Fall migration-Gainesville/New Smyrna Beach/Everglades-September 28th to October 6th

My next visit was to see Gina, Paul and Debbie down in Florida.  Climbing aboard a train headed from Baltimore, Maryland to Orlando, Florida is not for the faint of heart.  To put this in perspective, for a European, a train ride is a generally pleasant experience.  Your journey, on average lasts between 1 and 8 hours and is rarely longer.  En route, you are surrounded by business people, students, a smattering of tourists and locals, with an occasional nut case or drunken posse of football fans or bachlor/bachelorette parties.  While occasionally annoying, these last categories are definitely the minority and can usually be tolerated or, if you need a drink, can be joined with little problem.  In the U.S., if you are not driving a car, you automatically become one of the crazies (one notable exception would be the urban corridor between Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Washington D.C., and Philidelphia which has enough people to make train travel an alluring prospect).  If you are going 1433 km from Baltimore to Florida by train, you are definitely in with the crazies.  To put this in perspective, this is almost the same as travelling from Frankfurt to Barcelona.  Leaving at 18 put me into Orlando at around 14 the next day.  Only 20 hours.  During the journey, I was sitting next to four of the most talkative people on the planet.   A McDonalds manager who was a "gourmet" (he and his wife dined out conspicuously at Applebees...although to be fair, he gave me a recommendation for Florida B-B-Q in Tampa called "Kojacs" which might be good).  A destitute huckster with three kids and missing front teeth who gave me a CD of his rap music, a roving passenger/bartender who was drunk or drugged and insisted on buying anybody who asked beer and bringing it personally to their seat without cost.  To round out the crew was an 80 year old New York grandmother and one guy with a bag of cookies.  Throw in cigarette breaks and nicotine fiends and I'll leave it to your imagination what the ride was like. 

In spite of the chaos, the ride was survivable and I turned up in Orlando, got my rental car, and was immediately doused with more rain than I have seen in the last five years in Mainz combined, all in the space of about 20 minutes.  Welcome to Florida.  Although crashing at Gina and Andy's place is always great, Gainesville is a somewhat mixed bag as a city.  Gina and I had some great food at a place called the ?Warehouse? and I enjoyed looking at all the living creatures running around (stray cats, opossums, Gina and Andy's fat cat, gekos, and mysterious rustlings in bushes).  Other than that, there is far too much traffic in Gainesville and Florida cities in general (I guess with the heat, nobody really wants to get out of their cars and so everyplace seems like a superhighway).  After collecting my wits for a few days in Gainesville and just hanging out, I drove out to New Smyrna beach to see Paul and Debbie.  In contrast with the cities, the beaches in Florida are wonderful.  The water is warm, the sand is white, and there are fish all over in the water.  As always, we had fun catching up and getting in a little fishing and body surfing.  I was thrilled to see the space shuttle sitting on its lauch pad (perhaps one of the last few times that it will ever fly) down by cape Canaveral.  I highly recommend a visit.  Seeing a rocket in person is, to me, very cool and utterly inspiring.  In the excitement over Paul's part in Transformers III movie, we made the mistake of renting transformers II and having our brains fried by it.  Following the weekend, work called and I decided to make my way down to the Florida Keys and the Everglades.   After a brutal drive, I was informed by park rangers that I was insane to want to camp in the Everglades and that mosquitos would likely carry my dessicated carcass away to be dropped into the water as alligator chum.  Come back in December to do the 8 day canoe trip through the wilderness.  That one is on my list for the future!  Instead, I headed for Key Largo and ended up camping near the underwater state park.  The next morning I jumped on a boat and did a snorkelling tour of the reef.  Muey bien.  Swimming in the rough waters gave me my first bout ever of sea sickness while in the water, astounding to me as I had weathered 10 m waves on the Southern Atlantic with no ill effects other than the flu.  My chumming, however, brought the fish up close and personal so I figured it was all for the best.  A extra brutal drive returning to Gainesville through Big Cypress is something I wont repeat again in a hurry and my tour ended with a flight out to New Orleans!

 Something you wont find in Europe.  Damn good though...thanks Gina!

 Beach time.  Love the waves and sand.

 You can park your car here and just throw your lawn chair down.  Nice way to do a picnic.

 Never saw a sign like this in Europe.

 Our ocean going vessel.  Although we didn't bring back the crabs and fish we wanted for dinner, we had fun dropping chicken necks into the water, looking at enormous spiders, unhooking numerous catfish, watching the dolphins playing around in the water 100 meters from our boat, and watching the bald eagles circling.  Blissful.

In the distance you can see one of the launch pads for the space shuttle.  If you look closely, I think you can see the shuttle on the right hand side of the pad.  Having seen two launches and this, I somehow still never get tired of it.  Space exploration is cool!

Sorry, but no pictures of the underwater park.  It was underwater where I couldn't go with the camera and the Everglades was mostly driving.  I'll attempt to go back to do the canoe trip someday and take lots of pictures then.

Next stop, New Orleans!