May 7 - June 7, 2000
Day 1: Land in Ft Lauderdale. A quick drive gets us to Palm Beach & WhiteHall the “Taj Mahal of the East”. We see the 1st of the hundeds of baby lizards that will be scurrying by our feet on this trip.
Day 2: About to go scuba diving, but I forgot my scuba card at home. Instigate massive number of phone calls, no easy solution, luckily the waves are 3-4’ and the captain recommends cancelling the trip.
Day 3: My brother faxes me, NAUI & the dive shop my certification. Just prior to that NAUI says they have no record of me & so the dive shop says they won’t take me. I choose a different dive shop. The dive is excellent, incredible coral colours & lots of fish!
Day 4: Our $120US each prepaid 6 weeks in advance after 6 hours of trying to get thru on the booking line dolphin swim, is finally here. We each get 4 minutes but the opportunity to grab a dolphin’s fin and go for a ride is priceless. I’m satisfied, Lou isn’t, she want’s more!
Day 5: An evening of lounging in our hammocks on our peaceful beachfront oasis, is followed by another beautiful day of diving. We spend the next morning watching the birds on our beachfront. The pace is killing us.
Day 6: Key West is a beautiful town to walk around, we view the sunset from the top of the Holiday Inn while being serinaded by a Bob Dylan clone.
Day 7: More diving!
Day 8: Miami Beach’s Art Deco district. Just as beautiful as you’ve heard, lovely restored buildings. Endless beach, tons of bronzed beauties (male & female), hard to find a budget meal (not like Lou wants me to try!).
Day 9-12: Off to the Bahamas (we never did find a deal on a Carribean cruise). Winning the cruise ship trivia contest nets us a baseball cap. Tons of cheap diving (I do 9 dives, Lou does 3). Louise sees her 1st shark (and a sting ray), but isn’t quite yet ready for a shark feeding dive. Ten 7’ carribean reef sharks ripping fish from the hand of a chainmailed diver. I’m a comfortable 20’ away, no one dies. Back to the resort, where a dunkin donuts is available for emergency sugar fixes. $4 Daquiries come with an unlimited amount of rum. We stay away from the $9 Bahama Mama’s!
Day 13: Back to Ft Lauderdale. The temperature temporarily falls to 88F, we both run for our sweaters. Total rain thus far: 0minutes. Air conditioning is not an option (it’s a necessity).
Day 14: Off to Miami, we stumble onto game 7 of the Miami Heat - NY Knicks basketball series. We walk in at the start of the 3rd period and no one questions us. We watch the rest of the game on a tv screen listening to the roar of the crowd. At the last minute Miami loses by 1 pt. We make a quick exit.
Day 15: The Everglades. More alligators than you can shake a stick at (not that you’d want to!). We check off 35 birds on our plastic bird chart. Huge colourful grasshoppers, turtles, herons feeding. We stare mesmerized all day long.
Day 16: We change our plans (see I can be spontaneous) and head back to the everglades. Todays highlights are a tree full of racoons and dolphins off the port of our tour boat.
Day 17: After our airboat ride, the alligator show guy asks for a volunteer. I quickly offer Louise. He closes her eyes & puts out her hands. She expects a baby alligator. Out comes the scorpion and I debate whether I should run & hide in the car. After a little shock, she handles herself admirably and then quickly offers to let someone else have a chance. The Seminole Indian Casino has a $6.95 steak & lobster special. It’s only 11:30am but what the hell . . .
Day 18: Thomas Edison & Henry Fords Estate (control your jealously please). Then off to gather shells on Sanibel Island. I find several for Louise, then immediately make her throw most away.
Day 19: John Ringling’s Estate (dut dut dutta dutta dut dut da da . . .) & his beautiful fine art museum. Then we call the big cat place we’ve heard about in Tampa. They have a reservation for tonite. We soon find out our rental car can do 90mph. Our cat is Raindance, a 40 pound bobcat. We’re free to play with her (& 5 other cats) since we’re overnite guests. At nite we get to handfeed Tigers & Lions (thru their fences). We spend the rest of the day touring the animal cages listening to the mumur of the ocelots & the terrifying cries of the lemurs. Total damage: 4 rolls of film (I brought 19 rolls for this trip, luckily there’s a Walmart nearby).
Day 20: Manatee’s are like giant walruses. There live in brackish water and eat sea grasses (up to 250 pounds a day). They’re completely harmless and have no enemies (except boat propellers). The best time to see them is Nov-March. Our last cruise didn’t see any, but we try again. This place lets you swim with them (if you find any). We cruise for ½ hour with no luck then Louise yell’s “looooooook”. That morning Lou said she wouldn't go in the water, but she nearly knocked me over racing to the back of the boat. The visibility was about 18". The captain keeps saying they're right in front of us (we were the only ones on the boat) but we couldn't see anything (kind of a scary feeling). Then boom; there they were. Our 2 must be 800 pounds each (bigger than the dolphins we had swum with). But wait the ground under them was moving. Oh my god, it’s their mother. A 2500 pound monster so big that if we backed up far enough to see it all the visibility was too poor to see (I have some pictures of about 1/6 of it). When you scratch their backs they turn over so you can scratch under their flippers. We swam with them for an hour.
Day 21: Disneyland, specifically Disney MGM studios. The Aerosmith coaster was amazing. Our hotel is $30 including breakfast, a pool, a fridge in our room + HBO movie channels 1/2/3. It's very easy to relax.
Day 22: Epcot. Nice. It’s been 3 days since we’ve laid on a beach. Louise is getting withdrawal.
Day 23: Kennedy Space Centre – Louise’s most anticipated site.
Day 24: Sleep in, self driven airboat ride (max 8mph, but we got to see a owl catch & eat something & be dive bombed by a small bird while it was at it, so we had to assume it was eating one of the birds kids!), Lou’s 1st helicopter ride, then Florida mall!
Day 25: Spendid China. A miniature version of the greatest sites in China. Unfortunately they made them a little to small and their $100 million dollar investment yields about 30 people paying $30 for access to the park, dinner and a great show!
Day 26: Disneyland (we skipped It’s a Small World, but I couldn’t escape the Winnie the Pooh ride).
Day 27: Universal Studio’s Islands of Adventure (courtesy of 2 nice old people who had given us free tickets after our paths crossed several times at Splendid China). Some nice coasters but the highlight was the Spider Man ride. 12 people per car on a track surrounded by full motion screens. You really get the illusion that electric man zaps you car, fire man almost burns you, then levitation man sends your car to the top of a sky scraper, hovering precariously up in space. Then it happens, you fall 80 stories, to certain death, until spidey spins a web which you can feel slows down the car just in time. Best ride we’ve ever been on. Luckily some of the screens screwed up and we got to ride it 3 times in a row.
Day 28: A quick safari at Animal Kingdom, then an afternoon at Epcot, including GM’s test track, which true to it’s name breaks down constantly.
Day 29: Flight home (a little strange since this was a 31 day trip, but details don’t matter when you’re on vacation).