Everglades

This was basically a 7 hour drive across the state. The maps will tell you it's shorter than that, but they're wrong and lying to you.

Even though I call this the Everglades trip, that was actually only the first half. We spent a lot of time hiking and looking for flamingos and american crocodiles without luck.

That's okay, we saw plenty of other critters. This was the first time I ever went kayaking, and I didn't realize how easy it was to overdo things and ache for the next several days...

Caught glimpses of several interesting non-native species making the Miami area their home~

This little guy is a bark anole, they're native but don't live as far north as I do. This was the first I ever saw one.

The sweetest rooster in the world. We met him at a cafe, begging tourists for breakfast tidbits like a dog. He was so gentle

This could also have been called the Dry Tortugas trip, as that was a major destination. We took the ferry to the island to snorkel and explore.

The frigate birds hung in the air like low-poly background animations, they were great. I do wish they might have come into decent camera range though.

An out-of-season hurricane flared up and left the wind howling and the waves stirred up. I could barely sleep through the noise of it all even with my earbuds.

Which worked out, as during one of the many jolts awake I noticed an odd darkness to the sky. Upon sitting up to see what was going on, it turned out we had unknowingly scheduled our trip on the night of a lunar eclipse!


The entire milky way became visible, along with a large shooting star that broke up into fragments.


The return ferry, outrunning the hurricane, was not a trip I'd repeat in a hurry.


We'd planned to look for non-native reptiles around miami for a couple days, but were instead forced to flee back up the state just ahead of the leading bands of the storm.


Perhaps we'll return one day