Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of my dad driving us kids around town just before Christmas, letting us ogle the houses all festively lit up with Christmas lights while dreaming of Christmas presents to come. Usually there was snow on the ground and it was always so frigid that the back windows in the ’62 Pontiac fogged up because we pressed our faces too close to the subzero windows. It was fun, but very, very cold.
The tour boat
Well, Jett and I went out last night to look at the festive Christmas lights, but we did it Florida-style: in T-shirts and shorts, sitting on the upper deck of a boat that meandered through the channels of Port Charlotte. The boat had no windows, but even if it did we wouldn’t have had to worry about fogging them up – the temperature at 7:30pm was 75 degrees.
Definitely a better way to ogle the lights.
I recommend that you click on the link above, because video definitely captured the tour better than the stills. But, for the video-challenged, here are some blurry night scene photos:
Festive sailboat
Artfully blurry lights
The Gulf from Pine Island
We arrived in Punta Gorda via Pine Island (a big island with a lot of nothing on it) in time for dinner. We tried the Sheraton Four Points first because the restaurant there got some nice reviews, but we didn’t like the ambiance. We did like the tiki bar there but it didn’t serve dinner (though it was having an Ugly Christmas Sweater contest that was tempting, but it would have cut our cruise too short).
The Tiki Bar at the Sheraton
We opted for dinner at Tortuga’s Seafood Restaurant, also highly rated. The atmosphere there was only slightly better. The food was very good (I really enjoyed the leftovers the next day) but there were several “almost good” aspects to the place. One was the seating arrangements. We were the first people in the place and they sat us in the middle of the (small) dining room. The next group in were seated right next to us, which we found a little annoying. Two customers, a dozen tables and you have to use two adjacent ones? Why? The other annoying thing was that I found, in an otherwise spotless men’s room, cleaning bottles on top of the sink. Again, why? There was no other place to store the cleaning bottles than right there, in plain view?
Nits, I suppose, but that’s what we do: we find nits.
The Mall at Fisherman’s Village
The Fisherman’s Village complex where the marina was located was interesting in it’s own right. It is basically a mall, but one with some interesting shops and an arena that seemed to have non-stop entertainment. When we arrived there was a band playing some oldies with several couples dancing. When we left there was a couple doing karaoke to Elvis. Very nice.