Jan 6
đ5ïžâŁ I have said this before, but walking around Sarasotaâs downtown you could be forgiven for forgetting that it is in Florida, other than the sandhill cranes flying over Sarasota Bay and the sun high in the sky.
Weâve lived here now for more than two years and there is still so much more to explore, but these were My Top Five Favourite Sarasota Things from last year.đŠ©
Please click for moreA little chilly here this New Yearâs Eve morning in Sarasota. It might be a pyjama day, especially as our daughter has a touch of the flu so any plans, as minimal as they were, will have to be shelved.
Iâve never been a fan of âamateur nightâ as I used to call it back in the day, so cooking and popping open a nice bottle of red later will be good enough for me.
Please click for moreFor those that have read these pages regularly they will know that my family and I have regularly been impacted by hurricanes, the last one was in October last year when Milton made landfall just up the street from us, and we had to evacuate.
We chose to live in Bermuda and we chose to live 400 metres from the water here on the gulf coast of Florida, so no pity required, but I also spend a lot of time studying their impacts for work.
Please click for moreItâs that time of year in these parts that we we receive the mass migration of snowbirds.
The Oxford Dictionary definition of a snowbird is: âa person who spends the winter in a warmer climate, especially an old person from the north of the US, or from Canada, who spends the winter in the south.â
Please click for moreSummer officially arrived today although summer has been knocking around here for quite some time đ. The longest day means a later sunset, which will be around 8.30pm here tonight, an hour earlier than London. Although the latest sunset will follow next week.
Please click for moreI saw Les MisĂ©rables for the one and only time in the mid 90âs in Londonâs west end. My luvvie-other-half has seen it a handful of times, and yesterday we took our daughter to the show that has been seen by 130 million people worldwide since itâs first showing in Paris in 1980.
The show is a long as two football matches, plus half-time and with no injuries it goes for over 3 hours.
Please click for moreJust a couple of miles up the road from us is Siesta Key, recently voted the best beach in the United States, and the 4th best beach in the world by Trip Advisor.
Siesta Key is a barrier island that sits across the gentile waters of Little Sarasota Bay from us, and got badly battered in Hurricane Milton, but happily is just about getting itself back on itâs feet.
Please click for moreYou will mock, but it is cold down here in south-west Florida. I have just taken the dog out and I had to go and find some gloves.
This week Florida has seen snow settle on the ground in its northern parts and along the Panhandle. In the town of Milton northeast of Pensacola they saw 10 inches of snow. That’s more than double the previous state record of 4 inches, also in Milton in 1954.
please click for moređ5ïžâŁ. My next of my annual Top Fiveâs is on our doorstep. We have lived in Sarasota on the Gulf Coast of Florida since August 2023, and candidly havenât done anywhere near the exploring weâd like to, but Iâve done enough to put together a list.
Next of my 2024 look backâs is my Top Five Favourite Sarasota Things đ
Please click for moreI wrote my first New Yearâs Eve âmessageâ in 2004, and have done so for each of the 20 years since. Itâs makes me immensely proud, and old, that I have kept these pages alive for all of that time.
One of my New Yearâs resolutions, normally futile, is to convert at least the first six years into a book. Weâll see.
Please click for moreMy son arrived last night to spend Christmas with us. I donât think he believed me when I told him the Charlton score!
Itâs his first time to our house in Florida and weâre excited to have him here, in fact itâs his first time in America since he visited us in Chicago in 2007.
Please click for moreI am in Bermuda this week. A catalogue of meetings interspersed by Christmas drinks, or the other way around, Iâm not sure.
The Bermuda weather is about 10 degrees warmer here than it is in Sarasota, but still as humid as ever.
Please click for moreWe had already heard from a neighbour before we set off for the drive home yesterday that the house âlooked okayâ but the 5+ hour drive was still full of apprehension.
By the time we pulled up outside of the house it was dusk, but there it was standing in front us looking a little shellshocked. All around were fallen trees, large branches and debris.
Please click for moreWe will drive back to Sarasota today, and are expecting a long journey across Alligator Alley, the main road that runs east to west in the southern part of the state.
Information on the condition of our house is patchy as most neighbours evacuated and it sounds as if access to where we live is difficult. We do know we have no power or mobile phone service.
Please click for moreWe evacuated early this morning leaving our house in the middle of the path of Hurricane Milton, which is anticipated to make landfall a little north of us Wednesday night and into the early hours of Thursday.
We are used to hurricanes and weathered many in our time in Bermuda, but this feels entirely different probably because we donât know what to expect and mostly because this storm packs life threatening storm surge of which the west coast of Florida has never seen.
