Dateline July 7, 2019, Innisbrook and the Summer Ahead

It had been a busy spring around the house, with no end of projects, the biggest of them Janice's remodel of the guest bathroom. As best we can tell, that bathroom had not been touched since the house went up in 1958, so it was high time. It was a project, but it came out beautifully, and thank goodness it is done.

A shakeout weekend. On the twenty-first of June we ran over to the Tampa area for a weekend of golf at Innisbrook, with a second purpose in mind: to make good and sure the RV was up to snuff before we set out for the summer on the eighth of July. After all the trouble last year, we have by now replaced just about everything on the thing that could fail, so our hopes were high.

It was a fine drive across the state, and around half past twelve we pulled off for lunch near our old stomping grounds in Dade City, at a favorite haunt in San Antonio, Florida, called Pancho Villa's Mexican Restaurant. We had eaten there many a time when we lived nearby, though that was eight years ago now, and we half expected it to be gone.

It was not gone at all; there was a line out the door at two in the afternoon, and it was every bit as good as we remembered. Our one regret was that, not having planned ahead, we missed the chance to gather up some of our old Lake Jovita friends to join us.

The Island Course, and a familiar trouble. Saturday morning we went over to the Innisbrook Resort to play the Island Course. They had taken nineteen inches of rain that week, so we did not know what to expect, but the course was in surprisingly good shape and we had a fine round. We turned in our card, put the clubs away, and were climbing back into the vehicle when a woman called over to tell us we had a flat front tire. So much for the easy part; we have come to call this sort of thing a shakeout weekend. We have Good Sam roadside assistance and called it in, but the first fellow they sent never showed at all, and it was five hours before we finally had the spare on. A fun afternoon, that.

Sunday morning we were back out on the Island Course, paired this time with a delightful couple from Naples, Mark and Claire, both retired engineers from General Motors.

None of us was troubling the course record, and poor Mark found himself with about the worst lie any of us had seen in a good while.

We laughed our way around, though the rain had kept them from cutting the rough alongside the fairways, and a ball that strayed off the short grass was as often as not gone for good.

The wheel, again. We finished up and headed home to Flagler Beach, the first order of business being to check those tires; they were fine. But back home our tire shop, which had only just put four new tires on the back, pumped up the bad one and found the trouble: the wheel itself was cracked. Now, last year we replaced a cracked wheel in Billings, Montana, one of the many adventures that made that trip, shall we say, interesting, and a broken wheel is supposed to be a rare thing. Here we were with a second one, on the same Mercedes Sprinter. The short of it is that we ordered all five wheels from Mercedes and had them replaced, and the Roadtrek is in fine shape now for the summer.

A new chapter. As anyone who reads along knows, we do love our golf, and we have lately been given a happy assignment: to play courses around the country and write up how we found them. We christened the arrangement at Innisbrook, and have since enjoyed a couple of beauties close to home, among them a Rees Jones design that winds through an old sugar plantation, in near-perfect shape, and the lovely Creek Course at Hammock Dunes.

We will be playing a good many courses this summer as we travel, first up to New England and then clear across to British Columbia, and we will report on them as we go.

Twenty years. The third of July marked our twentieth wedding anniversary, and we celebrated at The Cellar, in Daytona Beach, over a fine Italian dinner and a good Tuscan wine. The Cellar happens to sit in President Warren Harding's old winter home, built in 1907, so we got a little of our favorite presidential history with the meal.

The traditional gift for a twentieth is porcelain, which gave us a good laugh over dinner, since redoing that bathroom had just called for a brand-new porcelain toilet. Life is fun.

And now it is back to packing, with the road waiting first thing Monday morning. The plan, as always, is golf, a heap of adventures, and family and friends all along the way.