Southern Florida

We've spent the last few days in Southern Florida... arrived at the Everglades on Thursday night. No big deal... enter the park... find a campsite... set up camp. Ain't no thing! But wait… what we didn't take into consideration was the fact that we were in the southern most part of Florida in June. This doesn't sound strange... yet the story progresses. As soon as Wes jumps out and grabbed the tent, he declared that "The mosquitoes are already attacking me. I definitely need my jeans." Knowing that he had only been outside for about thirty seconds, I was secretly thinking that he was being a vagina. But, as I myself am one in mosquito situations, I agreed to grab both our sweatshirts and jeans before I went outside. So, as we both were tying our sweatshirt strings as tightly around our face as possible and swatting away a bazillion moskweetoes, we managed to throw the tent up. The true show of having the ability to work under pressure is to do it while being eaten alive. After finally making it inside, we had to spend about 20 minutes using a flashlight to make sure that we killed all the little skeeters that came in with us. To make it even better, it was about 95 degrees inside the tent. Okay, enough negativity. Remembering that was almost painful, but I guess next time a national park is not charging for camping because it’s the “off season”, I must realize there is probably a reason why most visitors are not there.

(we saved this little feller by the way)





Thankfully, we made it through the night. And thankfully, in the morning the skeeters were at least 75% less. We managed to find two tortoises, an osprey, a bunch of vultures, ibises, and egrets. Unfortunately, no crocs. Apparently it’s the off season. I’ll have to make a trip back when it’s the winter… maybe things will work out a little better next time.

After leaving the Everglades, or rather Everlames , we headed south to the Florida Keys. We figured since we were down that far anyway, we might as well check out this awesome tourist location. As we’re driving, we see water on both sides of the road, but the shores are trees, rather than sand. We start to get a little weary about whether or not there are actually beaches. We get all the way down to Key West… the last island of the keys and the southern most point in America (by the way, we have now both been to the northern most and southern most points in America… Barrow, Alaska and Key West, Florida). Upon finding 3 beaches in Key West, we can’t help but notice the murky, brownish water, which happens to reek of sulfur (rotten eggs for those of you who are not familiar), and the huge clumps of seaweed. And usually we wouldn’t be babies about it, but this water was as close to stagnant as an ocean can be before calling it a big lake. Now, just to be fair some people were loving it… but I should add that they were also the people who go swimming in their clothes… now you can decide. We end up saying “screw this place” and drive back up the keys for lunch and to call Mary from Anchorage (but formerly FL) who tells us that Bahia Honda State Park (about halfway down the keys) has an awesome beach, where we can also go snorkeling. We drive into this state park and find a few miles of beach (with the softest and whitest sand!) and clear water for about 200 feet. Okay, now we’re talkin. We grabbed out snorkeling gear and headed out past the shallows into the intertidal zone, where we spent some time kicking around and found some cool little fish, a crab, a lobster, a conch, a bunch of purple sea urchins, and many lovely feather dusters and sponges. It wasn’t crazy snorkeling, but it was exactly what we needed. Plus, we got to kick it in the shallows for a while, which was pretty darn sweet. Thanks for the heads up on that one Mary.

We left the park and jumped back into the car to drive up North a bit to Parkland, Florida (an hour north of Miami) to visit my Aunt Michelle, Uncle Vinny, and cousins Matt, Mark, and Brett. We just spent the last 3 days with them… visiting, laughing, and enjoying the daily thunderstorms that creep in everyday at around 2:00. We tried to go to the beach one day and learned quickly that we needed to get there earlier the second time. The next day, we were booted off by the rain at about 1:49, but were still able to get lots of sun and wave- jumping in. We also visited my Great Uncle Gilbert in West Palm Beach and my Grandmar in Delray Beach. We had the privilege of taking Grandma to Poppie’s restaurant, a Jewish deli/restaurant, which is probably only still in business because of the 55+ community that lives almost directly across the street. Our last night there we went out to dinner to celebrate my Aunts 50th birthday, which was delicious and very romantic (there was a piano man singing… that kind of thing will put anyone in the mood).

We left Tuesday morning… after finally shop vacking (yes that’s a verb) the car for the first time. We’ve just arrived in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina… let’s see what this tourist town has to offer…