It doesn’t matter what exotic holiday destination I go to; one of the persistent constants that accompanies me wherever I go, whether I like it or not, is my body. I often wake up wondering which part of me will be complaining. It’s a bit like a lottery. Will it be my back? Will my hips be aching? Will it be the usual fit of coughing and spluttering, until my dripping and sneezing nose settles down? Will I be able to see straight through y seeping eyes? I never know what to expect from one morning to the next. Today, it was my calf. A couple of times throughout the night, my calf cramped up painfully. I think it was the third jolt from this that finally signalled the end of this night’s sleep for me. It settled down after I was up and active, but it was yet another reminder that I really could do with a full-body transplant. This one is knackered.
Hot on the heels of a successful Waffle House experience last night, the family collectively decided this was the best way to kick-start the first full day of acclimation, so we all readied ourselves and loaded into the Pacifica for the short ten-minute trip to the nearby breakfast haunt.
The Waffle House was so busy that people were queuing inside for a chance to be seated. We tagged on and put our names on the waiting list. After about ten minutes, we were all nestled into one of the booths and soon munching on another delicious breakfast.
The first order of business today, following breakfast, was a trip to the Florida Mall, not far from the airport. I had decided previously that this trip was to be the opportune moment to grab myself a new laptop. This time around, I opted for a new M4 MacBook Air, which meant finding an Apple Store. There are a handful of these in the Orlando area, and our closest one was at the Florida Mall.
The Florida Mall is quite large, with around 300 stores spanning approximately 158,000 m2. When we arrived, I drove around the perimeter to find a place to park. The entire perimeter was a massive car park, so I could have parked us just about anywhere. Other than the major anchor stores —JCPenney, Sears, Macy’s, and Dillard’s —there were no signs indicating where the Apple Store was in the mall. It was a matter of luck whether I would park close or far from where we needed to be. How was our luck today? I parked at JCPenney and we wandered in to find out. Wouldn’t you know it? I managed to find the one spot in the car park that was about as far from the Apple Store as was humanly possible. The mall is so big; we had to traipse its entire length, navigating the crowds and trying to stay together. That was harder than it should have been. Joey was eagle-eyed, narrowing in on anything that looked like it sold toys, and racing ahead, while the girls were detouring left, right and centre, into store after store. Before long, we were split into two groups.
Sandy and I have local US phone numbers, but the kids don’t. They just have data-only plans for the month we’re here on their phones. Although our local numbers are active, we are still working out the finer details of configuring the phones to ensure we send and receive calls via the correct SIM or eSIM. Between mobile numbers, Facebook Messenger, Apple Messages, and WhatsApp, there are a plethora of ways to contact each other, but not all of them work. This made me a little nervous about losing track of Joey, so I stuck to him like glue, while Sandy and Jae wandered off into the gates of hell mall.
Joey wasted no time in pinning down the exact location of a Toys R Us store, embedded within the top floor of Macy’s. I caught up to him there after several brief sprints, while trying to maintain eyes on him all the while. He wasted even less time finding ways to burn through the majority of his week’s spending allowance. We exited there, toting a bag with a new Lego set and a multi-crystal lightsaber. I fear Joey still has some way to go before he grasps the finer concept of not being able to spend anything for the rest of the week after blowing his entire budget on the first thing he encounters. Sigh. The struggle is real and ongoing.
Next up for me was the Apple Store, which we finally stumbled into somewhere down the far reaches of the anxiety-inducing labyrinth. Having already researched the laptop option to within an inch of its life, my time and transaction in the store were limited to the minimum necessary to get the job done. I was in there for under five minutes. Ladies, take note. This is how shopping is done correctly. You decide what you need, go and pick it out, pay for it, and leave. It really is that simple.
With a few bags of newly acquired goodies, we all somehow managed to find each other again and headed back to the car. Having a new laptop meant I was no longer beholden to Jae’s laptop, which will make me much more at ease for the rest of this holiday.
