Bereft

This trip of ours was nominally a vacation, but we had a mission to accomplish: attend the wedding. We had to get proper clothes, we had to find our way to the site of the wedding, and all manner of other tasks. Suffice it to say that there was a lot on our plates for that day. We were not looking for more to do. That's what the preceding days were for. The following day was for leaving town. It was a very simple plan, and yet something had to get in the way.

We had some valid but minor complaints about our hotel. The tvs were substandard, and the pools were the same. That was it. We had no interest in leaving, and yet a scheduling glitch compelled us to do just that, and a mere couple of hours before the wedding. Now this was a crisis of the caliber usually witnessed in wedding movies. I was grateful that the news reached us after my suit had been picked out, because I'd had enough anxiety already. I was just counting on it being relieved, but there was no such luck.

So it was that we had to hustle everything out of the rooms and pack them into the car where they were to wait while we attended the wedding. There had been some hope of checking into the new hotel beforehand, but that possibility was rejected. We could only hope that the cars would not get too hot for our electronics and that thieves would not prey upon the parking lots at a Catholic high school chapel and yacht club.

Of course it was all just fine. It was a tempest in a teapot, if I understand the expression correctly. Following the wedding, we found our way over to the luxurious Holiday Inn of Sarasota, which featured a bar too exclusive to remain open past 11 in the evening. It also had high definition tvs, so once we had recovered some alcohol from one of the cars, we were able to see past the establishment's absurdly puritanical operating hours. Sadly, we were to check out that following morning, and so could not properly appreciate the place. It was not to be the last incidence of that for me on the trip.