I thought about lumping the drive home into one post, but today was kind of remarkable on its own, so why not a post of its own! The plan for today was to check out by 10, then head to the Kennedy Space Center and then drive north to Jacksonville to meet Wendy Means aka Wendevious. Then after dinner with Wendy drive north to somewhere, beginning the drive home.
We cleaned up, packed up, started the laundry and away we went. We loved our week at our VRBO rental. It was perfect. I'm honestly not sure if there was anything I would have changed about it.
Oh and happy 22nd anniversary my love!
Trying to engage the girls about going to Kennedy proved fruitless. Kate wanted to go until she found out how much it cost. At some point Ken switched gears. One thing that Ken really wanted to do was to see alligators. He had read about the Lake Apopka Wildlife drive through a nature preserve. That seemed like a good idea that only cost us time and gas money. On our way there we made one stop at an Ulta to buy Fiona a much desired scented hand sanitizing spray. She chose watermelon when we were at the store. After gassing up we were on the way to Lake Apopka.
We entered the area, Ken as passenger, and began our slow drive through. The posted speed limit is 10 miles/hour. In some areas you can safely go around a stopped car, but in a few places it was too narrow to safely do so. There were a few places to turn out and stop, but for the most post you were not supposed to stop on the road way. It was a gravel/sand road that was white in colour. The drive was through the wetlands and marshy areas on the north shore of lake Apopka. The first wildlife that we saw in abundance were birds. It was a good few minutes before we saw our first alligator and oh the excitement! We drove and drove and took picture after picture. Fiona had climbed into the front seat and sat on Ken's lap. Alice was on the passenger side and at first she had all the best gators on her side, but eventually Kate had some good sightings too. All in the girls counted 72 gators! Ken was happy, we were all happy, it was awesome!
After the awesome drive we started to make our way up to Jacksonville. We needed gas and stopped at a gas station that had a taco bar in it. It was definitely not a touristy place at all and what did we see, more boiled peanuts, this time in cans. After we drove away Ken was sad we didn't buy a can.
Oh and this is Spanish moss. It hangs from oak trees. I just looked it up, it is neither from Spain nor is it actual moss. It's actually a flowering plant not a parasite and generally it doesn't kill the trees but it may slow down their growth. (The Spanish moss is the bits of stuff hanging down from the branches, this isn't the best picture.)
We drove through Ocala National Forest. The trees were really pretty. I love how different the trees are in the south.
Six years ago, maybe seven years ago now, Ken was playing a game called wordscapes on his phone. I would steal his phone to play the game. He was mildly annoyed by this and encouraged me to just download the app myself, which I eventually ended up doing. In April of 2020 during the pandemic (I thought it was March but I googled it) wordscapes introduced teams. I started to get these messages about joining a team, or creating a team. On a whim I decided to create a team. Pretty soon other people started joining the team. I called the team Light. I felt like we all needed light during the pandemic and it just fit. One of the people that joined the team was a player named Wendevious. At some point Wendevious - Wendy Means and I became Facebook friends and we would chat privately from time to time. I told her a few months ago that we would be driving to Florida at Christmas and we started talking about meeting up. I was nervous. This is the first time that I've ever met someone in real life that I met online. It was our whole family, not sure if that was overwhelming or not for Wendy. We had a nice dinner at Longhorn's Steak House. It was brief but good. And it didn't feel like meeting a stranger, it felt like meeting a friend.
I think it was a street light that I accidentally caught on top of Wendy's head, but it just seemed kind of perfect!
From there the girls and I walked to CVS pharmacy across the street. I thought it would be so fun to find this book "What Makes a Rainbow". My high school friend Nicole is actually in Florida right now too. Her family is having a fun trip in the Florida keys. They're in a camper van and they've been visiting CVS stores finding copies of Matthias's favourite board book when he was little. I didn't find the book but saw Shaq gummies and they made me giggle - Ken had shown them to me in Target I think, or maybe Publix, in any case, I thought I'd take a pic.
And then we were on the road driving north. You can a little bit make out that the sign says Georgia.
But you really can't make out that this is the welcome to South Carolina even a little bit!
The drive tonight was without incident which was a great blessing. This whole trip has been one blessing after another. We're in Florence, South Carolina at the Home2Suites by Hilton.
No comments:
Post a Comment