Back at the house, I set to work unpacking and bringing my new toy to life. The keyboard on this thing is far better than the one on the previous MacBook Pro I have back at home. It’s not nearly as prone to double-strikes or misses. Each keystroke feels responsive, and I’m finding I don’t have to keep backtracking to correct for mistrokes. I only found out a few weeks ago that there was a recall program for my MacBook Pro model. Alas, I only discovered this after the window for a free repair was closed.
With my new laptop and my blog writing endeavours, now firing on all cylinders, the next order of business for me was to get some new driving and reading glasses. My prior research suggested this would be cheaper here in the US than back home, with the bonus of same-day service. I called around for a same-day service optician and booked an eye test. I was clear about what I wanted and that I was only interested if they could make good on their same-day service offering, which they confirmed. It was a location closer to home base, so we made our way home to drop off the kids first. Joey relaxed in the house, while Jae wanted to be dropped off at a nearby nail salon at the Champions Gate shopping centre. We had hooked Jae up to our Uber and Lyft accounts, so she could call an Uber home if she finished before my eye test. As it turned out, that’s precisely what happened, and Jae made her way home in an Uber for the princely sum of $6.
The trip from home to the eye test took Sandy and me about 25 minutes. Our villa is located in Davenport, which is farther out and more rural than the more typical Kissimmee tourist region of Orlando. You get to see some bizarre stuff. Businesses stake small advertising signs into the ground along the sides of the roads. We saw signs advertising all manner of things, like buying junk cars, tractor sales, new home lots, etc. One in particular caught my eye: “We buy diabetic supplies.” Let that sink in for a moment. An industry exists to trade in the buying of diabetic supplies from the general public. Who is selling their diabetes supplies? It’s not like you might wake up one morning and decide you suddenly don’t need all your diabetes supplies, right? Is this some black-market trade? What’s going on here? Is this driven by the costly healthcare industry, which has become one of America’s hallmarks?
We made it to the eye test facility, and I checked in for my scheduled appointment. I made it clear again that I was here for same-day service and wanted a couple of pairs of driving glasses—one tinted—and a pair of reading glasses. I even went so far as to say I didn’t want to proceed with the eye test at all unless I walked out at the end with my three new pairs of glasses. The lady who checked me in and got me to fill out some paperwork confirmed that it was all correct.
The eye test process was the same as back home. It consisted of me looking into various machines while they took all the appropriate measurements. Those initial scans were followed by someone measuring my prescription using a more manual series of tests, in which I was repeatedly asked which of two images was the sharpest, and so on. This is where the process differed from back home. Here, they did the final series of tests virtually, with an optometrist speaking to me via a screen rather than sitting with me in the room. It took a while before the optometrist was ready for me, presumably because he was carrying out a virtual test for another customer elsewhere in the country. While we were waiting for my turn, Sandy was doing a spot of research into this company and their reviews. Evidently, there were more than a few poor reviews from people displeased with the virtual testing and the general quality of the service. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, since all companies have a handful of negative reviews. And besides, we were already here, and the test was free with the purchase of my glasses, so I had nothing to lose.
