Travel Memories. Travel Writing Prompt.
My Weekend of Honorary Retirement in Florida’s 50+ Community
Like Nick Miller, I felt like I was finally aging into my personality.
I am a natural early riser. Or at least, I have been since college, when I worked 7 a.m. markdown shifts at TJ Maxx.
Most days, I wake up at 5 a.m. and go about my morning routine of coffee and breakfast, then a nice walk. As a result of this habit of early rising, I get cranky if kept up past 9:30pm.
It didn’t occur to me that these things made me an ideal candidate for staying amongst the 50+ until a unique travel opportunity came about.
At the time, I was in grad school, living on a strict budget while earning my MFA in creative writing. My friends and I got the wild notion that we should do whatever we could to attend the annual AWP writer’s conference, which would be held in Tampa, Florida, over our university’s spring break.
Fate seemed to call us to the shores of the sunshine state, and even if our wallets begged otherwise, we were going to figure it out.
We began to cobble together our cost-saving plan to make the most out of a weeklong trip to Florida as we could. Two of us were midwestern, of the…
