I’ve always said St. Augustine is the Bermuda Triangle of Florida because you get in and can’t get out. Not that anyone’s trying. It’s the perfect place to be stuck, and you always count yourself lucky when you return to a place like this.
That’s especially true when you go to a conference in, say, the nation’s capital. I love traveling. Especially to a city like Washington D.C. There are monuments everywhere. Museums that sell astronaut ice cream. And a plethora of people who can speak cogently about Chapter 13, Section 12, Item B, Paragraph 42 of the Affordable Care Act. They do! Everywhere you go! And boy, it sure is interesting!
It makes you realize the best part of St. Augustine: Coming home. But as always, I learned a few things while away, and I thought I would share:
• When crossing the street at a roundabout, wait until there is a break in the traffic. Then close your eyes and run screaming with arms flailing as if a bear is chasing you. A bear isn’t chasing you. A bear would be awesome. Instead, there’s a city bus with questionable brakes coming from the direction you forgot to look. At a roundabout, there’s always one direction you forgot to look. And there is always a city bus coming that way. l Use your free time to go explore. But make sure you only take a sightseeing walk when there is a verifiable flash flood warning in effect. This makes the experience much more enjoyable.
• Travel with an umbrella so small that it looks like you’re holding up one of those folding paper drink garnishes over your head.
• Also, make sure that it’s an umbrella that likes to fold up on you at the most inopportune moment … like in the middle of a flash flood.
• When you get back to the hotel and the man at the front desk cheerfully asks, “So, is it raining outside?” don’t kill him. Just go upstairs, ring out your clothes and remember he’ll have to walk home in it later.
• Just because the hotel breakfast buffet has a 4-foot-tall stack of bacon laid out doesn’t mean you have to eat it all. Pace yourself. Just eat eight strips.
• Make sure, whatever you do, not to arrive early to your conference. You will look like some eager dork who the registration people will snicker about the rest of the day. Worse, you will have to kill time somewhere. This will inevitably (and ironically) make you late for your first session, and the registration people will snicker about you the rest of the day.
• Never pour a drink of water in the middle of a conference. Especially not from a metal pitcher full of ice. It will sound like boulders in the spin cycle of a washer, and there will be a major spill causing the Weather Service to issue a flash flood warning.
• Make sure when you come up from the metro, you do NOT get yourself oriented. No! Convince yourself you know exactly where you are (maybe by placement of the sun or a crow flying overhead) and then trudge off for 18 or 19 blocks in the wrong direction. This is especially fun when it’s 95 degrees out, or there’s a torrential downpour and you have a travel umbrella.
• When you have a travel umbrella, and even if you know the Weather Service has said there’s a 70 percent chance of rain, look out the window, see bright sun and convince yourself you don’t actually need it. Believe that the red blobs barreling toward you on the radar will magically veer away because of magnet properties in your fillings, or voodoo! This way you can have a really good conversation with yourself when you take shelter five minutes later in a Whole Foods Market while Niagara Falls pours down from the heavens.
• Never, ever, under any circumstances eavesdrop on a conversation in D.C. about Chapter 13, Section 12, Item B, Paragraph 42 of the Affordable Care Act. Your ears will bleed, you will sink into a catatonic state and the rest of the day you will wander the streets moaning wonk-ish things like, “exempt all actuaries with preexisting conditions from the sliding scale of assistance!”
• In fact, never eavesdrop on any conversation in D.C. You might hear something like: “Hey, I saw this idiot run screaming across a roundabout because he didn’t see a bus coming. Dumb tourist should go home.”
To that I say, “Amen!” and it’s good to be back.