After the testing was complete, they checked the new prescription against what they measured from my existing driving glasses, which I had brought with me. It turned out that the prescription strength hadn’t changed, but I did now have a different astigmatism value. After the sales clerk spent some time tapping things into her computer, I kept seeing the prices rise. It was up to well over a thousand dollars at one point. This was especially worrying, as I was told over the phone to expect to pay $79 for two pairs of glasses and an additional $40 for tinting. Admittedly, I was adding a pair of reading glasses, but that still shouldn’t have brought the final tally anywhere near what I was seeing on the monitor. It turns out my sales clerk and another sales clerk at an adjacent table were trying to update the same client in the system concurrently by mistake. Once they figured out what was happening, everything straightened out a little. However, then came the bombshell. I could take one pair of driving glasses with me today, but I’d have to come back in two weeks for the other pair. At this point, things went south quickly. I said that I was only interested in buying the glasses if I could have them today. My existing glasses are still sufficient, as confirmed by the test results. The only thing I really wanted and needed was a pair of tinted glasses for on-the-road use. If I had to wait a couple of weeks for those, that would have been half the holiday already gone, so I wasn’t really getting the benefit from them. My sales clerk was unimpressed (perhaps because she saw her sales commissions vanishing before her eyes), so she reluctantly ‘clarified’ that all I then had to pay was for the test itself. Nope! The test was free, remember? Yes, but that’s the promotion—free with the purchase of your glasses. Yes, but I’m not purchasing glasses since you cannot make good on your same-day service promise, so I’ve nothing to pay, right? It took a little more persuading on my part—and, let’s not be coy about this, I can ‘persuade’ with the best of them—but she finally accepted that we weren’t going to be parting with any money today. We left without a dent in my wallet, but with no new glasses either.
A little disappointed, more so because of the lost time than anything else, we left and made our way back to the house, via a quick stop at our nearest Publix supermarket. That was another shopping experience which was an eye-opener. I’d seen news stories about the cost-of-living situation in America, but neither of us was prepared for the sticker shock we received wandering around the Publix aisles, gawking at the insane prices. I chatted with some of the check-out staff about this. They mumbled something about tariffs. Not wanting to get bogged down in a political debate, we took our expensive provisions and headed back to the house.
Dinner tonight was decided to be at a nearby Chilli’s. Everyone would eat something, although Joey was still a bit of a challenge for various reasons. He did come with us into the restaurant and did eat something, so that was a win. I always knew that the first few days here were going to be a sting to the wallet, as we throw caution to the wind and indulge with little thought for the costs. Still, we’re already starting to consider how to maximise our pleasure while minimising the costs by being more judicious about what and how we order our meals. The next time we’re here, we’ll share one of these and only get two of those, etc.
Dinner was less eventful as a meal per se. What happened on the way there, on the other hand, was really quite shocking for all of us. The roads were quite busy, and it was already dark when we were on our way. I was driving in the right-hand lane of a three-lane road. It wasn’t raining, but I’d say the conditions warranted caution, so I was driving perhaps three or four car lengths from the car in front of me, keeping a respectful distance. The car ahead of us hadn’t spotted that the cars in front of it were breaking. If anything, the car in front of me accelerated, and we all watched in horror as it collided forcefully with the now practically stationary car ahead, resulting in a nasty accident. There was an almighty crunch. The rear end of the car ahead of us lifted several feet into the air, while the car it collided with spun on its axis about a quarter turn. It was fortunate I had maintained my distance, as it meant I was able to avoid getting too close completely. By the time we reached the collision, we saw people exiting both vehicles, so it seemed there were no serious injuries. Another car had already stopped to assist, so I made the split-second decision to drive around the accident and to continue our journey before getting caught up in the resulting traffic jam. It wasn’t much later before we heard the distant sirens from the emergency services vehicles racing towards the scene.
Not far from the Chilli’s was a Walmart Superstore, which Sandy was keen to explore. We made our way over there and wandered in. Naturally, everyone split and went off in their own directions. We all reconnected about an hour later. We didn’t leave with a huge shopping trolley full of purchases, which I was happy with. Around the corner was a Dollar Tree, where we found some cheaper provisions, like shampoo and so on. Again, the cost-of-living for household essentials here has really shot up in recent years. Curiously, Walmart didn’t accept contactless payments (Apple Pay). So far, it’s been the only store with that restriction we’ve encountered.
Everyone was by now starting to feel quite drowsy, so we made our way back to the house. Today has been a good day. The kids have been on their best behaviour (it’s all relative), and we continue to acclimate to the Florida lifestyle. We’ve nothing on the agenda for tomorrow, so it should be a nice, relaxing day at home. Our theme park schedule starts properly on Monday, so we have a day’s grace—the calm before the storm.