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The girls that go wild get old too. Today at the pool here in Florida on spring break was all the evidence of that anyone could possibly hope for.
It’s another sign we only have so many springs, summers, falls and even winters, too, before it’s all said and done.
While making the journey from Louisville through Nashville, Chattanooga and Atlanta on the first day of the road trip, and before ultimately arriving at our destination here in the Orlando area the second, it occurred to me I was on an actual spring break for the first time in a decade and a half.
Financial printers do not do spring breaks. They are locked into work, eat, sleep mode from February through the first couple weeks of May. Sometimes, when deal activity warrants, they go into early summer—grinding it out from dust till dawn, day in and day out, over and over again.
College students, most certainly, however, do spring break.
I am a college student, albeit an old one. I’m older than most of the faculty truth be told, as well.
That is why I feel like Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School many days while I sit at my desk in the room with my class mates.
Today at the pool here in sunny, warm Orlando I didn’t do a triple lindy off the diving board like Rodney. I did get in the pool slowly, though, and looked around.
Unlike everyone at school, most everyone at the pool was older than I.
I didn’t feel any particular glee about it, just a nagging sense of finality knowing full well we all will someday get old if we live long enough.
I was also thinking that at one time many people may have come to Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth a la Ponce de Leon, but few, if any, actually found it.
Today, the youngsters flock to Florida on spring break not in search of the fountain of youth, but for a good time—sex, drugs, booze and rock ‘n’ roll. It is a reward for making it through school up until this point.
Whatever the reason, I was bound to enjoy my first actual spring break in like forever. When I was going to school the first time, “Girls Gone Wild” wasn’t even around, nor was the spring break ritual of getting wild and crazy and trying not to get in trouble while doing so.
Today I kind of got in trouble on spring break.
I got a sunburn and am paying the price blogging through it now.
Bet you didn’t know bloggers are sometimes deserving of hazardous duty pay.
I saw some alligators while walking around today, too. Some might think this is another cause for blogger hazardous duty pay. Alright, alright, they were babies and not that ferocious while sunning along the golf course waterways I went past.
They could have done some damage in theory if they would have attacked as a pack of baby alligators, maybe.
Unlike the girls, when you are older and go blogging on spring break, sometimes your imagination goes wild.
I witnessed smoking in a restaurant for the first time since the 90s during our stop in the Atlanta area.
This made my imagination run wild again.
Panama City Beach, Florida, during spring break (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Spring breaks of the 90s had bars and restaurants with smoking in them, and Girls Gone Wild was in its infancy.
Getting wild and crazy on spring break is overrated.
But considering going to the beach tomorrow for a dip in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in 30 years with superficial dermal stings courtesy of my back to school influenced, spring break sunburn?
Priceless.