Jamie Thingelstad

• Up at 7am to head back to Orlando.
• 7:30a Drive to Orlando
• Great day at Discovery Cove.
• Fabulous time in Crazy Train Escape Room.
• Return car, get to flight.
• Back to central time.
• Lyft home.
• Finally get to sleep at 2:00 am.

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Roundabout flight plan from MCO to MSP to avoid storms.

Our final thing before leaving Florida and heading home was to visit Doldrick’s Escape Room and do their Crazy Train: The Ballad Of Skeemin’ Plotz escape room. Tammy saw this room was rated 61 in the world by the Top Escape Rooms Project in 2024 so we had to check it out! It was our 66th escape room and our first room in Florida.

This room was great! You are given 75 minutes to solve this room and it is wonderfully themed like an old school cartoon. You have to stop Skeemin’ Plotz and all of his various attempts to skeem. The story was great and the overall room mechanics were flawless. Screens serve as windows looking out of the train and you see and interact with things happening inside and outside the train. The difficulty on the puzzles was all “just right” and we were super engaged through the entire room. The time breezed away, we used (technically) no clues, and successfully stopped old Skeemin’ Plotz!

• Tammy and Mazie go for run around St. Augustine. Warm and humid morning. Jamie and Tyler hang out at Airbnb.
• Head to Blue Hen Cafe for breakfast.
• Chocolate tour at Whetstone Chocolates.
• Explore downtown St. Augustine and visit tons of shops.
• Explore Fort near downtown.
• Great dinner at Saint.
• Drive back to Airbnb.

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Cool to see the Apple Sports app just got support for F1! 🏁 This app is how I connect to almost all sports I care about now.

This Airbnb in St. Augustine has a great vibe. The tiny pool is actually a “cool tub” with a chiller for the hot summers.

I remember 10-year-old me being envious of the cool Pinewood Derby cars my cousins Josh and Jarvis had made in Scouts. “It’s strange the stuff we remember” — indeed.

Engagement is the powerful drug of social platforms. Sometimes it is blatant and in your face, such as a notice that your post is trending. More often it is wrapped as a feature, such as analytics as addiction letting you know how many views, likes, and other such engagement your post receives. This feedback loop is a slot machine: random, addictive, and unpredictable.

Being a blogger removes all of that. As Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog, recently shared no one cares (for now), and that is okay. This is writing on the web. First off it is almost always harder to write a blog post. This post has structure, sentences and paragraphs, not just a “blurb” spewed into the melee. Actual thoughts strung together with English grammar. The open web lacks engagement devices such as those views, likes, and “re-whatevers”. You may trigger an email. I got one of those this morning from Manu on a post I wrote yesterday. That’s rare. And no one else knows. No one sees that I received a “❤️ 1”.

So why do it? Why write post after post into the void with nobody engaging? Why bother with a more difficult approach?

I’ve been blogging for two decades. It isn’t all that different from journaling, but it is completely open and world readable. I would encourage bloggers to not think about the individual post. Instead, think about the collection of writing, over weeks and years, as a body of work. It is a body of work that you are constantly adding to. Growing and improving. The individual post is but one breath. It comes and goes. But over the course of time this adds up. It is the cumulative action that creates something truly great.

But who is your audience? Who is this for? You. Yourself. Your family. Your friends. Your friend’s friends. Your neighborhood. And they can have it whenever they want. As a gift. A gift from you to them. Not a gift to be measured in engagement, but instead as a body of work. A gift to the web, which is a gift to people.

• Up at 7:00 am.
• Leave Airbnb at 7:30 and drive to Turner’s donuts for breakfast
• Drive to Kennedy Space Center
• Listened to Nintendo Direct — Switch 2 on the drive.
• Experience Kennedy Space Center: Rocket Garden, Astronaut Hall of Fame, VIP behind the scenes bus tour, Saturn V building, Atlantis Building, Ice Cream at Milky Way, Modern building (unknown name)
• Left Kennedy Space Center right as they closed
• Got gas and visited a WaWa
• Ad-hoc dinner plans at Ferreri Pizza
• Finish drive to St. Augustine
• Check in to Airbnb in St. Augustine

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Stopped at Turner’s Donuts to get a bite before hitting the road.

• Jamie: Cherry Cake, German Chocolate
• Tyler: Raised with White Frosting, Bavarian Cream
• Tammy: Chocolate Cake, Chocolate Iced Cruller
• Mazie: Blueberry Cake, Sour Cream Old Fashioned

All that, with a coffee, for $11.

