Robert came up from Boynton Beach for the weekend and Jean’s brother and sister-in-law were on their way from North Carolina. So Friday evening Jean, Robert and I decided to go out to dinner at Mike’s Dockside Bar. It isn’t directly on the Gulf but sits back at a marina on one of the inlets. To the North is a large saltwater marsh.
We went inside to sit down and the dining area was almost bare. It’s a dockside bar (duh!) and everyone was either sitting outside (in Florida you can’t smoke inside a bar where food is served) or sitting at the open air cabana bar. We sat inside for a few minutes and decided we wouldn’t get served since they were so busy outside, so we went out to the cabana bar.
The old joke is that Michigan’s state bird is the mosquito. I know Florida swamps have a lot of them, but I haven’t seen one since I’ve been here. Florida has beautiful scenery, especially along the coast and the sunsets on the Gulf Coast are stunning.
We hadn’t been there two minutes before the first no see um found me and bit. If you’ve never heard of no see ums click here http://pelotes.jea.com/AnimalFact/Arthropod/NOSEEUM.htm .Before long, the second one got me, then the third, and from then on I lost count. Jean and Robert were fine and may have been bitten once between them all the time we were there. It’s something about body chemistry because the mosquitoes like me best too.
We sat there for a while and didn’t get waited on. After a short time a waitress came by and said she would take our drink orders to help out our waiter who was busy with another table. As it turned out, he may have been the fraternal twin (they didn’t really look alike) of our crappy waiter from St. Sebastiaan’s that I wrote about a few weeks ago. He was never there when we wanted him, couldn’t remember what we were drinking, would forget what we ordered and we had to stop him when he was rushing by, apparently to help someone else who looked like better tippers.
It had been windy that day and they had the plastic weather protectors rolled down, so it was more like an enclosed room…you guessed it…full of smokers. Being a typical beach type bar, it was loaded with forty-something guys hovering around “well endowed” twenty-something girls wearing tight fitting clothes made from way too little material. In the girls’ defense, they are probably helping to conserve our natural resources and they’re helping keep the men occupied while their wives are home getting the kids fed, bathed and ready for bed.
It didn’t take long for us to realize that Friday night is entertainment night with a live band and we had chosen the table right in front of the bandstand. Luckily the band kept blowing fuses and we got a little peace and quiet before they started up again. After we finished our meal we looked around for our waiter and realized we hadn’t seen him for about 15 minutes. We waited another 5 minutes, still no waiter, and flagged down the waitress who had helped us with our drink order to get our bill. She brought it to the table, I put down my credit card, and we sat there another 5 minutes and no one picked it up.
I finally had enough, got up, and carried the bill and the credit card up to the bar and forced it on the first person I saw. Of course, they didn’t have a credit card machine at the cabana bar and had to take it inside to process. A few minutes later they were back, I signed the slip and we walked out. As we left the cabana bar our waiter, for the first time in half an hour, met us on the steps and thanked us, probably for the tip he felt he deserved.
We had endured a poor waiter, a room full of smoke, loud music blasting in our ears and a cloud of no see ums that had bitten me on every square inch of exposed skin. By then I was so upset that I’ll never go back (until next Friday night when Dick and Mary Brower are here to visit).
Just (Anemic From Blood Loss) Jack