Charles Apple

Because the place is full of lakes. Like this one, smack in the middle of downtown:

It’s called Lake Morton. And we can’t imagine a prettier scene than watching families feeding bread to the birds on a warm 80-degree Wednesday afternoon in Florida.

Here’s the view to the left:

And when we spin around, you can see a large bank building and the chamber of commerce across the street. How’d you like to have a view of Lake Morton from your office window?

The smaller birds are some kind of gulls, perhaps. We’re much too tired to look for a match via Google image search. The tall guy with the red legs, though, is a white ibis.

The swans were all sacked out in the shade. Guess that makes them smarter than the gulls and ibi.

And then there’s one in every crowd — in this case, a loud, obnoxious goose who had taken it upon herself to cross a fairly busy street.

It crossed our mind to run out and stop traffic, but the goose had it under control, waddling and honking until she was safely on our side.

Once she was out of the road, she qui making such a racket, suggesting she knew damn well what she was doing in the first place. Silly goose.

While we were out, we zipped over to the paper — maybe nine blocks from us here at the historic Terrace Hotel — just to make sure we could find it.

It’s a gorgeous building. This morning’s Art of Being Brilliant show as well as my afternoon Looking Good on a Shoestring Budget presentations will be on the third floor executive boardroom, where the lighting is more friendly to my slideshow, I’m told. Gus Gonzalez will hold his leadership sessions on the first floor.

While we were there Wednesday, we noticed this interesting news rack offering not only the local Ledger and News Chief – both owned by the New York Times – but also the Wall Street Journal.

We pulled out a bagful of quarters from the briefcase to buy a Ledger and News Chief. We always buy local papers whenever we can.

But wait? What’s that in the far right corner?

Yep — that’s the New York Post — available from a rack, 1,200 miles from New York City. For only $1.50 a copy.

After checking in to our gorgeous old hotel, we went upstairs for a nap… and promptly blew an entire afternoon catching up with messages and blogging various news items. We did manage to lay down for a little while, but it was very little.

We met up with Gus, fellow speaker Carol Richer Gammell and SNPA Traveling Classroom chief Graham Kimbrough for some dinner and a few beers on the hotel’s porch veranda.

Graham and Carol…

…and moi.
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I got up early this morning to shoot the sunrise across the street from the hotel:

Like we said, the hotel is this grand old place, built in 1924.

It’s pretty much a landmark in downtown Lakeland.

We’re told a few more folks signed up for our Brilliant show since last week. We’re looking for a good crowd today.

As soon as our shows are over at 4:30, we’ll have to pack up fast, drive straight through Thursday rush hour and dump off the rental car in time to make our flight to Philadelphia. After a brief layover there, I’ll be home sometime after midnight tonight.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 5:52 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Travelogue, Workshops. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.