• Mazie and Tammy run on the beach.
• Tyler and Jamie go to North Shore Cafe but it’s closed. Instead they go back to Mademoiselle Paris for coffee and an eclair.
• Tammy meets up with Tyler and Jamie at Ginny and Jane E’s for breakfast. The crème brûlée French toast is very good. Mazie stays back to read on the beach.
• Tammy, Jamie, and Mazie return the rental beach chair, umbrellas and boogie board to the Lazy Turtle.
• We ride our bikes to Holmes Beach and the Kingfish Boat Ramp.
• Tammy and Mazie make a quick stop at Publix for boat snacks.
• We meet Jeremy and take a boat tour of the bay for a few hours where we snorkel on a sandbar, see manatees, and dolphins and cruise around the bay.
• We ride our bikes to Bradenton Beach with dinner at SMOQEHOUSE!
• We ride back to our Airbnb after dinner and head to the beach.
• Tyler and Mazie hang out in the ocean while Jamie sits in the sand and Tammy looks for shells.
• We have our last sunset on the beach.
• Everyone cleans up and we walk to Dips for ice cream. Turns out 9pm ice cream is very popular.

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Tammy and I at sunset on Anna Maria Beach. 🥰

Sunset from Anna Maria Island.

Finished cycling 4.64 miles in 30.1 minutes. We actually rode twice this but I only recorded the route from Smoqehouse back to the Airbnb. There is really just the one main road that goes up Anna Maria Island. It has a bike path on the side so is an okay ride even though there can be a lot of traffic. 🚴‍♂️

Smoqehouse opened in 2016 in the now defunct Faribo West Mall in Faribault, MN. This was a short drive from our cabin and they had delicious pulled pork sandwiches. This became a regular part of our cabin weekends — a dinner visit to Smoqehouse. A year after opening this first location they expanded to Northfield and shortly after that opened a location in Anna Maria Island. Sadly for us the Faribault location eventually shut down, and the Northfield location sadly had a kitchen fire and was destroyed along with the historic hotel it was in.

We were without the delicious pulled pork from Smoqehouse. For years. In the meantime I’ve vastly improved my pulled pork technique and have gotten it pretty darn close — but we still miss our visits to Smoqehouse.

Since we were heading to Anna Maria Island, there was no way we were going to miss an opportunity to visit! And we were super happy to be greeted by Andrew Kubes who we used to see in Northfield in those early 2016 visits. He shared that we now are members of a fairly small group of folks that have were diners at the Faribault and Anna Maria Island locations.

Great barbecue in here!

We got a family photo with Andrew Kubes!

These lights are the exact same look that the Faribault location had in the big community table.

Same chalk menu board!

These cow, pig, and chicken images were also in the Faribault location.

Write-up in the Bradenton Herald on Smoqehouse.

Smoqehouse on wheels! Nice looking pickup.

And how about the barbecue? Love the classic barbecue style dinner trays.

Tammy got the classic pulled pork sandwich — good as ever!

Tyler tucked in on the brisket burger. His only regret was not making it a double!

Mazie had the chicken and thought it was great.

I got the Cubano and it was amongst the best. This was not a regular menu item in Faribault.

We had a fun afternoon with Crysten’s AMI exploring the bay side of Anna Maria Island with our guide Jeremy. We snorkeled on a sand bar in the middle of the bay finding sand dollars, crabs, and shells. Then found two groups of manatee as well as dolphins getting dinner.

These full face snorkeling masks were hard for me to get comfortable with.

• Up early at 7:00 am.
• Head to The Donut Experiment to start the day.
• Tammy, Mazie, and Tyler go on C Ponies horse riding activity.
• Jamie goes to Orange Blossom Coffee to tend to some SPS stuff he needed to do.
• Jamie picks up everyone and head back to Airbnb.
• Walk around the shoreline of the island to lunch.
• Long and relaxing lunch at The Waterfront.
• Tammy and Mazie shop. Jamie and Tyler return to Airbnb. Shopping: Pineapple Marketplace, Shiny Fish Emporium, Ami Outfitters, Two Sides of Nature, and The Lazy Turtle.
• Overcast and cool day, so head to the beach.
• Lots of throwing football, sand feet.
• Got treats from an Ice Cream Boat!
• Cleaned up and went out on bikes to dinner.
• Went to The Porch for late dinner.
• Ride bikes back to the Airbnb in the dark.

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We were hanging out on Anna Maria Beach around 5:30p today and saw a boat coming close to shore playing that unmistakable ice cream truck music. It had two flags in the back and we wondered “Is that an ice cream boat?” It was indeed an ice cream boat. AN ICE CREAM BOAT! How awesome is that.

The boat was a bit down the shore from us but how can you pass up getting ice cream from the very first ice cream boat we’ve ever seen. We made our way over to the boat. As we got closer I saw that not only was this an Ice Cream Boat, but it was also raising money for vets. All of the proceeds from these ice creams were going to support vets. We made a couple donations and got a couple of ice creams, and I asked for more information about this organization.

The organization is Project 11:11 started by Erin Gallivan from Bradenton. They have a bunch of profiles on various sites to check out, as well as a GoFundMe to help raise money.

What a great thing to do to bring smiles to people on the beach and do good for veterans. Way to go! 🇺🇸

Sand feet. 🦶

Yes I’m on vacation — but I’m still updating my bits.