We took a lit­tle trip to Flo­rence to visit Cousin Lau­rie and cur­rent beau Harold. With one cup of cof­fee each for Lau­rie and I, plus a refill or two, between us, we used 8 lit­tle creamer con­tain­ers and about 26,000 gran­ules of real sugar. The lit­tle bowl for the creamer cups was empty and the sweet­ener packet holder was left only hold­ing those blue, yel­low or pink pack­ets of syn­thetic stuff.

Maybe because it is past the sum­mer I-95 Florida tourist time and not late enough for the I-95 Snow­birds, the Cracker Bar­rel was not really busy. As a con­se­quence of this we ended up with an overly atten­tive waiter which became a source of both amuse­ment and irritation.

But some­how atten­tive didn’t trans­late into effi­cient. We didn’t get our food to us in a very timely man­ner, it seemed to take longer than usual and when it arrived noth­ing was out­right cold, but noth­ing was really hot, just warm. Plus Harold’s break­fast meal came with­out any bread (every­thing at Cracker comes with bis­cuits), when he asked for some toast, it came very quickly, so much so that it almost didn’t look toasted. No but­ter or jelly came along with it though. Now, sud­denly, the guy that was ask­ing how every­thing was, seem­ingly between bites, was nowhere to be found.

After we parted ways, Donna and I did a lit­tle geo­caching (9 for 9) on one of the sec­tions of Florence’s wooded trails that is near the Mall. On the drive home the Pur­ple Whale passed by the 26,000 mile mark.