Please click for moreThe area in which we live is still recovering from Hurricane Helene, especially the barrier islands, which âprotectâ the mainland, but of course are not just the first line of defence but beautiful beach communities for thousands of residents and visitors alike.
We were lucky last week here, but very near us there are still streets with debris and ruined personal belongings from rain inundation piled up on the street waiting to be taken away.
Please click for moreI am loving the Olympics so far. Iâm completely immersed in it. Swimming, gymnastics, tennis, rowing, womenâs rugby, BMX, that crazy canoe race, whatever is on I am glued to it.
GB have had an incredible opening few days with our best ever medal haul at this stage, which could even have been bettered if it wasnât for many 4th place finishes.
Please click for moreIâm making my way back home after a week working in Bermuda. Iâm at Charlotte Airport, where I tend to spend half my life and my onward flight to Sarasota has been delayed.
Please click for moreI was lucky enough to see Hamilton on Broadway 6 years ago, and today I went again with the family to see the touring production at the Van Wezel Theater in Sarasota, and it did not disappoint.
I was told before my first viewing that it was a show youâd have to see a number of times as with each visit you make new discoveries. In fact I have a mate who has watched it a couple of dozen times, and he might only just be able to tell the complete Alexander Hamilton story.
Please click for moreWe are really pushing the boat out this new year and are spending the night at the north terminal of Gatwick. Sounds of jet engines and people dragging their suitcases down the corridor will replace popping champagne corks.
We travel home to Sarasota tomorrow after a very enjoyable ten days back at home (sic) seeing our family for Christmas.
Please click for moreAt the top of this blog đ are eight Pages links. I donât know if youâve ever read them before but they are chapters of my life and I have just penned the latest one, Sarasota. Itâs up top but it is also here:
Please click for moreAs a kid I have no recollection of Halloween, it was all about Guy Fawks, or firework night as we called it in our house, but like a lot of things American âcultureâ has seeped itâs way into British society whether it be Black Friday, Halloween or peanut butter, which is topping my toast as I sit here and not jam jelly.
It has been a little over two months now since we moved to Sarasota, and it has been quite an adjustment. For the other-half, our daughter and me every day and week is very different to what we were used to.
It was part of the charm to move to the United States, and we had our eyes open to change, but thus far there has been as the Americans say a fair bit of acclimating (sic).
Please click for moreI first came across Sarasota in my early 20âs when one of my oldest best friendâs spent a couple of summerâs working in Orlando. Me and another mate came and visited him and during those trips we would regularly drive out to the St.Petersburg, Clearwater and Sarasota beaches on Floridaâs gulf coast.
Memories of that trip always stuck, mostly because of how much fun three early 20âs London lads had out there, but also at how stunningly beautiful the area was.
Please click for moreNo, not two new Charlton signings but two Hurricane Category 3’s that in a twist of fate blew by Sarasota and Bermuda this morning.
I have become a little neutralized to storms after being in Bermuda where we rarely escaped a summer without one, and now as a Florida Gulf Coast resident we remain in the cone for any storms that make it towards the north west of the Caribbean and beyond where the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico collide.
Please click for moreItâs been about two weeks since we moved to Sarasota in Florida. Me and the dog anyway, and it does already feel like home helped for sure that is was already our house and we had known for a while that this move was in our future.
There is much that is different though. I havenât yet started my new job, but our daughter has started school, which will be remarkably different from what she was used to in Bermuda.
Please click for moreWe made it.
Around about 5.15pm tonight I pulled my gigantic American gas-guzzler onto the drive of our Sarasota home with the pup in the back.
Three days, 1,290 miles and nine states.
Please click for moreItâs been an emotional last few days in Bermuda. Weâve had the full gambit from hopes and fears to regrets and relish. So much to miss, so much to look forward to.
The moving company have taken every precious personal effect, and more. We have sold stuff, donated stuff and dumped more beside.
Please click for moreAs we pack up the house around him, our chocolate Labrador has looked a little bewildered in recent weeks (they do say that dogs take after their owners), yet more disorientation is still to come.
Due to the hot weather at both departure and arrival locations – Bermuda and Florida, which at the moment could be anywhere in the northern hemisphere, the airlines wonât take our dog. He is too big to go under the seat, and frankly we had neither the time nor the cheek to register him as a âservice animal.â
Please click for moreJust over 15 years ago we moved from Chicago, the city of big shoulders to this beautiful if peculiar tiny island of Bermuda, but the time has now come to leave.
