A perfect day

Last year, on the way back from Haiti, Kenzie and I stayed for a few days in the Miami/Ft Lauderdale area. We had a blast and it was so beautiful that I texted Jeff that we should go down there together some time. 

A few months later, he was in the Tampa area and texted me that it was a beautiful place and we should plan a trip together. "You think?" I said.

So I did. 

We planned a week, mostly in St Augustine and then a couple of days in Orlando to do the free Disney World activities. Then last week we were bored and sat down to see if there was anything worth watching on the old Roku and we found a PBS Nature show about Florida. 

"Let's watch that," I suggested.

So we did.

And we discovered a cool place called Silver Springs where you could see manatees in the wild and the water is 99% pure so you can see all the way to the bottom of the river. I immediately Googled it and found glass bottomed boat tours and straight away booked the extended tour for Sunday.

We arrived separately in Jacksonville on Friday night and didn't reach our airbnb until one a.m. We had trouble getting to sleep because time zones and then the resident rooster started crowing right outside our very loosely attached bedroom window at 5 a.m. which did not make me happy because I had barely fallen asleep. I may have gotten an hour at the most and started the day slightly grumpy. The plan was to attend a couple of different markets and have a fairly easy day on Saturday, but the best laid plans do oft go astray. The first market apparently didn't actually exist, despite online evidence to the contrary and our most earnest attempts to find it. Then the second turned out to be a carnival, which did not appeal to either of our sleep-deprived selves, so we decided to look for lunch instead. We found some food carts, which looked promising, but the barbecue quickly went cold in the brisk wind that was blowing and we decided to go back to the house and take a nap.

Which we did.

We slept well last night, being barely conscious of the enthusiastic rooster this morning.

Honestly, who has an airbnb rental and then invites a rooster to stay?

Aside: The host couple also has a crazy old lady who lives in a room on the other side of the house and who accuses them of stealing from her. They let her stay for free after some hurricane and now they can't get rid of her and she stands on the road in front of the house most of the day, protecting her stuff.

True story.

I have to tell you, last year had its good times but for the most part was rough. I lost my zest for life for quite a long time and am only now recovering it. Great days have been few and far between. 

Today was one.

The weather was sunny, light breezes, not too hot and not too cold. Just like baby bear's porridge.

The drive was relaxing and the scenery was unparalleled. Long needle pine forests and small towns and everything was green and the sky was blue.

We arrived at Silver Springs and I was, as always, taken with the gorgeous Spanish moss that hangs from certain trees in the South. It's an epiphyte, dontcha know? 

Please excuse my obsession. I can't help it.

 Jeff is positively dwarfed by the trees at the entrance.

Here I am, sitting in the boat as we pull out into the river, hoping for a manatee sighting.

Silver Springs is one of the largest artesian spring systems in the world. There are 30 springs in the system and the water surfaces through vents on the bottom of the river. Water pours into the river through these vents at the rate of 550 million gallons a day. This is a great description of the area if you're interested in reading more about it. Silver Springs

 This is one of the first vents we saw. You can see the water churning out of the vent because it disturbs the surrounding sand and often shoots out crushed shells that come from the bottom of the vents. Some vents lead to caves that are so deep that their depth has never been measured.

I don't think I have ever been to a habitat that has so much diversity of wildlife. Wildlife that is, on the whole, seemingly unconcerned with we humans. Turtles, fish, alligators, all kinds of bird life abound.

The river has a bit of a bayou feel to it. Lots of cypresses and undergrowth. There were numerous kayaks and other boats on the river but it was still quite peaceful. 

This fellow was a fifteen-footer and I'm darned if I would have sat in a kayak this close to him. They are not fond of human flesh, apparently, but I don't think I would wait to find out.

You're probably wondering if we saw any manatees.

Oh boy, did we! Some swam under the boat and that was a short-lived thrill. We saw many others in the water close to the boat. 

And. 

I discovered that about an hour past Silver Springs is a place where you can swim with them, so I foresee another trip to this area in our future.

Because, who would not want to swim with a manatee?

 The birds were as unconcerned with human watchers as were the rest of the critters.

At the end of the boat ride we saw the Mammoth Spring, which has two vents and is 30 feet deep and 135 feet long. It is estimated that 45% of the water in the system comes from this spring. 

Many movies and TV shows were made on or in this river and in the upper left corner you can see statues that were left there after one movie. The vents are under the shelves that are apparent in the two photos.

Being a boat captain is Jeff's idea of bliss, so he had to get a photo with Captain Bob.

This is another of the abandoned statues that is in the education center. 

