Tripologue: Various Places in Florida (pt 2)

 On the first day of our vacation with Jan's parents, Doug and Candis, we headed far away...to a spot literally less than 10 minutes down the road. The Everglades! They're what Florida put in after the TemporaryGlades didn't work out.

We were there for an air boat tour. There are ones where it's just a 2-3 seater and there's the guy up on the top with the earmuffs on and you have a ginormous fan behind you. On our boat, it was the same thing except it was 1) covered, and 2) had 2 fans and sat about 35 people or so.

It was a nice clear day

Mads was stoked.

Still stoked with Grandpa Doug, whose head was bitten off by an alligator shortly before this was taken.

If this were at all legible you would be able to see several large vultures in those trees. 

Hey what's that thing

It appears to be...

Yep.

It was a lot of fun, and definitely something that we will try to do with any subsequent visitors we get down this way. The captain was a very nice guy who told us all sorts of Everglades facts and even caught a fish for us right out of the water using a piece of popcorn for bait.

When we de-boated, we went to the 'Gator Boys' alligator show, which was on the premises. They apparently have a reality show, but we weren't aware of that. They actually do wrestle alligators, though.

We have several videos from this. I'll post some on our YouTube channel in the next few days.

 After that, we headed back up to Orlando, a short 3 1/2 hour drive (I had left my lucky pair of socks in the hotel). While there getting my socks, we decided to take 2 days and go to Walt Disney World!

Now, unlike the December trip, I didn't take many pictures there. With two kids to help wrangle, and with fairly large crowds to fight, I didn't find much time. But I did take a few pictures at Epcot.

Phineas, Ferb, Doug, Mads.

The Epcot Center's bum region

Gpa Doug, Gma Candis, Mads (apparently with headache)

Jan, Emme, me (after waiting in long lines)

Lunch.

She kept her arm on her bottle like that for a while.

 Next up was Captain E-O, the 3-D movie experience of 1986!

The kids were less than thrilled.

 The movie was awful and destroyed about a half hour of our lives. But we didn't think there was literally anything else to do at Epcot! We knew there was some 'row of restaurants' that we somehow thought was just a line of food tents? So we spent a lot of time on the lame 'educational' rides up in the first half of Epcot. As the night started to wind down, we headed to the 'food' part to get in place for the fireworks show...and found that the entire 2nd half of Epcot was flipping awesome.

Really cool lake. You can see the globe in the back there, and in the fireworks show that lights up with video and fireworks shoot over the lake, and large things of fire shoot up out of it.

The entire thing is like distinct 'lands' for different countries. Each thing had a really cool set of buildings. Each had a gift shop, a restaurant or two, a cultural attraction (ranging from a 'movie in the round' to duplicates of relics/artifacts, to rides!), and lots of scenery.

We felt really bad and increasingly stupid that we had missed out on all of this. So in the next 90 minutes we crammed an entire day's worth of Epcot's cool part in.

The Canada part

More Canada. The movie they had was really good.

Blurry landscape shot. We were in a hurry.

The cool Mexico pyramid, apparently filled with a boat ride and artifacts. We felt bad we missed this.

 We headed to the Norway part.

See?

And rode on the strange boat ride, "Maelstrom." It was both really cool and incredibly stupid. It was like a combination of folk lore with trolls and wizards, and then a travel brochure of modern day Norway. It had a waterfall or two, and was really fun, but the last minute or so was odd where it sends you to a big oil rig in the middle of an ocean and you float through a Norweigan village. There were no robots or dialogue or sounds really in the last areas, and when it ends, a Viking-like voice says something like "The spirit of Norway is the spirit of fortitude" or something. It was delightfully odd.

And it had the best gift shop in the entire park.

The Italy part was cool, though it was mostly restaurants. This was a nice fountain.

The next day, we went to the Magic Kingdom. I'm not sure I have a single picture from that, but I do have a few pictures from the McDonalds we ate at that morning, which was a bizarre place that had 'the largest play place in the world' according to signage.

Instead of like a big ball room or something, though, it was just cram packed with bizarre stuff. Such as:

And...

And...

Yes. A raptor and an alligator stalking the McBird girl thing.

 We also went to the Orlando temple and took pictures. Except for me, apparently, because I didn't find any on my phone? Odd. I think Jan has several though and will post some on her blog.

After we were back for a week, we had one last stop: Jungle Island, in Biscayne Bay in Miami. It was my work's annual company picnic.

Jungle Island is an animal encounter zoo. So you can hold parrots and monkeys and snakes and even baby alligators.

