Hiding From The Cold
Howdy!! It’s been a while since I last wrote a post. In fact, it’s been a few months. I took some time off from writing posts to be present in life. I feel like sometimes I get so caught up in trying to get a blog post written and out each week I forget to be in the moment…present in life. So, I worked ahead and was able to get posts scheduled from October 2018 to January 2019. Last week’s post was the last post I had pre-written so I could take a break.
SO! We’re back to the normal writing and posting schedule where I’m just a few weeks ahead! It’s been a few months…and we’ve done quite a bit! Let me get y’all caught up!
We left Colorado and spent some time in Missouri to visit family and friends. Then, we headed down to Texas to do some doctoring and visit with more friends. After Texas…we hightailed it down to Miami, FL where…we hid from the cold for six weeks.
We stayed at Larry and Penny Thompson Park the last time we were in the Miami area. It’s a great park with full hookups and is wonderful for getting some walking in. I can get right around two miles with one loop.
And…when I got tired of walking the loop in the park, I could venture out to this little pond just outside the campground boundary. The signs say watch for gators, but in the six weeks we were there…we never once saw a gator. Not. A single. Time.
Most of our six weeks we did regular life stuff. School, chores, work… Nothing exciting or remotely adventurous. I guess you could say we took a staycation. ;-p
We did eventually decide we should probably venture out and do something. We’d visited both National Parks in the area during our last stay in Miami, but we’d missed seeing the Nike Hercules Missile Base over at the Everglades National Park so we hit the Ranger Walk one Saturday. If you’re interested in seeing the Nike Missile Base here, you should know it’s only available through the Ranger Walk so make sure you check the times for that. We’ve been to other Nike Missile sites, but this was the first time where the missiles were kept in topside buildings instead of underground silos! This missile site was the last one to go dark in 1979 due to the Cuban Missile Crisis of the time.
We also made it to the Miami Zoo Lights during the Christmas season. We’d never been to the Miami Zoo…we wish we’d gone during the day instead of during the Zoo Lights. Don’t get me wrong…the lights were super cool! But, we only saw three animals. And, their habitats were lit with weird blue lighting. So, I guess we’ll have to hit that up the next time we’re back in Miami because the zoo itself looked like it would be a really neat zoo to visit!
One of the cooler things we did during our six weeks in Miami was to go to John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park and take a glass bottom boat ride! It was really neat to go check out some of the sea life hanging out by the coral reef! The whole tour was about two hours and there were a couple of very knowledgeable guides to tell us what we were looking at. They did a great job!
After the boat ride, we hung out at the state park long enough to check out the beaches and fight off the thousands of no-seeums that swarmed us. They were bad. We all went home with tons of little itchy bites! And yes…for those of you wondering…we did use spray. They might have thinned a bit after the spray, but they were still pretty darn thick.
John Pennekamp Coral Reef Sate Park is on Key Largo and…since we were so close…we decided to go hit up Robbie’s down in Islamorada for some lunch after the boat tour! Check out that shrimp quesadilla! It was huge! And it was loaded with shrimp. I wasn’t expecting to get that much shrimp in a quesadilla.
After we ate at Robbie’s we walked over to the docks right next to the restaurant where you can feed the ginormous tarpons!! Guys!! These fish were soooo big! We saw a few sharks lurking nearby too. And the pelicans were begging for food. Begging…stealing… The pelicans were kind of pushy about the food.
The last stop on our day trip to The Keys was to The Blond Giraffe Key Lime Pie Factory where you can get anything key lime flavored. We all got something then headed out to the chicken yard to eat. The chickens were awesome. They were so friendly they were willing to share your key lime treat…they might have been a little too friendly because they didn’t really care if you were done with your treat or not. Ha! I loved it! And yes, that is a frozen chocolate covered piece of key lime pie. Alex let me know that it was delicious!
We spotted tons of these huge iguanas. They would just kind of lumber around everywhere. The biggest ones we saw were all lounging around along the side of the big borrow pits along the sides of the roads. What’s a borrow pit? It’s where the state had to dig a big ditch in order to use that material to build up the road. All of the borrow pits we saw were filled with water…and quite a few had some gators that were keeping the iguanas company.
We made Christmas cookies over Christmas. It’s one of our traditions. The decorating gets more and more creative each year. We also ate ourselves silly on Cuban food and Mooyah burgers.
There were pretties everywhere, but these purple ones were my favorite.
We had a great six weeks being semi-normal and slowing down a little. It was such a switch from the fast paced moving we’d been doing all year. We learned we’d like to take it a little slower…we also learned that six weeks in one stop is way too long for us. We were all getting a little stir crazy by the end.
See y’all down the road!!
#hidingfromthecold