I was trying to look aloof but alas, it seems that I cannot.

After the boat ride we were still floating, it had been such a great two hours of discovery. We trod the raised boardwalk before we left.

Some movie producer released a bunch of macaque monkeys onto an island in the river, not knowing that they could swim, which they promptly did and now there is a large population of them in the area. We spotted some in the trees at the beginning of the walk.

More beauty than the mind can comprehend in this day.

Towards the end of the loop I turned a corner and there was this little family of macaques sitting on a log. They were busy picking little parasites off each other, I presume. As soon as they saw me with my camera two of them took off and the bigger one turned quite aggressive. He bared his teeth at me and I was suitably intimidated.

We crossed this river and it was so beautiful and so I snapped a picture and if I had done it half a second later I would have gotten that large bird up close. I didn't even know it was flying up until after I pressed the button.

This little bat was hanging from a small tree right by the boardwalk. 

I love this watermelon picnic table.
Somebody make me one.

We drove back to St Augustine but stopped in Palatka on the way back because there is a Ravine Gardens State Park that we wanted to check out. The ravine was created over thousands of years by water flowing from the nearby St, John's River. The Park was created in 1933 by the WPA and over 95,000 azaleas were planted there. They are almost at the end of their blooom, but we had a very pleasant walk around the 1.8 mile loop. I only complained a little bit about my right foot pain. 

Spanish moss. 

I love it.

Unreasonably.

I wasn't sure how I felt about this sign. I wasn't expecting to find random alligators on my path.

As we made out way back to our car, which, by the way, is a bright red Dodge Charger, we heard the song of a red cardinal. Even the cardinal, a usually shy bird that takes flight as soon as it sees people, was unconcerned with us. 

On the way home we stopped to eat at Cracker barrel, which is my new favourite restaurant. I think I will eat there every day until we go home.

A Tale from Cruising Down Under

A longish story from our cruise to New Zealand and Australia. Too long for Facebook.

One day, as I got off the lift, I saw a little old English lady walking through the lift lobby and muttering to herself. I stood there for a while, I forget what I was doing but I think I was looking at some art work or something. Pretty soon, here comes little old dear again, and this time I could hear what she was saying.

"I just can't find my room," was her refrain.

I stopped her and said, let me see if I can help you. She knew her room number but couldn't find it because a part of the corridor looked like it dead-ended at one point, but if you walked closer to it, it turned a corner. Large cruise ships can be very confusing, and this one was a giant. It's not uncommon to see very senior citizens walking the corridors in a slightly confused state when on a cruise ship!

It turns out her room was just down the corridor from ours, so I walked with her until we found her room. I suspected that she might be in early dementia, as the inability to interpret spaces is a symptom. We talked as we walked and it turned out that she was born in Birmingham, just like me, and was evacuated during the war to Cardiff in Wales, where my family visited on our summer holiday. My parents were also evacuated to the country during the war. Her husband had died a few months earlier and her daughter persuaded her to take this cruise. She had a couple of friends that were also on the cruise but she was alone in her room. Not, I thought to myself, an ideal situation for someone so confused.

Anyway, she told me that she liked to go by Eva, although her name was really Enid, which she despised. Her husband's name was Ray, and I nearly flipped because Enid and Ray were our well-loved neighbours in Alvechurch when I was a child. What are the odds? So from then on I called her Enid!

After I left Enid I went to our room and worriedly told Jeff about her. I decided to go and check on her after our outing the next day, which I did. She remembered me when I knocked on her door and was happy to see me and invited me in for a chat. She was so funny and could talk up a storm, but the delightful thing was that she knew she was a chatterbox and made jokes about it. She was a bit shaken up because she had fallen when going down the steep ramp to the quay that morning. She had forged ahead with her tour but by lunchtime she was feeling pain and headed back to the ship for a rest. The cruise people took her to the on-board doctor, who checked her out for broken bones and  and gave her about four Naproxen for the pain.

Four pain pills! I said. How ridiculous was that? I had my own supply of Naproxen with me because of plantar fasciitis pain so I offered to give her some of mine. I also told her to double the dose the doctor told her to take, because I know about these things! I told her if she was in pain and needed them, call me and I will bring her some. She told me all about her life, we laughed a lot, and then we parted ways.

A few days later, Enid called me and wanted more pills, so I gave them to her and then made a point of knocking on her door periodically to see how she was doing. We had many delightful talks. She is a great, brave, optimistic soul and I loved her. I introduced her to Anne, and here we are. It was mystical how many different ways our lives had intersected. We felt like soul sisters!