Weekend Update

We had a pretty good Easter weekend. We left Thursday night after work and drove to Orlando. We got in about 12:30AM and stayed at a hotel near the University of Central Florida (UCF) campus. On Friday we had a campus visit at 10:00AM that lasted for about 3 hours. Kiel got a chance to check out UCF pretty good. UCF is huge! It's one of 15 largest universities in the country, it has a student population of 43,000. The funny thing is that you never hear about this school. I know folks who have lived in Florida there entire life but never heard of UCF. We got a $20 parking ticket from the campus police. We parked in a space that used parking meters that would only let you pay for a maximum of 2 hours of time. So they nailed us about 5 minutes after our 2 hours was up. I look at it as contributing to the general fund of the school at which my child will attend. After checking out the school, we checked out the local area. The area around the campus is what you would expect: lots of apartments, traffic and bars. The campus itself is very nice, it's actually quite new. The school itself is a little over 30 years old plus they keep expanding it so most of the facilities are in excellent shape. Kiel likes the program (Media Arts/Game Design) at this school a lot too so this seems to be where is he leaning.

We left Orlando about 3:00PM on Friday and what should have been a two hour drive took four hours because of the weather. We ran into some pretty stout thunderstorms as we headed towards Jacksonville. The weather slowed down the already congested traffic, so it took much longer than expected to arrive in JAX. We stayed right downtown on the river near the Landing area. The city was beautiful, they just had the Super Bowl there a couple of months ago so they did a lot of work on preparing the city for that. The view of downtown with the rivers and bridges was great. We ate at the Landing at some Brew House and then listened to a band that was playing on the landing. Katlin and I got up around 6:00AM on Saturday and went to the golf tournament. After finally getting to the course, we were able to watch about 4 hours of golf and then the rains came - and they never left. We left and made it back to the hotel around 2:00PM. We picked up Kiel and Kathy who had been hanging out at the hotel and went to the mall and dinner at The Bonefish Grill. After that we went back to room and to sleep.

We knew that on Sunday more rain was expected to roll in around 2:30PM. Because of that we decided to get to the course early again. Kiel, Katlin and I arrived at the course around 7:30AM. We immediately got a pairing sheet and figured out what was happening. We were able to watch over 6 hours of golf. We got to see everyone we wanted to and watched from several holes. We were tired and knew the rains were coming so we left at 2:00PM. We got to the car and started to leave and the heavens opened up and the rains came down again. Play was canceled for the rest of the day. So we got to see about as much golf as we possibly could. We picked Kathy up at the hotel and headed home. We got home shortly after 6:30AM and unpacked the car and then started laundry. It was a good time - it was nice to get away. Even though the weather was miserable at times we still had fun.

On Saturday while we were at golf, Katlin and I decided to watch from the green of the 9th hole. Kat likes to watch the guys make their approach shots and then chip on to the green and putt. Because of the way this hole is setup you get to see each player take about 3-4 shots. Anyhow, Kat and I got to the hole early and had a pretty good view of this hole. We each took a small 'saddle' chair', so we were sitting but were very low to the ground. We sat in the front row near the green, near the area where the players walked off after they were done playing. So we ended up being about 6 feet away from them as they exited the green. You could easily make eye contact with them and talk to them. As we were sitting there watching them play one of the players made eye contact with me and motioned that he was going to throw his ball to Kat. He threw it and Kat got it - which was nice of him to do. But what's funny is that the exact same thing happened with the next two groups of players that passed through. None of them knew that the group of golfers who just left did the same thing. So three times in a row after they finished playing on this hole they tossed their ball to Katlin. Keep in mind that there were well over a 1,000 people standing around the watching this, plus TV cameras. After the third ball Kat was embarrassed by the attention he was getting, so we decided it was time to leave and move on to some place else. Kat was just in the right place at the right time, plus these guys enjoy doing that kind of stuff with kids. It was pretty cool and made for an interesting few holes.

That's pretty much it. Hope your Easter was enjoyable as ours. Later...