March 27, 2025 - Fort Lauderdale

Today was our first full day in Southern Florida as we await our embarkation on Celebrity Beyond.  The weather is sunny and warm with a nice breeze to make conditions enjoyable. The temperature reached a high of 30 degrees.

After breakfast I went for what I thought would be a short walk, but I ended up getting lost. I had crossed a bridge behind our hotel and discovered a park with a walking track around a lake. I thought that I could start on the track, walk back towards the hotel, then find an exit and get back to the hotel. After walking for about 30 minutes and not seeing any exits, I sadly realized the park was surrounded by private properties and there were no exists. On my way back to the park entrance, I somehow managed to miss the entrance and walked for another 5 minutes or so before finding another park entrance.  So, what I wanted to be a short walk turned into a mini marathon.

The Holiday Inn has a beautiful outdoor pool and hot tube. The landscape is relaxing, and you wouldn’t know that it was just a short distance to a very busy highway. We didn’t use the hotel’s bar, but it looked like a very classy patio bar.

In the afternoon we went to Hollywood Beach. It was a twenty-minute cab ride from our hotel. Marg knew this area because in the past she had visited her sister Donna and Ron while they were on vacation there, and our friends, Rigo and MJ, have a vacation apartment along the busy boardwalk. The wind was making the water quite choppy, so there weren’t many swimmers. It is still March Break here and the boardwalk was packed with students and the bars were filled to overflowing.

On our trip back to hotel we had a cabbie who was a treasure. Alexander is a native Jamaican, who served in the US Navy. He talked about the training he did while in the service, which included running non-stop until “Jesus comes.”  He commented on his joint assignments with the Canadian navy and how much Canadian servicemen drank. He has 13 children and many more grandchildren and great grandchildren. He joked that as a young man, he was a machine gun and now he is a musket that falls asleep immediately afterwards. You could tell how proud he was of his family as each of his children are university graduates, funded by GI scholarships. He also joked about his wife’s gambling obsession, and how when she wins, she only gives him a small portion of the winnings.

In the evening, we meet with our cruise crew for dinner. It was wonderful to see all these friends from British Columbia and the United Kingdom. The relationships seems to grow stronger on each trip. I think this might be or 5^th or 6^th trip with this group.

We were going to eat at a restaurant called the Quarterdeck.  The hotel’s concierge said we didn’t reservations, even though we numbered 17 people. How wrong could one person be. It was so full it would take over an hour just to get a table, with no guarantee that they could sit 17 people. Fortunately, there was an Outback restaurant across the street and there was plenty of room there.