Is This Hockey Or What?

On Thursday Sandy and I went down to Tampa for a night out on the town , or as much of a night as the two of us are capable of doing at our age. The first stop was going to the Hard Rock Seminole Casino. Not for gambling, but for buying souvenir t-shirts for our niece. Man that place is way out of Tampa near the Junction of I 4 and 275. We were so lucky as to be looking for it at rush hour and evening traffic. Now I've been in a lot of Hard Rocks across this country, from San Francisco to NYC to Key West, but this place is bizarre. It rises up out of former scrub brush and swampland and is gleaming white and maybe 4 or 5 stories high. We parked in a gravel parking lot, and had a quick wander through the lobby to the giftshop, bypassing the gambling casino. The place was filled with Yankee Lincolns and Cadillacs of the Behemoth style,i.e. monsterous chrome bedecked house- sized sedans with an acre of ugly vinyl for roofs. They all had northern license plates and sheriff stickers on the rear. I'm mystified at the typical Florida car that is always around me in traffic. Why do these people all have stuffed animals in the rear windows?? They have dogs , cats, monkeys , and things I can't identify. Another thing they do is blow their horn at me as I make unknown transgressions. Every time I look up to see who is impatiently beeping at me the culprit is usually an 80 plus year old man or woman, that I can only guess where they are in such a hurry to go.I guess it is because they are Northerners with stuffed animals in their windows. After the Hardrock Experience we went downtown Tampa to the waterfront to a first for us- a hockey game. Tampa has a professional hockey team, the Tampa Lightenings, which won the Stanley Cup last year, something I was told which is akin to winning the Super Bowl or The World Series. The concierge at Hard Rock told me they weren't very good this year, and they lived up to her prophecy by losing 3-2 to the New Jersey Devils in OT. It was most interesting, as we only knew the very basics of the game. It was very,very loud and chilly inside, as it should be. The sport is comprised of young athletes flying across ice doing everything possible to maime and disfigure each other. Two robust lads spent time in the glassed-in penalty boxes for fighting. Now I know what time out in elementary school was invented for-- it was to prepare future hockey players. The team booklet shows that the oldest player is in his mid twenties , and only three were from the United States. One star was from Finland.THe amazing show was the audience who screamed at the refs and players.They screamed at things that I didn't even know were screamable offenses. Maybe it was like Nascar in that these Thursday night fans were filling their fuel tanks with $6 beer and $8 sandwiches. I bought a Pepsi for $4 and it seemed to be the same recipe that I had paid $1 for previously in my Kentucky life. There were brief moments of cavorting ice cheerleaders, but it only lasted about a minute. In retrospect I guess that's about as long as scantily clad women can dance on ice. The arena ,as I said is about 10 or 12 years old and is beautifully situated on the river and bay of the waterfront. You can look out 70,000 sq ft of glass and see the beautiful skyline of Tampa's tall buildings and highrise condos along the river. The news says that real estate in Hillsborough County(Tampa) and Pasco County(New Port Richey) is down 40 percent. I couldn't swear to this by the Corvettes and Porsches zooming through the rush hour traffic. A very lasting impression of the hockey game is the sheer energy and volume of the music and crowd. It seems Nascar and Hockey share the same hard driving rock music, as is probably appropriate as both sports is full of violence and speed. After a Lightening score the stadium would erupt with a humongous ship's horn as loud as Dale Junior's race car.Then loud rock music as in Welcome to the Jungle. Overall I liked the scene a lot more than the old ones out at Hard Rock.I've got a week left in Paradise and it's been a lot of fun , but these old farts need to lay off blowing their big old chrome horns at me. I'm a stranger in a strange land and try to be a good visitor. But that only can go so far. I may buy me some stuffed animals and put them in the front window of Sandy's car. It can't hurt anything . If there are any mermaids on the net , I've stolen all of Sandy's hand lotion and can meet out back at the dock any time. This has to happen before next Saturday. Welcome to the jungle.