Bermuda has been good to us so we leave with a heavy heart staying far longer than we ever expected to. Bermuda is a wonderful place to live and bring up a young family, even our daughter was born here, but for numerous reasons in no particular order â school, a new work challenge, and as a family we were ready for something different, we have made a long thought and drawn-out decision to move.
Please click for moreAfter almost a week in the freezing temperatures of Colorado, I am now in the winter warmth of Florida.
Beaver Creek was as sensational as ever and the snow was âepic,â which was how the guides were describing the huge amounts of snow that fell in the last week of January. It was still falling as I left causing a few now-normal flight delays. It was a good time all around and lovely to spend some quality time with people I hadnât seen for three years.
Please click for moređ5ïžâŁ My next 2022 Top Five is places. Travel was better in 2022 if not extensive and if I tell you until recently Accrington was on my list, then that tells me I need to get out more..
We did a few trips, nowhere new or too far, but were lucky to sample some new parts of some old places. Here are my 2022 Top Five Favourite Places đïž
Please click for moređ5ïžâŁ A little bit of annual self-indulgence so apologies in advance. My 2022 Top Fiveâs begin with food.
The restaurant industry is in recovery mode after the pandemic, but sadly restaurant closures in the UK have been worse since as owners wrestle with rising energy costs, staff shortages and simply people not having the disposable income to splurge on going out to dinner.
Please click for moreAs I sit here drinking coffee at my kitchen counter in Sarasota tired from overdoing it on New Yearâs Eve Eve, I am pretty pleased to put 2022 in the books.
Normality returned to life as we knew it in 2022 after two pandemic impacted years allowing us to remember again how to do the simple things we took for granted.
I often had to remind those around me, and myself that in times of hassle and intensity, that it was these moments that weâd missed. I love being busy and slightly living on the edge of unorganized and spontaneous, and I wouldnât have it any other way.
Please click for moreIâve been working this week from Sarasota in between making room for some Christmas festivities, and tip toeing around the obligatory workman at the house.
We have just got in from an early dinner, and there is a real chill in the Florida air. Tonight is expected to be the coldest night in Sarasota and most of Florida for 30 years with the temperature set to hover just above freezing. Extreme weather warnings are being sent all across the country with the rather dramatic threat of bomb cyclones closing in around the Great Lakes.
Please click for moreIâm in Sarasota, Florida for a few days, the first time I have been inside our house since Hurricane Ian. Happy to report it is still standing!
On Saturday, not long after the end of the Addicksâ FA Cup game, I fly to Las Vegas for what my daughter charmingly calls a âwork vacation.â
Please click for moreWith Hurricane Fiona battering Bermuda last week, Hurricane Ian has wrought devastation across south west Florida moving across the state bringing rainfall measured in feet, and is now heading back into Charleston in Georgja for second dibs.
Those of you that read these pages regularly will know that we have a house in Sarasota, Florida, which is between Tampa and Naples on the Gulf Coast. It has been another worrying week.
Please click for moreTime to escape the high heat and the nudging 100% humidity of Bermuda, so we are flying to Florida tomorrow for, er more of the same. Actually as an expert in sweating during summers, I think Floridaâs heat is a lot more bearable, probably due to modern day air-conditioning. Our Bermuda home built of large slabs of limestone is more than 200 years old, and the air-conditioning units possibly not much younger!
Please click for moreI fly to Florida tomorrow for a few days mostly to check in on the house in Sarasota. See what the latest round of excuses are from the variety of contractors and artisans. No doubt our furniture is being sourced from Moscow.
Please click for moređ5ïžâŁ. Next up on my look back at the year that wasnât of 2021 is My Top Five Favourite Places. Not quite as limited on exploration as the year before, nevertheless the five were relatively easy to select.
There was nowhere new, but plenty of places revisited, one in particular was long overdue. Here are my 2021 Top Five Favourite Places đ
Please click for moreBack home indoors after almost a month away in the United States. The dog was ignoring me, but we rekindled a little on our morning walk earlier.
It was pretty restorative being away from this small isle for the past 4 weeks, travelling East Coast to West, and back again. When I left at the beginning of December Covid was in the rear view mirror and now it is back in the front seat. California and Florida have a complete different mindset when it comes to the pandemic, and one could easily see that after spending time in both States.
Please click for moreItâs always spooked me that warm places over-compensate for being sunny this time of year by having the most outlandish of Christmas decorations.
Bermuda goes to town on the festive bedecking but after being in Sarasota, Florida for two weeks I reckon it takes the glittering prize.
