Last real day of vacation, tomorrow will be mostly on a plane and be three hours shorter than normal. Beth and the kids were barely awake when I left the room at 9:30 this morning. Grabbed another fruit frappacino and muffin at Starbucks on my way to the convention center, not something you’d want to make a habit of. I think I liked the tangerine better than the pomegranate.

It was after 2pm when I came back to the room, everyone had finally gotten out of bed and spent some time at the pool and were just having lunch in the room when I returned. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, so Beth gave me half her sandwich, then we headed for the car to drive out to our old friend Robbie’s house in La Quinta for dinner. Robbie grew up two doors down from Beth in Framingham, she and her husband moved out here shortly after their son Brett was born about 12 years ago. We saw them when we were here in ’96 when Chloe was a baby and Brett was only a couple of years old and they were living in Palm Desert. Alan was working then, but ended up quitting the business he was in and never really did anything after that. They also have a daughter who’s about 8 or 9, but Alan and Robbie have been separated for the last year or so, she’s still here but he moved back to the Boston area. So now Robbie’s a single mom, trying to get divorced and work and raise two kids and make ends meet and living in the desert. She sounds like she’s keeping it all together, but it must be a lot of work. We got to her house about 5pm and spent a few hours there and ordered out pizza, the kids got along together fine, but by 9 or so it was time to hit the road, it took about 2 hours to get back to the hotel, the kids were strung out by then , such that it took them a little while to fall asleep, but they’ll really be in for a shock tomorrow when we get home late but it won’t feel that late to them.