Monday, August 26, 2024

Atlantic City- August 9, 2023


Rosa woke up early, gave our unmoving forms hugs and went to walk and lay on the beach.
 
We remained unconscious for most of this time. 
Hey, in the exceedingly rare instances I rest on a vacation, I REST. Combined napping and reading lasted till noon. Anabelle started reading her first Russian novel. [Aside- This is inaccurate. I have no idea what my notes said, but it was some sort of high-end novel making the next joke still appropriate.] She did read a couple comic books at home, but once again, I found no way I could complain about her comic pile being mostly untouched. [Other Aside- Her comic pile was finally finished... roughly a year later.]
 
As usual, the three of us piled out of the room with all of our stuff just as housekeeping returned from wherever they’d been hiding to throw us out. With as much as possible dumped in the car, we went down to the hotel’s lower level.
 
Then we left the hotel, because an Atlantic City resort Starbucks is overpriced above and beyond their already high corporate standard.
 
We returned to the Boardwalk where Anabelle continued to make sure she’d give the daquiri place that replaced her favorite (and sample granting) Polish Water Ice stand a heated stink eye every time we passed.
 
Our traditional last day lunch was the Rain Forest Café. I still miss the fish in the giant tank framing the entrance.
(Anabelle- “WE KNOW! And did you know the Bronx Zoo Monkey House is still closed?”)
 
Our seat location meant we were mooned by a Gorilla the entire meal. 

There was a fair amount of confusion throughout the experience. They got our ticket mixed-up with someone else's in the kitchen, and when we asked for water, he brought us napkins.
There was also a level of concern over Gluten Free requests that made it seem like if they messed up it was a death sentence. (Which, honestly, is better than not caring about it.)
 
The waiter was apologetic if weirdly intimate, calling me “boss” constantly and repeatedly saying “I got you.”
 
The result was we were there for three full thunderstorms. Dropping the credit card at the end of the meal was a fitting finale.
 
As long as we already stayed too long, we hung out in the lobby for a bit to consistently be distracted by other things, including each other, causing us to miss when the crocodile moved.
 
We walked further down the Boardwalk looking for the Henna place that had caught Anabelle’s eye the other night. It turned out to be behind us and we caught it on the way back. (We continued to be very much in need of rest.) Anything drawn above the size of a freckle was massively overpriced.
 
Giving the former Polish Water Ice location one final stink eye, we returned to the Trop.
 
Buying souvenir taffy, we learned the points on our card were non transferrable and had a much shorter expiration time than previously. We used our hard earned eighty-five cents on a couple of Swedish Fish.
 
Rosa wanted some of her coated nuts for the road. I waited in line for them long enough for them to be grown, hand picked and toasted.
 
There were two reasons for this delay:
 
The first was one single guy was handling everything one could pay for at this location, pastries, snacks, Taco Express, nuts, possibly tailoring services…
 
The second problem was the man ahead of me had serious soup issues. First, he wanted a kind of soup they didn’t make. Getting what felt like it should have been this simple concept through his skull was a Herculean effort. When he finally settled on his soup selection, he decided that the price he was charged did not reflect the size of the soup container he was handed nor the solids to broth ratio. These concepts also took an extensive amount of time to get into his head.
 
With Rosa’s nuts and Anabelle’s Danish, we found our car in the garage and drove back up north, following the GPS along the traffic free and direct non-Goodfella’s based way out of the city.
 
We did make a quick stop at an acceptably overpriced Starbucks on the way back.
 
When everyone else wasn’t napping, the music was accompanied by Anabelle and my excellent screaming marmot impressions. This may have prevented some of Rosa’s napping.

Huh, the total word count of this entire vacation story is less than a single Disney Day
We do know how to maximize the magic!

Speaking of which, come back next week for the start of a different kind of Disney Adventure for our trio.
 

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