...but it was flippin hot so we quickly went to a bird show (which was cool), ate lunch...

Not birds...

 And took some pictures in front of some flamingos.

Flamingos not pictured.

Whew! That's it! It's been a very exciting 3 weeks. For our next vacation, we will all go into comas, I think.

Tripologue: Various places in Florida Pt 1

Alrighty then! Where to start? 

So first off: no, I'm not made of money. I am made of Mtn Dew and beef jerky. Most of what you'll see hereafter only *looks* expensive but was either free or wasn't as pricey as it looks. The fortunate thing about being in Miami is that there is quite a bit to do within 2-3 hours of home.

It all started around the end of April when Jan and Emmerson went up to Virginia to visit the Virginia McMurdies and to be there for our niece, Hallie's, baptism. While they were gone, it was just me and Madeleine. 

We woke up early in the day to take Mom and Emme to the airport, and after we went back home to sleep a little, we got up and I went to take Maddie to the library. The library was closed! I opened up my map app to see what else was in the area that we might consider doing. The map goofed and thought we were in the Florida Keys. With really no plan for the day and with the Keys only being an hour or so away, I made an uncharacteristically spontaneous decision and we headed down to the Keys.

Driving through town took a while but we eventually got to a 10-mile or so stretch of highway that went through some very low, very swampy looking scrub. Eventually we got to a medium-sized bridge and got a much better view of where we were. (Click on any pictures for a larger view or for a Gallery view.)

I got this picture from my helicopter.

It was getting much more 'oceany,' for sure. Now, we didn't go down as far as the Overseas Highway that you've seen in movies like Mission Impossible 3:

This is closer to Key West

But we did make it as far South as Plantation Key. Between Key Largo, Tavernier, and Plantation Key, we spent most of the day. 

There were many gift shops with fun stuff that Maddie and I like to check out:

And we had to take a quick picture of this sign to inform Mom and Emme where we had escaped away to:

I'd say 99% of the waterfront area in the places we went by were either owned privately or were part of a gov't park area. Was Key Largo beautiful? Well, the places where we could get to water were:

Everywhere we went, there were signs for scuba diving or snorkeling or parasailing or things like that. And we saw many hotels that looked like they had very pretty beach areas. However, you had to be staying at the hotels to be able to access all that. Key Largo itself seemed to me like a pretty normal Florida city. A bit older, with lots of trees, and roads not in great repair. But nice enough.

Some time later we found a public-accessible beach area. This was truthfully a lagoon with some beach sand where people could lay out. Maddie and I were not at all dressed for the beach-we were both wearing pants and dark shirts. But I got her there and rolled up our pants and we walked around in the water for a while. It was very nice but it was tough to keep her from wanting to jump in and swim with the small fish we found.

After a luxurious lunch at McDonalds-one of the only places where Maddie will eat, although there were 2 or 3 fairly cool looking local spots that I was tempted to try, we found an enormous gift shop that was full to the brim with sea shells and lots of fun stuff both inside an outside.

The little brother of my famous "Pirate's Pub" wooden sign that I bought in LA 11 years ago.

Heading back home, there was one spot where I found that the ocean came up to both sides of the road. But wanting to be safe, I only snapped several pictures of it.

That Sunday, Jan returned and we all headed up to Orlando for a business trip that I had. It was a convention at the Gaylord Palms, which is a sister hotel to the Gaylord Texan that we had near our home in Dallas. It was very nice and had many interesting features:

A large domed area

Very big atrium

This is a re-creation of the Castillo De San Marcos Spanish Fort from St. Augustine

Their very fancy steak house, the Old Hickory. I've eaten at the one in DFW before for work events and it is very very pricey but very good. This one in Orlando is done up to look like a bayou place.

Lots of plant life. These are all real.

The third area in the hotel was done up as Key West. 

Later in the conference I had lunch on that boat-the floor of the restaurant just extends onto the boat.

This is a duplicate apparently of a large shopping area in Key West called Mallory something or other.

Later in the week when I took Jan to the hotel (we were staying at a different one about a mile away from the conference) she arrived in time to see them feeding the alligators. I hadn't even noticed them during the conference, but there they were. They are all piled up on that rock in the pond int he below picture.

This was the cool wallpaper in the hotel bathroom.

A cool wall inside a restaurant in the hotel.

When we were done with the conference, we went back home to pick up Jan's parents: they had flown to Virginia for the baptism and had headed down to see us for the 2nd leg of the trip. I worked for just one day in that week and then we were back on vacation again!

To be continued...

I...

am back.

Regular blogging resumes 5/20/2013.