Please click for moreAt home in Sarasota, Florida this evening after a whirlwind and exhausting eleven day work trip, or as my daughter calls them work vacationâs.
A Five night kick-off in Las Vegas is not to be recommended, although the time there was more dominated (other than work) by sports more-so than gambling. I actually didnât even get to sit at a table to lose any money. One reason I wasnât that bothered was due to mandatory mask wearing at all times within the casinos.
Please click for moreWaking up very early in Las Vegas is more precise this morning. My body clock and my eyes are not in tally at all.
I was 14 hours late arriving into Las Vegas yesterday after the plane was hit by lightning on itâs journey into New Yorkâs JFK, thus meaning an unexpected and irritating stopover at this funky hotel at the airport.
Please click for moreSo we have been in the Florida sun rain for the past 10 days. We spent the first weekend with friends in Miami, which was a lot of fun, and then drove to our house in Sarasota across alligator alley on the other coast at the beginning of last week.
It’s the baby-faced-other-half’s big birthday tomorrow. Don’t tell her I told you.
She got back from a quick trip to Sarasota today. I have her locked in the shed quarantining. Our Premier has taken a leaf out of Boris’ rule book and our guidelines are now as equally as confusing and they can’t find time or be bothered to update the government website. We think double shot vacinated, post two weeks, still means ‘mobile quarantining’ until you get your Bermuda arrival test result. The shed is comfy I just told her when I left a bag of mini-eggs outside her door.
I have long had a aberrant dislike of Tom Brady, mostly resulting from my aversion of anything New England sports related. Yet when Brady chose Tampa as his and Giselle’s retirement home last summer I was intrigued to see if he was going to Florida to just collect one final big pay day ($50m) or was he really Michael Jordan with pads.
đ5ïžâŁ A global pandemic has curtailed a lot of eating out, and it has been the year of the take-away. Even Bermuda now has a delivery service 25 years after Pizza Hut first started doing it.
Like elsewhere for long parts of this year restaurants were shut on the island (fortunately for us they are open again although with plenty of restrictions), and we are lucky that for most of the time we are able to sit outside.
đ5ïžâŁ Happy New Year to you all.
I’ve been doing my annual CA Top Fives for more than a decade, but there has never been a year like 2020.
There were always barriers to travel, whether self made, man made or natural forces, but never before was the world closed to exploration. For the ‘normal person’ anyhow. Who knows what the world looks like after the vaccination seizes control back from the virus and allows us to venture outside again, but all I know is I want to see it, old haunts, favourite spots, new places.
In saying that one of the small positives of being stuck at home in 2020 was more family time, and more time to actually spend with them on our own doorstep. Bermuda is hard not to appreciate, and if I include my home, then I actually can stretch to five places I spent some time in during this pandemic infected year.
Like most of the rest of you our Christmas Day was spent behind closed doors. Just the three of us with a continual loop of Christmas music, a fridge full of food, a shiny paper mountain of discarded wrapping paper, board games and a few glasses of champagne. The toasts for better times for the world beyond midnight this coming Thursday.
Fortunately though yesterday’s conversation was dominated about how pleased we were to have made the pilgrimage to Sarasota. We felt lucky that we were able to get a change of scene, and a taste of the world outside, my first trek off island for 11 months and for the little-un and island-fevered-other-half more than a year.
I’ve not left this little isle since February. The family since last December. 21 miles long, and a 1.75 miles wide at it’s very widest point can seem very, very small.
Yet, as I told the story the other day during the summer and into the early winter months you’d question yourself why you’d ever leave the beauty and reasonable normality of Bermuda during a global pandemic. Why throw yourself to the sharks, when we can swim with the parrot fish!
If February had 29 days, then March had 50, and April has so far had 500! Five weeks now since the Addicks and every other league club played a game of football. Unprecedented times indeed.
Who knows what will happen to remainder of the 2019/20 season. Planning our lives beyond taking one day at a time is impossible at the present, and that includes our much loved football. A straw poll amongst almost all fans would be getting the season finished, by hook or by crook. But, if that is to happen anytime before the autumn, it will almost certainly be behind closed doors.
Next on my agenda for my 2019 Top Fiveâs is Hotels. Those that know me or have had more than a cursory glance at this Blog will have worked out that I have a fascination with hotels. My travels were way down on previous years, but I managed to still have 20 locations to pick from and these were my Top Five Favourite Hotels:
Itâs hard to even fathom that 20 years ago today we were at work unsure as to whether the computers would even come back on after we came back from the new Millennia celebration. Millennials can look up that near calamity here.
