I've been considering going on a vacation to Florida sometime next year.  Ostensibly, part of the trip will be to visit Harry Potter World and visit my parents.  At the same time, though, I've never really had a vacation before.  Last time I had a vacation, I was a kid, and my family went to Green Bay.  Several family members from my mom's side were close by (which is always just Heaven on Earth).  We spent a significant amount of time at the Green Bay Packer Hall Of Fame.  At the time, they had an Atari 2600 wired to a big screen TV where you could play football.  Always a gaming geek, so I had some fun, but definitely not my first choice.

As I mentioned, I've never had a real vacation, certainly not one since I became a legal if not mental grown-up.  I would be relaxing, getting away from my job.  And I don't see the point of traveling 2K miles just to relax, I can do that up here and still be close to my stomping grounds and creature comforts.

Discussing this with my teacher, she was pretty ambivalent, but she thought my problem was simple.  I need something not only worth seeing, but worth going to see.  It's possible I'm in a sort of funk.  I have no idea what is at Harry Potter World, so I don't know if it would be better than Great America in my own backyard.  Then again, considering I haven't been there in a while, either, it's possible I need something more than a theme park to get my attention.  Nicole Bobek, a former Chicagoan who was a figure skater before things went really really wrong spends part of the year in Florida, but I believe that would be considered "stalking".  I'm a fan, but I don't want to creep her out.  Miami is home to the biggest ska scene in the US, but I think the rudies would take one look at me and think I was a poser or something else that screamed "not one of us."

So, what would be interesting?  That pic I posted of the bedroom?  That has to be a resort somewhere (you can sort of see a wall on the left, and the depth makes me think that, if it actually was the ocean, the tides would partially expose it).  Someone at work said it was Atlantis.  Well, that tells me it's already too expensive for me.  How about something closer to home, relatively cheaper?  Like... say... Jules' Undersea Lodge?

In Sound Waves #5 and 6, Rhapsody and Melody stumble across an undersea home where The Professor and his family live.  Jules' Undersea Lodge (yes, named for Jules Verne) is a former marine lab in the Emerald Lagoon, Key West, that's been repurposed into a hotel of sorts.  Access to the hotel proper requires you to be a certified diver, you swim to get there (which means I really need to get my ass in shape).  It's 30 feet under the ocean surface.  You're looking at about $550 a night.  No hotel offers THIS ocean view....

The only thing I can't figure out is how I would get pizza delivered.  But I might not care.  I can see myself at one of the benches in the background and just watching for hours.

Personally, I'm glad I don't have to clean the windows in these places.