Home from Florida

We got up really early. This isn't the night before, it's leaving our hotel in the morning. I had to return the rental car, I wasn't 100% sure I wouldn't get lost, and the airport was a good half an hour away or so.

Sunrise at the car return next to the airport. Gorgeous. I love it when the electric lights begin to match the intensity of the sky. I've probably said that before.

Back in the West. I don't know where this is, but it's a tweaked effort to get a good airplane photo from a bad original. I love taking pictures from the plane. Or just looking at the changing landscape. Give me a window seat and I'm happy.

Crater Lake, Oregon. Again, the original was pretty bad due to glare and a less-than-clear-window. The flight path to and from California often goes this close to Crater Lake. It's so beautiful and interesting with the cinder-cone in the water Click the photo and you can see the crater within the big crater.

Typical western Oregon from the air. It looks like there's a fire. We have a lot of these cotton-puff clouds usually. We're nearly home and glad to be back in a reasonable climate. Yes, there was a reason I moved to Oregon!

I always love coming into PDX. Portland has one of the prettiest and most user-friendly airports I know. It's even a good size - it's not tiny and it's not overbearing. Now we only had to drive two hours back to Astoria.

Lion Country Safari, Florida: Tapirs, rain, and golden light

After having had no luck with the beach and high-rises, we decided to look at animals. It would be a drive-through and we wouldn't be bothered by heat. As it turns out, it stormed like crazy during the hour or so that it took to get there. The rain was coming down so hard and fast that we sat it out in a parking-lot-cum-swamp. The skies were still black when we got there, but the rain was letting up for the most part.

The giraffe on the concessions cart near the front gate was cool. It reminded us of the giraffe eyeglass holder in our online gift shop.

The real animals were nice, too. It turned into a pleasant afternoon watching animals at close range. There were some dark long-legged birds and black buffalo with horns flattened backwards that caught my attention. Maybe someday I'll put their pix in a web album, although if I'd had a really good one, I would have posted it. The windows were a big problem.

We had started late and were driving slowly, taking a lot of photos, most of which were pretty lousy. We weren't allowed to roll down the windows, and they were watching me. The zebra-colored vehicles seemed wary of anyone looking that carefully at the animals and pointing a camera. To be honest, it was very tempting. The lion was, I'm not sure why, particularly majestic and compelling. Both Sue and I felt it, and since he was behind chain link, I really, really wanted to get out and take his picture. But the staff were vigilant, so it didn't happen. By evening, the light had turned gold as we drove toward the sun on our way out of the park.

Sun, rain, green, and animals. It had been a relaxing few hours, for sure. We were almost the only ones there, so we didn't have to deal with crowds, either.

In the first exhibit, a huge area with few fences, we found the tapir, here resting under some trees out of the rain along with a few avian friends. I should say a lot of avian friends, although they didn't all turn up for the photo shoot. The white chunk out of the photo is another stork. Click on the photo to see the dark birds he's cuddling up with.

Having eggs for dinner at iHop was also a sane choice. The food wasn't overbearing, and if anything, the air conditioning was too cold.

High-rise hell and too much food

Sue had never been to Florida, and I hadn't been for many, many years. I have fond memories of paddling in a boat-like thing across a lake owned by the hotel, seeing deep into clear water at Clearwater (???), and doing something-or-other that was fun at Ocala Caverns. It was in the early 1960s. I remember a lot of flat land and I don't remember that much development.

Our hosts for the current trip were located in Miami Gardens. They'd paid for our flight and our hotel and would buy us some meals on the day we met with them. Other than that, we were on our own, and we'd decided to stay a couple of extra days. It was a stretch of the budget for both of us, but we were already going to be there, so why not? But Florida may not be the best destination for two aging women who don't tolerate heat. It was January, and we were not only warm, but very tired. Exhausted from a December of extremely hard work and Astoria's first hurricane, we hand worked to ship orders on time despite power outages in the freezing weather and dark days that followed. It had been a heavy Christmas season in the gift shop - which, in and of itself, is a great thing. So, the first blast of muggy heat getting out of the airport and into a rental car was a bit much. We thought we'd sleep it off, though, until we found that the hotel accommodations were less than we had expected. I don't mean to dwell on it, but let's say sleeping was difficult, so neither of us ever got really rested. About all we wanted to do the first day was catch up on sleep as we could and get out a little to see some sights if we could do it without getting too hot.

That effort turned into a quest for edible food. The Aventura area is deluged with food, as we would find out - mostly either exorbitantly expensive, or junky fast food, which we were seriously trying to avoid. We drove around a bit and found a famous and actually very good huge deli, the Rascal House. As it turns out, it's also famous, and some of the only history left in the area, with McDonald's, Taco Bell and other look-alike boxes taking over. We each ordered a couple of things. That's when we learned something else about Florida. They feed you as if you were an elephant. Not hay, but tons and tons of everything else. Oh my god. We tried, but we were not used to this, and the eyes-bigger-than-stomach thing kicked in. We both ended up bloated and feeling almost miserable. We took pounds of food back to the room to save a few bucks, but much of it was fried and useless and off the low-glycemic plan on which we'd both been feeling very good.

This is Sue saying, "Nope, I've had enough." This photo is AFTER we'd finished eating! Don't they know that there are people starving, and how the heck does anyone think we became such fat people in this country? We didn't realize yet that the food issue was not limited to this restaurant.

As for sightseeing, we couldn't seem to find the ocean. The whole beach front was under construction, "One Way," or had literal or implied "Keep Out" signs. So we went back to relax and maybe sleep, and figured we had another day or so to find the sights.

Tripping

Sue and I are beginning our trip to Florida, where we were invited to visit one of the Tapir and Friends Gift Shop's vendors, Safari Ltd. We got up early to get to the airport in Portland, and it wasn't until our layover somewhere in the middle of the country (I'd have to look it up since I'm posting at a much later date) that I realized I'd been wearing my shirt inside out.

January 11 is also my Dad's birthday, and I've felt sad on that day since he died. I like to remember the day somehow. He loved flying and taking trips, and so do I.