11am our time, heading to the airport and hit our hotel at 2am pacific time (4am our time).  A VERY long day.  Especially since I’d been up since 4am that morning.  We’re still catching up on sleep as the kids, not ones to miss out on such a sumptious breakfast, were up at 8:30am each and every morning to partake.

Turkey Day was an amazing day – so full of family (literally; there were 12 grandchildren, 2 grandparents, 5 siblings, 4 sibling spouses, and 3 other relatives) and my sister put on an amazing spread.

Now we get back to the business of procuring “stuff”, though I must say we’ve made an excellent dent with our $60 thriftstore and $250-heart-attack-inducing Tarjay haul.  My computer is limping along with either a bad RAM slot or DIMM so updates may be few and far between.  Sounds like a most excellent excuse to me!