This past Saturday was one of the busiest for me in a long time. I spent time with a lot of friends doing several events in two different cities. I’ll share the highlights of those events with you in this blog post.
The first event of the day was checking out the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida. I normally play some kind of sport with a group of active friends on Saturday mornings, but since admission to the museum is free on the first Saturday of each month, we decided to go there instead. We walked around inside the museum for a while, admiring the art and enjoying each other’s company, before heading outside to spend some time in the gardens by the river. This was a much calmer and quieter Saturday morning than I’m used to, and I enjoyed the change of pace. I hadn’t been to the museum in years and it was nice to go back, especially with friends. After we had spent a couple hours there, I hopped in my car and drove about 45 minutes to St. Augustine for the next event.
Before Saturday, I had only ever done one escape room, and since I enjoyed that one, I scheduled one for Saturday afternoon. There are several escape rooms in or around Jacksonville but Escape U is considered to be an especially good one, so we decided to go there. I didn’t have to be there until 2:25 but I left around noon to have lunch with a friend at The Press. We made it there in plenty of time to enjoy the food and have a nice conversation before walking to Escape U, which was, conveniently, two doors down in the same plaza as the restaurant. Everyone showed up before our allotted time, and, once we had signed the waivers and listened to the explanation/rules, we went in to the room and got started. The room we chose was “Save the Fleet”, which involved unlocking two doors to get from outside a lighthouse into the living area and then into the control room, restoring the power, and sounding the foghorn three times to keep incoming ships safe, all while dealing with “ghosts”; two girls gave us clues if we got stuck and their angry father tried to stop us from completing our mission. We had an hour to do this and we did it with almost 18 minutes to spare. Escape U also gave a grade based on how well we did and how many clues we used, and we were excited to find out that we “graduated” with an A- (which was better than I thought we did). We celebrated, took some pictures, did a little swing dancing demonstration for the person who worked there, and then headed back to Jacksonville for more excitement.
Porchfest, an annual music festival that features bands playing in the historic district of downtown Jacksonville, started at 1:00 on Saturday afternoon and ran until 9:00 that night. A few people swung by there before going to the escape room but I didn’t get there until around 4:45. Once I got there and found my friends, we spent most of the remaining day hanging out, dancing, listening to the music, and having fun. I had missed most of the bands that day but got to see two great ones before Porchfest ended. This gave me a chance to practice dancing to blues music, which I only started doing on Thursday night. I’m far from being good at it but I did all right and it was nice to be able to dance to a different kind of music than I normally do. When there was just over an hour left of the festival, I walked over to my car, got some gas, and headed home.
My day was packed, but those were only a few of the many events going on that day. I don’t know why that Saturday was so busy; maybe everyone saw that it was free months ago and decided to book all their events for it. Either way, I’m glad I had such a full day. Normally I take it easy on Saturdays (once I’m finished with the morning sports event, that is), but it was nice to have a day full of great things to do with my friends. I had fun everywhere I went and enjoyed a very different, and very good, kind of Saturday.