Vero Beach ~ March 29th - April 9th

We left with our bicycles attached at the trailer hitch with a Bell apparatus that I picked up on sale at Walmart for $30!! The VW Sportwagon was loaded beyond belief.  I did over inflate the tires to accept this load and it helped.  We had a complete sound system with a Yamaha receiver, 5 disc player, two Kliptch speakers and a huge subwoofer.  Mix in a 7' Ikea cabinet with 6 shelves, several large power tools, some kitchenware, a 24" flat screen, food from our DE refrigerator, clothes for a month, laptop, and us.

We drove straight through and made the bed when we arrived at 12:45 AM.  Times were exciting the next day.  We shopped at Lowes across the street and found a large gas grill on sale because the previous owner thought it was prudent to wax the covers (stainless) over the burners.  Of course when he lit it those covers ignited and caused quite a fuss.  It was returned and for some reason it did not have wheels.  It was totally as is, but at a savings of well over $150.  Before we went to bed that night we talked about this and the next morning at 6 am we drove over to Lowes to make a deal.  I had to find the manager at 6:30 in the morning and he was happy to let us load the wheel-less grill on a flat cart and push it to our home across the street.  This image is of Sue bringing it back to Lowes.  Oh yes, I chose this early since there would be less traffic on I-60 than later in the day.  Too bad Sue could capture at least one image of me pushing this grill strapped to the card across I-60.

Arrived with grill intact

One of the high priority projects we wanted to pursue was the replacement of the countertop in the kitchen area.  We visited a couple of vendors but none seemed too reasonable or would be speedy to have this done before we needed to leave for Delaware.  Then we stopped at FTC and met Ronan and he promised to come over and measure our kitchen the same day!  He did and we met the next day to select our granite.  We had three projects in mind: the kitchen top, filling the pass-through area and doing the tile on our porch area.  After haggling for a while we agreed on a price and he said that the work will be done in a week.  As we drove away, I said that it would be nice to have all of this in a week, but we didn't expect this service.  On Monday morning Chris called Sue to explain he would like to come out to the villa and make templates.  On Tuesday Chris called to ask if we had time for the installation!!
Actually, everything was completed on Tuesday afternoon.

Adding the one piece slab

Chris calling his boss to say they were finished

Enjoying dinner on Tuesday night