Another grueling day

Here is the summary of the day so that those of you on a tight schedule can get a full sense of my experience without investing extra precious minutes:
I felt sick and sat around. Then I ate Dunkin Donuts. The end.

The expanded version is not much more glamorous. After a night of coughing and intermittent breathing and sleeping I sort of awoke to find that the dizziness and nausea were back. At least that way, the coughing wasn't lonely so that's good. I spent some time hanging out by the pool as the wind whipped up at 15 miles per hour. So I didn't swim but got a real sense of what it would be to swim by living vicariously through some others.

I returned to the room to find that the wife had decided to go on a tour of fancy houses. The tour would require a bus trip to a boat trip. I considered this in light of my stomach's inability to reconcile my seemingly static position with the constant swaying of the world around me. I begged out so that I would not leave a DNA trail across Florida in the form of half digested breakfast food (Special-K and skim milk...really). While the others went on their little adventure, I walked around in a daze looking for a quiet and relatively not windy place to sit and grade papers. Eventually I found a tree enclosed set of tables and I went to work. Soon, I was bored. So I left. I found the stores for tourist junk and wandered through them trying to figure out why they have 40 pink hats but no dramamine. By the time I made it back to the room, the group had returned with short stories of seeing houses and riding on boats. Sounds positively riveting.

Dinner was a lot of reheated leftovers so I chose to take a walk and get a sense of what restaurants were out there. Let me be clear -- this place has LOTS of kosher restaurants. I mean lots. The wife and I must have looked into 10-12 places on the one main drag. Of course, with only 2 exceptions none of them had any room for anyone to go in, sit down and get a meal. They were all jam packed. And I don't mean jelly. We were encouraged to make reservations for tomorrow but it seems sort of wrong to have to make a reservation to get pizza or a bagel and cream cheese. Many of the places didn't even have take out menus so that we could sit around later on and reminisce about the places we couldn't get in to. Who are all these people who all decide to go out to eat exactly when I do? And is there really such a constant and sizable Jewish community that it can support so many places year round? Pizza, pasta, fish, grill, shwarma, bagels, chocolates. We also saw 2 kosher markets and 2 Judaica stores. Lots of places, all full. Except the places that were already closed at 6:30. It was crazy to see them all so full. I mean, I live in Teaneck, and we have a bunch of restaurants, but they never get quite so wild and overfull. The Dunkin Donuts decision was the only reasonable one to make. The line was short and the food is predictable. It is a pity that there was only 1 woman working the 2 counters (Youdelina. I kid you not) and she didn't seem happy about it.

Anyway, we stopped at Walgreens on the way back for some motion sickness pills and then back here. The weather is about 71 degrees and the wind isn't as violent as it was earlier in the day, and now I'm full.