Clearwater Beach, June 2012

Well, folks, we’re back, as you can probably tell from the fact that my Instagram photos have abruptly switched from photos of sunsets (and, er, rubber ducks…) back to their usual programming of photos of Rubin. And rain.

(OK, I haven’t actually taken photos of rain yet. I will, though.)

It’s been an… interesting… couple of days, starting the day before we left Florida, with the realisation that someone had cloned my debit card and cleaned out my bank account (and the subsequent 1.5 hour argument with my bank to convince them that it wasn’t ME who’d been paying for taxi rides in London while lounging by the pool in Florida. It’s a long story…), to the fact that it took us over 24 hours to make it back home, thanks to an already long layover at Gatwick, which got even longer thanks to a delay on our flight. (It was so cold in the airport, and I was already so tired, that I spent part of this delay lying with my head on Terry’s knee, with clothes borrowed from my dad and Terry draped over me in a bid to stay warm. My mum later told me I’d looked like “a heap of old rags”. Excellent!)

Anyway, since we’ve been back, I have, of course, plunged right into the usual pit of gloom, with a severe case of the Post-Holiday Blues. Rather than dwell on that, though (And hey, I’m sure you can just refer to any of my previous “OMG, I HATE BEING HOME!” posts if you really want to…), I’m just going to show you some photos from the apartment at Clearwater Beach where we spent the first week of our trip, almost half a lifetime ago – or it feels like it, a least.

We stayed on the 9th floor of a gorgeous apartment building, right on the beach. Our view to the front was the one you can see above, and to the back was a view of the Intracoastal Waterway.

(There was also a little black poodle pup living in the building. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but still: POODLE PUP!)

It. Was. Amazing. In fact, we spent a LOT of time on those balconies, just staring at the view, and sometimes watching the lightning from far-off thunderstorms, which will be familiar to anyone who’s visited Florida, particularly at this time of year. In fact, one night we’d planned to go out, but just as we were about to leave, the most amazing lightning show started up, so we sat down to watch it on the balcony, and then, when I got up to go into the kitchen for a drink, I walked SMACK into the closed patio door behind me. Actually, I’ll be honest: “walked” is the wrong word. I actually SPLATTED against that door like a bug on a windscreen. I bruised both my forehead and elbow (which I think I must have raised at the last second, in a bid to protect my face), and spent the rest of the holiday waving my hands in front of me to make sure I was walking through air rather than glass, every time I stepped outside. (I’d like to say this stopped me doing the same thing twice. You all know it didn’t, though, don’t you?)

We also spent a lot of time on the beach, where we apparently only took “walking into the sunset” type photos, even when it was 7am in the morning. These ones are from our first day, when we all woke up early due to the jetlag, and walked for miles along the beach:

It’s mostly empty because it was still early, but the beaches on the gulf coast are so long that it’s not hard to find yourself a reasonably empty stretch, which is good because, well, The Others. You’ll just have to imagine it, though, because after this, we didn’t take many more beach shots, for fear of destroying the camera with sand or saltwater.

Speaking of photos. though: as you’ll already know if you follow me on Facebook, we took 1,518 of them during this trip. And there are another 666 (OMG! THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST!) on my mum’s camera, which is where most of these come from – thanks, mum! I’m going to be kind, though, and stop here. For now. Like the Terminator, though, I’ll be back…