A View of the Future: My 10 Year Trip by Rick Rice, Controls Engineer One of the many positives of working for Crest Foods is the opportunity to celebrate 10 years of employment at the destination of your choice. I have worked for more than a few companies over the course of my 35 year career and this was the first time a company offered a reward for 10 years of employment. My wife (Anne) and I started planning that trip pretty much from the beginning of my employment. We bounced back and forth between Hawaii and Europe before settling on Florida. This might seem a little odd when compared to London or Paris or somewhere else in the “old country” but for us, it was the perfect destination. Anne and I met in 2008 and one of our first discoveries was a mutual desire to live and work in the United States. My father was born here and I have worked most of my career somewhere here in the mid-west. Anne used to go to Florida every year as a child and carried that dream forward with multiple trips there with her own children as a single mother. We realized our dream when, with the help of Crest Foods, we moved here in the spring of 2011. Over the ensuing years, we have been down to Florida a few times and started thinking about where we would like to be when we retire. Well, the easy decision was to relocate to Florida, specifically central Florida. Our 10 year trip became a combination of paid for vacation and an opportunity to take a good look at our intended home one day. There was even an added reason to celebrate as it was also 1 year after my frightening encounter with CoViD-19. What better place to celebrate than Disney World in Orlando, Florida? This trip was a little different than our previous adventures as we decided to drive down. I’ve always enjoyed the side trips of life and making the long trip down by car was an opportunity to stop and smell the roses. Unlike other vacation periods, I decided to take a full two weeks off rather than the usual 5 days. This meant taking our time and splitting the drive up into comfortable day trips with lots of rest time in between. On the way down we stopped overnight in Clarksville, Tennessee. For those who don’t know, Clarksville is on I-24, right beside the Fort Campbell military base. We had a great hotel and very enjoyable dinner, made even more so by the sights and sounds of families visiting their service members. The second night was stayed in a hotel just over the border between Georgia and Florida. Our goal was to see palm trees and while we satisfied that desire, we were less than happy with the choice of hotels. Lesson learned as one shouldn’t just pick a hotel off a website because it has a little pond with a couple of palm trees. It turns out that was the best part of the hotel. Happily, our next desti- nation was Caribbean Beach Resort at Disney World Resorts. One of our favorite things to do when travelling is to go for long drives and see the “country”. This particular trip found us in the Tampa/Sarasota area one day and passing through Daytona Beach and Cape Canaveral the next day, only to go again to the Gulf coast and visit our favorite part of Florida, John’s Pass and St. Pete’s Beach. Our trip to the Atlantic side was to take in a passion of mine, airplane museums. I have been in love with warbirds (in particu- lar) since I was 13 years old and I volunteered at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum near my home in On tario, Canada. Our trip that day was to visit Valiant Air Command Museum in Titusville, FL. Titusville is right across the Indian River from Kennedy Space Center. My wife was kind enough to follow me as I wandered around the museum and drank in the smell of old airplanes, machine oil and high-octane fuel. A day in the park (Magic Kingdom) and lots of time around the pool were key features of our Disney stay. We make sure to take the monorail and, this year, the Skyliner that joins the various resorts to the parks. We spent some time driving the area between Orlando and the gulf coast, stopping in small towns to see what sort of living situations we might find ourselves in when we decide to leave Illinois for the sunny south. Unfortunately, time passes all too fast and way too soon our time in Florida was done. Learning from our hotel experience on the way down, we can- celled our return stays and “upgraded” our hotel choices to Best Western for our trip home. A night in Macon,
10 Crest Ink April, May & June 2022
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker