Aaron's Visit

I was flying my son down from Cleveland to visit me and was taking off (for the first time in 2 years) a Friday & Monday. This 4 days has been a blur so I wanted to jot down what we did before I forgot some of the details.

Friday morning we went to Honeymoon Island's "dog beach" to hang out with Sadie, cook some hot dogs and just hang out at the beach. It was nice (you must keep your dog on a leash at this beach) but was pretty windy, er really windy. We saw the sunset in Dunedin and then to relax in the hot tub and watch a movie.



On Saturday we drove to Tampa and Aaron and Sadie "helped" me keep laps/assign primes/write down the podium for the A & B race at the Tampa Crit. After that we went to the "dog beach" at Davis Island and had a cookout out and played with Sadie; it was a great time. We dropped Sadie off and headed back to my brother's gym and then home; we went to the Dunedin Brewery and then after dinner a friend stopped by to see my place and meet Aaron.

Sunday we took a slow drive down to Pass A Grill after I got back from a 35 mile solo ride. We ate at the Brass Monkey (yum) and then hung out at the beach....it was a perfect day. After getting back we were invited for dinner at a friend's in St Pete and brought Sadie with us; it was a nice evening.

Monday had me renting a tandem kayak and packing up a small cooler, backpack, the dog and Aaron for an adventure. If it wasn't too windy I had wanted to go to Honeymoon Island and paddle to an Island to play/eat at.
Well, the wind had kicked up from 7kts to what I was guessing to be 15-20 kts....I only really knew how windy it was once we got in the water. Long story short, the boat flipped over; luckily, I had secured all the "extra things" we had brought with us...Aaron stayed calm and even though Sadie loves to swim...I took her over to the shore then got back to the kayak, flipped it back over, had Aaron hold on to it and swam out to get the paddles which had drifted away....Aaron helped get the kayak back to the seawall then we put it back onto the van. I asked him if he wanted to drop Sadie off at home and try it again on a more secluded spot and he said sure. That was awesome of him and we put the kayak back into the water at Safety Harbor and had a great time....he even got the hang of paddling.




After that it was getting to be time to get him back to the airport so we dropped off the kayak and went home to shower and go to the airport for pizza and wait on his plane.

It was one of the best times that I have had with him in a long, long time.

Back to work and training on my bike for the race season that has already been underway for a month!

Ciao,
Rick