- By Rich Miller
Every morning when I get up and am getting ready to go to work, I cut on the television to see what the weather is going to do for the day. While waiting on the weatherman to give me his best guess for the day, I am stuck listening to all of the depressing news that has happened over the last few days. For the last couple of months the big news has been the oil spill in the Gulf and I have been paying particular attention to it because we have had a house rented in Destin, Florida, since February. The rental agency was great, though; they did offer us our money back if we didn’t want to take our vacation down there with the oil spill. We decided that we were going anyway because all the reports were good from the people that we talked to in the area – contrary to what the news media was telling me every morning.
We arrived in Destin on that Saturday afternoon and you would have never known that there was a oil spill because it hadn’t effected the crowd there at all. The beaches were clear and everything looked to be as normal as ever when we were sitting on the beach sunning it up. There were workers walking up and down the beach every day looking for tar balls or oil on the beach, but we never saw them find anything.
My wife and family weren’t affected at all by the oil and the only person in our group that it affected was me. Since we made our reservations, I had started lining up some deep sea fishing trips with a friend of mine in the area. The fishing is always good down there and I thought that I was going to have a whole week of nothing but deep sea monsters. Even though the beaches were fine, all of the fishing boats were leased out to the oil companies and we didn’t have a boat to fish on. Needless to say, I was really disappointed, but I realized that what they were doing was more important than me catching a few fish. Even though I didn’t get to fish, my wife got exactly what she wanted – me on the beach and in the pool all day with her and my son – so I came home with a empty cooler and a really good tan. I just hope that they get the oil leak stopped and there is no more harm done to the environment.
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