Wednesday Racket (OT)

Hey, everybody.  I'll be doing a live ESPN chat in a little while, and I just want to take a moment to look ahead to the next few weeks in this Wednesday Off-Topic thread. I'm off next week for Belize (a real, authentic, genuine family vacation!), but TennisWorld will be up and running. Steggy is going to make a selection of TW's Greatest Hits and post one each day, as well as provide the Monday Net Post and other regular OT threads.  If any post I've written in the past stands out in your mind, email Steggy and recommend it for inclusion in the Greatest Hits.

Then, after a week home, I'll be heading for Indian Wells on March 10th, to cover, live, through the 18th. I will also be at Key Biscayne starting on Monday the 26th. That will take us right up against the European clay-court season. I'll cover the Grand Finale at Roland Garros, as always.

Lisa, Luke and I will be going to the rain forest in Belize at the start of the trip, staying in a bare-bones camp and taking horseback and kayak excursions in the jungle. The little cowpoke is already all fired up about having his own horse.

The second part of our trip will consist of a few days at the beach, in Placentia. I'm a lifelong fly fisherman, and Belize has abundant Permit and Bonefish on vast, shallow flats. This is an exciting, highly visual sort of fishing - stalking, really. It's not the best time of year, but I have high hopes. .

So if any of you out there have any experience of Belize, now would be the time to share your knowledge. Ruth?

As this is our first real family vacation, I'm throwing out this OT topic: What childhood vacation do you remember most fondly and vividly?  For me, it's a no-brainer. For a few years, each year in August we would load up the station wagon with camping gear and hitch up the little motorboat. We drove to Sebago Lake, in Maine. It seemed like an impossibly long and amazing drive at the time, although it couldn't have been more than 10 hours from our home in New Jersey.  I caught my first landlocked salmon in Sebago Lake, and I had a vacation romance with a girl (was her name Kitty?) who had a magnificent home perched on some cliffs on the beach near the campsite where we stayed.

I met her at the rustic general store on the periphery of the state park/campground, and every evening I used to sneak away after supper, telling my parents I was going fishing. I walked the beach to just below her house, where she waited for me. I would lean the fishing rod against the rocks and forget about it.

We would sit in the sand with our backs against some massive chunks of granite and watch the sunset, although as kids we couldn't care less about sunsets with a capital "S".  It was a poignant, rich girl-poor boy scenario and I remember Kitty as a sweet and very affectionate girl who was far more developed in affairs of the heart than I. Her braces cut up up my lips, something awful, but it's good to learn the value of the No Pain, No Gain sensibility early in life. Fishin and Kissin. How sweet those days were!

Okay - your turn!