This morning was spent at Fort Lauderdale Beach. Perfect beach weather, hot and sunny. The area is beautiful, it reminds me of Umhlanga Rocks. Jean, Gray and I spent a good two hours bobbing in the warm Atlantic Ocean. It’s not a surfing beach, there are no waves here.
It’s so hot here, when Gray got out the air conditioned car his glasses misted up.
From the beach we headed off to the Apple Shop to buy my new iPad and home for lunch. I’m so excited to have a working device at last.
In the late afternoon we headed off to M*** Fish Camp, not even the GPS could find this place. Eventually we found the rocky road and then had to trek deeper along waterways and long grass to the airboat, gator watching, fishing and camping camp. We didn’t have to wonder for long about where the hell we were, we were warmly welcomed and soon settled on the airboat. The air boat, a contraption with seats, no sides and a giant propeller/fan on the back. We shot across the river over the road and headed deep into the Everglades. Our pilot was Old Grandpa Marshall, we were pretty sure he had married his sister and his folks must have been first cousins but he was salt of the earth and seemed really knowledgeable about the area. He took us to the ‘rarest flowers’in the world, the male and female spider lilly. After showing us one he promptly reversed over it. We googled it and discovered that you can buy them at the local nursery. I asked him about bird that had flown past and he informed me it was a brown one, just like the black ones back at camp. Wonder how much of what he told us was real.
The Everglades is a natural region of tropical wetlands in the southern portion of Florida. It has some really interesting biomes, made up largely of marshy area of saw grass and reeds. The Seminole Tribe of the area, unfortunately no longer exist, but aptly gave the large body of water the name ‘River of Grass’. We entered mangrove and cypress swamps to access one of the many islands in the Everglades.
The Everglades are also full of lilly pads, unfortunately as the sun was setting the lillies were closed.
From there we headed through the some of the hundreds of sawgrass tributaries to a small river clearing, trusting grandpapa Marshal knew the way. Here we stopped to fish and watch the spectacular sunset, with its pink and purple hues. Gray caught reeds and lilly pads, Wayne caught an alligator, which Grandpa Marshal chastised, by hitting her on the head with his hat, for taking the fish bait, I took pics (my fishing skills left much to be desired) and Jean won fisherman of the day (for her amazing technical skills) but unfortunately we had no fish for dinner.
We returned to Hill Billy fish camp after the sun had set with Gray and Wayne having taken turns at the helm. Between them and Marshal I’m surprised we made it back at all.
What an amazing experience, it’s a day we will talk about for years to come.
Pandas in Africa 