Florida: Let's Keep Working! Part 1

When I first heard I was stationed in Florida, I was a bit disappointed because Florida is supposedly so hot, humid, and muggy.

Friday morning, October 31st, 8 a.m., found my parents and I at the airport, me excited to fly across the country and have new experiences, them excited as well but also a bit nervous about letting their daughter go so far away. Thankfully, I was able to fly there with a friend from my home state. 

We went through security, boarded the plane, traveled all day, and arrived in Ft. Myers, Florida at 8 p.m., tired but happy to be there. 

Stepping out of the airport, the first thing I noticed was that it smelled like coconuts. Secondly, I noticed it wasn't nearly as hot or humid as I was expecting. 
Okay, I shan't bore you with any more detailed descriptions until the end.

I met my roommate and we got along very well, which was such a blessing. We never got to sleep until after 12:30, despite the fact that breakfast was at 7:30 the next morning. She is awesome, and her tolerance of my weird quirks was incredible. 

Next morning we were assigned to our van teams. My team was in Cape Coral the bulk of the time, and if you've ever been to Cape Coral, you understand me when I say it was confusing. For example, we had a 43rd Street, 43rd Place and 43rd Terrace all in a row, and then we had quite a few streets that were separated divided by canals, so you could only do one part of the street before having to be driven to the next section of it, which was across the canal.

After the first day and a half with our driver attempting to navigate and drive, I was so excited when, the next morning, he announced he  had a dedicated navigator. 

Then he said, "it's you," and the expression on my face drooped a bit for a minute. It turned out to be a huge stretch and growing experience. I also learned that not looking down on curves reduces car-sickness by about 61.3%. 

If you haven't ready my post about Virginia last year, I will remind you that we door-knock from 9 a.m. to dark, around 6:15 p.m., and the van transports groups of two to different streets, where they blitz through the doors, we pick them up and drop them to the next street. Keeping track of who was on what street and where each street was proved confusing. Thankfully, our driver was able to keep track of where the streets were most of the time, and when he wasn't, I could usually figure it out.

Buddies in the back seat! 

 Tallying up our results...Fun stuff. ;)

 Phone-banking with this sweet gal!

This was what I had for navigation...Being slightly directionally challenged, I learned a lot. 

Other random adventure: I got to pump the gas. Call me weird, but something about pumping gas in a car you've never driven and in a state you've never been in is pretty cool. I also had to ask a random old guy what the zip code was because it was required to pump gas. Weird. 

After door-knocking/driving/navigating all day, all teams arrived at the Rick Scott for Governor Campaign office and phone-banked until 9 p.m. SS (part of our van), JB (our driver) and I spent the first half of the evening tallying up our voter contacts and doors knocked, which was time-consuming, but so gratifying after reading the figures we had accumulated. Our record voter contact attempt rate was 894 for the day, and our record doors knocked on was 656! That's pretty good for when taking into consideration that we were in Cape Coral, if I do say so myself. 

This concludes part 1 of my Florida experience. Coming posts will have more more pictures and less text. Oh, and just to explain, "Let's keep working!" was Rick Scott's slogan for his campaign.