- Joined
- Jun 9, 1999
- Messages
- 4,729
Hello again everyone! First I'd like to thank everyone for the farewells on my previous thread, http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum65/HTML/000858.html. I'm sorry that I didn't get to reply but I wrote it just before we left. The vacation was a success though, even more than I'd hoped. I found it's really hot in Florida, I think I understand why Jim seems so crazy sometimes now! It's a long way from PA too, and I now know that we desperately need a more comfortable car. It's nice to be back now, even if it is only for a little while. Here's the rundown of the trip.
After we drove for two days, we showed up in Fort Lauderdale. A wrong turn on the way to our hotel took us by a store called Guns and Knives Inc., which we ended up visiting later. Ft. Lauderdale actually ended up being sort of a bust, as you'll see in a minute. You see, the second day there was mostly taken up by Mom and Dad going to a mandatory time share tour (it was part of the vacation package), so when they got back we headed over to Guns and Knives. Dad and my brother, Keith, went for the guns and I went for the knives. They had a ton of stuff too, Randalls, Camillus Becker's, Darrel Ralph, Chris Reeve, Cold Steel, Boker, Eilishweitz, Al Mar, Microtech, Spyderco, REKAT, Bechmade, well, you get the idea. This place was LOADED with nice knives. They were very helpful too, at least once I started dealing with the knife manager. One of the gun guys started helping me first, but I knew more than he did so he passed me off to the Knife manager. She really knew her stuff too. She was so helpful she would get out some knives I hadn't even asked to see just to show me some neat features, like Spyderco's Compression lock. If you're ever in Ft. Lauderdale you really should go to this place, they're in the yellow pages and pretty easy to find.
Now comes the bad part. My mom and blades just don't seem to get along. She's had several freak accidents in which she was cut and she wasn't even the one using the knife! While I was ogling the DR Apogees, mom was looking at the kitchen knives. She decided to get a souvenir and ended up picking a medium sized paring knife that was all metal and VERY pointy. She looked the knife over, put it back in the box (this part's important) and handed it to the clerk to ring out. He totaled her order, then for some unknown reason took the knife out of the box with nothing over the blade but a little plastic sleeve, then handed the bag to mom. She hadn't noticed him removing the knife from the box. She went over to see my dad, and on the way the bag slipped out of her hand and landed on her foot. Did I mention that she was wearing sandals? The knife went about 1/4" into her foot up between the bones on the pinky toe side of her foot. It wasn't pretty. She ended up in the hospital for the next 3 hours getting stitches, while my brother and I went to eat. I wanted to sue the place and offer to settle out of court for a Microtech or two, but she's a little more forgiving than me, so they're off the hook. The moral of the story: Even little knives can be dangerous (and my mom is accident prone).
That was it for Ft. Lauderdale, since we got on the cruise the next day. I found out I really like cruises.
The first few hours aren't real fun because everyone is trying to get on the ship and then there's a very dumb lifeboat drill, but after that it really perked up. I had even more fun on this part of the trip when I ran into a custom knifemaker. Small world huh? I never did catch his last name, but his first name was Troy and he had some really nice bowies. Well, pictures of bowies. We talked for a while and I got his card and told him he should advertise here when he gets his website up. Do you suppose Spark would give me a commission?
Not too much happened after the cruise. We went to Orlando and to Universal Studios, which was fun but overpriced. On the way we stopped to see an old college friend of my mom's, Cindy, who let me drive her Trans-Am. That was REALLY fun. Those things can move! After that it was just a really long drive home. It really is good to be back, I missed this place a lot.
After we drove for two days, we showed up in Fort Lauderdale. A wrong turn on the way to our hotel took us by a store called Guns and Knives Inc., which we ended up visiting later. Ft. Lauderdale actually ended up being sort of a bust, as you'll see in a minute. You see, the second day there was mostly taken up by Mom and Dad going to a mandatory time share tour (it was part of the vacation package), so when they got back we headed over to Guns and Knives. Dad and my brother, Keith, went for the guns and I went for the knives. They had a ton of stuff too, Randalls, Camillus Becker's, Darrel Ralph, Chris Reeve, Cold Steel, Boker, Eilishweitz, Al Mar, Microtech, Spyderco, REKAT, Bechmade, well, you get the idea. This place was LOADED with nice knives. They were very helpful too, at least once I started dealing with the knife manager. One of the gun guys started helping me first, but I knew more than he did so he passed me off to the Knife manager. She really knew her stuff too. She was so helpful she would get out some knives I hadn't even asked to see just to show me some neat features, like Spyderco's Compression lock. If you're ever in Ft. Lauderdale you really should go to this place, they're in the yellow pages and pretty easy to find.
Now comes the bad part. My mom and blades just don't seem to get along. She's had several freak accidents in which she was cut and she wasn't even the one using the knife! While I was ogling the DR Apogees, mom was looking at the kitchen knives. She decided to get a souvenir and ended up picking a medium sized paring knife that was all metal and VERY pointy. She looked the knife over, put it back in the box (this part's important) and handed it to the clerk to ring out. He totaled her order, then for some unknown reason took the knife out of the box with nothing over the blade but a little plastic sleeve, then handed the bag to mom. She hadn't noticed him removing the knife from the box. She went over to see my dad, and on the way the bag slipped out of her hand and landed on her foot. Did I mention that she was wearing sandals? The knife went about 1/4" into her foot up between the bones on the pinky toe side of her foot. It wasn't pretty. She ended up in the hospital for the next 3 hours getting stitches, while my brother and I went to eat. I wanted to sue the place and offer to settle out of court for a Microtech or two, but she's a little more forgiving than me, so they're off the hook. The moral of the story: Even little knives can be dangerous (and my mom is accident prone).
That was it for Ft. Lauderdale, since we got on the cruise the next day. I found out I really like cruises.
Not too much happened after the cruise. We went to Orlando and to Universal Studios, which was fun but overpriced. On the way we stopped to see an old college friend of my mom's, Cindy, who let me drive her Trans-Am. That was REALLY fun. Those things can move! After that it was just a really long drive home. It really is good to be back, I missed this place a lot.