2019 has flown by, work has been the busiest I have known it since Iâve been in Bermuda, the results have been bloody good though, but absolutely exhausting and it didnât surprise me to just be told I have almost 4 weeks holiday left for the year.
My predilection for travelling has thus taken a backward seat this year, for which Iâm very disappointed with myself. Good news though is that after years of attempting to renovate a house in Sarasota, Florida, which has veered from the tortuous to the exorbitant, it may finally become liveable so that is an exciting development and will be a home from home.
Itâs Bermuda Cup Match long weekend, a cricket game that shuts the island down and we donât have to go to work. Yay. So the choice is going to the game, which I have done many times, camp on the side of the road like the locals do, sit indoors under the a/c, or make use of the bank holiday and get off the island. Weâve done the latter.
We havenât really left the humid weather behind because we are in Florida, but despite similar heat levels, you never seem too far from proper air conditioning here, so the sweaty uncomfortableness doesnât seem quite as brutal.
The trip starts on the gulf coast to check in on the long running saga of a house renovation we are doing in Sarasota. Iâll leave that there because the slight mention of it gets me into a embittered temper and a grump.
*Counts to 5*
That used to be one of my regular drinking haunts in Bexleyheath, yes Iâm showing my age. Well, with the onset of age and remembering the only horses I ever saw in Catford belonged to the rag and bone man, I have in my adult years taken a keen interest in the ponies, in various formats, and been lucky enough to have been to a couple of polo matches previously.
Of course I donât really understand it, but I am intuitive enough to realize that it is not easy sat upon a thoroughbred horse galloping at a hundred miles an hour trying to swat a small ball with a stick.
Sarasota Polo Club was founded in 1991, although polo on these Floridian ranches has much deeper roots. The Club sits on 140 acres on the west coast of Florida as part of the famed Lakewood Ranch master community and is one of 300 thriving Polo Clubs in the United States and today we went to witness the last day of the season, which only starts in January.
An away point is still an away point..
I’m in Sarasota at the moment and was unable to pay yesterday’s game a lot of attention, but it said a lot about what Lee Bowyer has brought that the result was considered disappointing.
From looking around at the post match comments it sounded like the performance lacked the intensity and attacking quality of the previous games, yet the pitch was poor and Bristol Rovers are not.
I stared at the Arrivals board at Miami airport today to see which carousel my bag was going to end up at and for the life of me I could not remember where I had just flown in from. It was San Francisco and last week was every part of fun and successful, but the time difference was a killer for me this time as well as carrying around a stinking cold.
Vegas was low key, we could feel the numbness and it was quieter than I remember it from other times. Los Angeles was hot, and hectic. Burbank we saw one of our largest clients and home to the âhappiest place on earth.â The San Francisco days were long and exhausting mostly stuck in a room, and when we went outside it was chilly.Â
I have had a tremendous summer of travel, but my head spins when I think about where I have been and some of the absolute sadness and tragedy that many of these places have had to deal with, and how lucky Iâve been to miss some of these awful events.
Like a lot of others I am sat tonight glued to CNN and the Weather Channel like it’s a drug. One of the reasons is work related. I live and breathe risk during the week, natural, human or otherwise, so what is happening in Florida and happened to those poor Caribbean islands and Texas last week has massive ramifications for us at work.Â
For reason’s I haven’t fathomed I seem to be rather attracted to hurricanes. I wouldn’t mind but I can’t even fly a kite. Yet in the last couple of weeks I have been in St Barts, Saint Martin, Sarasota, Tampa and Miami and I live on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that has annoyingly been a recent magnet to big storms, around 7 or 8 hurricanes in the past 5 years, once we even had two different hurricanes over consecutive weekends!Â
I’m in Orlando for our annual work Symposium, a regular bazaar of back to back meetings, break out sessions, early mornings and late night’s. We moved the whole shebang from Miami Beach to Orlando last year and it went so well we are back. Shame, because nothing beats a ‘work conference’ in South Beach but as my boss says less people got hurt and we didn’t lose anyone. So Orlando it is, in a different hotel a little bit nearer to the wonderful world(s) of Disney.
My 2nd listing of my 2016 Top Five Favourites. I stayed in 27 different hotels in 2016. Wow, that even surprised myself! But I do love a hotel, especially sumptuous fluffy slippers, flouncy beds and bubbly shower gel type ones.
So, here goes my 2016 Top Five Favourite hotels starts here:
Please click for more
TPC Louisiana
