The World’s Longest Freedom Review: Part 4featured

This one’s pretty dry on the pics…sorry! But we start the actual boat review in the next part so this part is kind of a necessary evil.

I woke up alone in the hotel room around 9:30 am. I guess Mom, grandma and Stephanie ran out to Target to get random stuff like Vitamin Water. I don’t know. They left me a Post-It LOL. It looked beautiful outside- nice and sunny and best of all WARM!

I was dressed and ready for the day by the time they got back. We’d had a bit of disagreement on how to spend the day. Being the “adventurous” one of the bunch (which really isn’t saying much), I wanted to drive down to the Keys. If no one else wanted to drive all the way to Key West (which was about four hours away), we could drive to Key Largo, which was a MUCH shorter drive *and* would allow me to cross another place off my life’s goal list of visiting every place in the song Kokomo.

I was outvoted.

Mom used to actually live in the Fort Lauderdale area way before Stephanie and I made our grand entrances into her life and she wanted to go to Miami to take us to this place she used to go to for brunch all the time, but that was scratched because Lord Wikipedia told us that the restaurant was shutdown in 2006.

We ultimately decided to just bum around SoFlo for the day. First stop? We drove a half-hour north to Boca Raton. Grandma has a condo up there (which we don’t use for pre-cruise stays because we prefer to stay closer to the port and it’s an awful lot of work to set it up to stay for just a day or so) and we’d actually all go and live there in the winters when we were little, so Stephanie and I were looking forward to a small tour du’childhood since my memories of our winters in Boca consist of seeing the Little Mermaid, riding the trolley to Boca Town Center, crawling around the balcony, pulling the shower string at the pool for fun and grocery shopping at Publix.

The drive up to Boca was a pretty quick straight shot off the turnpike. We stopped for a quick breakfast at Einstein’s. Mom, grandma and Stephanie all had bagels with cream cheese and lettuce/tomato and I had a bacon and egg bagel sandwich. Einstein’s was PACKED, especially for a late weekday morning. We have two by our house at home and neither are ever particularly crowded. There wasn’t much room to eat inside so we took our food al fresco. Though it might have been cooler by Florida standards (low 70s), it was nice and warm for us.

Our first stop on our tour du’Boca was the TJ Maxx. Why? Because even though we had all massively overpacked (I had a suitcase, a duffel bag and another suitcase of shoes and toiletries that I shared with Stephanie), some of us (mostly Mom) wanted a few more “going out” outfits. The store was packed for a weekday morning (then again, almost everyone who lives in Boca is retired) and it had SUCH amazing merchandise! They had an entire section of just designer stuff. I found a Cynthia Rowley top that I loved and we all actually ended up getting the same shirt in different colors. That’s just how we roll.

We passed a shoe store in the same complex on our way to the car and decided not to go in and instead drove to the condo just to check in on it…and then we decided we wanted to look at the shoe store so we drove back to the shopping complex. We did a little shoe shopping and then decided we were going to go to lunch at Boca Town Center. Yes, that Boca Town Center…the one with the serial killer that was never caught. Apparently, my grandpa used to take me there a lot when he was still with us. Mom always tells me the story about how there was this huge grand opening party at the Bloomingdales there and I had just discovered dancing and I put on my own little dancing show. Anyways, we could find parking at Town Center. Like, at all. On an early Friday afternoon. And instead of circling the parking lot for an hour, we just decided to skip Town Center and head back to Fort Lauderdale.

When we stopped for gas at an oasis on the Turnpike, we grabbed some sandwiches (for Mom, Stephanie and grandma) at the Earl of Sandwich and I grabbed a muffin. We dropped Mom and grandma back at the hotel and Stephanie and I went to Target so I could grab some stuff I needed. Mom called me while we were in the Target parking lot and I guess I freaked her out because I *hate* birds and there were these red-headed devil ducks ALL OVER the parking lot and I guess my reaction to them made her think we were in a car accident. Oops.

It’d been windy all day and it was really picking up when we got back to the hotel. We decided to head to the Galleria in Fort Lauderdale and eat at PF Changs and then go find a movie theater to go see Valentines Day (because we’d be on the boat for Valentines Day and I didn’t want to see a movie about Valentines Day after Valentines Day…it’s the same reason why even though Love Actually is one of my favorite movies ever, I only really watch it in November/December). Stephanie called for reservations and I was surprised that we found no traffic on the drive to Fort Lauderdale.

We wanted some time to shop at the Galleria (which is one of my favorite shopping centers), but we got there just around the time of our reservation. We have a PF Changs by our house, but I can’t remember the last time we ate there. We get carry-out occasionally because they have the best mongolian beef, but I think the last time we actually ate AT PF Changs was when we were in Beverly Hills back in 2006.

The food was good. It was happy hour so we ordered a few discounted appetizers (including their AMAZING chicken lettuce) and we shared some mu-shu pork, some sort of chicken dish that Stephanie insisted on and a mongolian beef.

By the time dinner was over, it was POURING out. Just absolutely POURING. Mom and Stephanie went and got the car and pulled it around so grandma and I wouldn’t get too wet. We consulted my iPhone for local movie theaters. Here’s a top hint: DON’T DO THAT. It sent us to two movie theaters that didn’t exist (that or it gave us the wrong directions to go there) and by the time we realized where we were, we missed the movie. So instead, we decided to go back to the hotel and try to find a theater closer to there. We stopped at Publix to get some muffins for the next day and grabbed some dessert to eat at the hotel (I mentioned to Mom that I really wanted some chocolate covered strawberries, but we didn’t get them…it seems random now but this comes up again a few days later) and then we drove back to Plantation. I discovered how to create bokeh on my camera and spent the drive taking blurry pictures of lights like these.

There was a showing of Valentines Day at the Sawgrass Mills cinemas (Sawgrass Mills is the largest outlet mall in the country…just a random fun fact) at 10:15. We had a LOT of repacking to do and we had to be up early the next day to get on the boat, so we had a lot of debate on whether or not to even go see the movie since it was opening night and it would be packed. Grandma decided she didn’t want to and Stephanie and Mom didn’t really want to, either, but I really wanted to go so we decided to go for it.

Sawgrass Mills was about 15 minutes away and even though the mall was closed, it was PACKED. The theater was probably one of the biggest ones I’d ever been in and we got there just in time to grab some seats together (a big closer than we like to sit). The movie was a bit disappointing. I’m glad I didn’t wait to see it until after Valentines Day because everything I didn’t like about it would have just been heightened. But it was okay.

After the movie, we went back to the hotel and Stephanie and I finished our packing and I went on MSN for awhile. For a “vacation,” I certainly wasn’t getting much rest, but the next day, I’d be losing my internet service for eight days and for someone who craves connection as much as I do, I wanted to draw out as much time with my iPhone as possible.