Florida

So I spent a week in Florida last, well, week. We were visiting my wife's grandparents and surprisingly I had a pretty good time. I don't really like vacations as such, my ideal one would be basically staying at home and ordering delivery for like a week straight but I had a nice time anyway.

Florida is hot and humid, although amusingly we did miss the weekend of triple digit weather here in Portland by going there, much to the chagrin of some of my friends, but honestly the humidity more than makes up for it. You can't tell if you are sweating or if the air is just damp.

Florida is really flat, this is to be expected for a place that is on average something like 9 feet above sea level, human habitation there is an entirely artificial thing, the cities were basically hacked out of the Everglades and the whole area feels like they are on the verge of retaking it. Would be a good biking state except for the whole "hot as balls" thing.

I liked the nature, it wasn't really buggy while I was there and there are iguanas everywhere, since random lizards just hanging out isn't something I am used to this was quite marvelous, though I am sure it gets old to the natives. We visited the Everglades, took the airboat tour and everything and that was pretty damn cool, the Glades are perhaps one of the most interesting natural places left in America.

We saw alligators, but that would have been worth it even if we didn't.

Saw manatees too! We had to journey a bit south to the Miami aquarium to do so since it wasn't the season for them to be around where we were, but that was fun, they pretty much look like floating rocks and are incredibly silly creatures, they don't do anything silly mind you, they just look ridiculous.

So that was neat, other than that, we spent a lot of time going to restaurants, we chatted a lot, went to the beach and a local farmer's market where I got a very fine crab boil. And just generally did the tourist thing, it was nice. Next time I would like to have my own transportation though, so perhaps I'll look into renting a car.

I have other thoughts on Florida that are somewhat less complimentary that I will talk about tomorrow, today was just a trip report.