Well, this is my first day back from a two week vacation, and let me tell you it was awesome! For the most part I did nothing of real importance and I loved every minute of it… and for some reason I was in a euphoric state on the 10th day. If anyone has an explanation for that I’d like to know.
Anyway, the one thing that was actually interesting on my vacation was my trip to Bradenton, Florida (to the south and on the gulf side) to visit an old college friend of mine. I learned a couple of important things on this trip: 1. the weather in south Florida is much more tolerable in October than in July (when I went last year) and 2. the older I get, the more I seem to suffer from motion sickness on airplanes. Thank goodness for Dramamine.
But other than the important lessons I just mentioned (which have no relevance to this story), I experienced some very cool things while I was there. I went to the gorgeous Myakka River State Park for a day and got pictures of all sorts of wild animals including some turkeys, deer and beautiful water fowl. I also saw a mama pig with her cute little piglets in tow, running as fast as their little legs could take them just to keep up, but was unable to get a good picture. Possibly the coolest animal was this huge alligator, probably about 12 feet long! He was amazing.
I also made a visit to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, which was a lot of fun once we actually got there (getting lost in downtown Tampa requires the ability to laugh in the face of adversity). I got a picture of this softshell turtle hanging out in a little pond outside the building, which made me think of our softshell turtle Sponge Bob. Below are some other pictures from my trip. All in all I had a blast… minus the flying.
