florida

summer’s coming up fast and caryn and i were hoping to take at least a short vacation. unfortunately, due to time restrictions, we could only go somewhere for a few days… actually, just 5. so we decided to join sharon and dave on their trip. they’ve been RVing across the country for a couple of months now, and had gotten all the way to Florida from here. so we flew out there to join their road trip for a brief time and hang out.

it was so fun!! RVing is hella cool. one of the days, we had a 300 mile drive ahead of us. normally, that would fucking suck and be torture… not so in a RV. the whole time while dave drove (poor dave), the rest of us were free to wander around the RV have fun, and drink large quantities of alcohol. drinking while on the go is dope!! (esp. when you dont have to make bathroom stops either)

our trip was divided into two parts. the first part we spent in a national park at key largo. key largo is the closest of the Florida keys to the mainland, and was really cool. thick mangrove forests lined the shores next to beaches and beautiful turquoise waters. we spent some time hiking around through the trees, and also took a glass bottom boat tour to see some of the tropical fish. we even learned some local slang: “the bomb plus tax”. heh. we tried the infamous key lime pie, and then we tried more of it in a different restaurant. key lime pie is so prevalent in the keys that you can even get it in a sushi restaurant.

the second half of our trip we spent in Orlando. Orlando is a pretty weird town. we went to this one place called gatorland. it’s kind of hokey, but kinda cool at the same time. the place is *filled* w/ gators. tons of them everywhere. huge ones! they have a show where they hang a whole chicken on a rope and the gators jump out of the water to eat it. oddly enough, not only do they have live gators there, but they also sell gator nuggets and gator ribs. we tried the gator nuggets… taste like tough chicken. they also had some baby gators that had just hatched:

after gatorland, we went to a place where they let you drive your own fan boat. you know, those weird swamp boats with the huge fan on the back? The damn things only went up to 9 miles per hour! it was still fun though, to boat through the swamp and watch turtles swim around. another thing that we saw a lot of was herons and egrets. these were cool stork-like white birds that flew pretty much everywhere in Florida…

that’s pretty much it for sightseeing. the rest of the time was just spent hanging out in the
RV and drinking. living in the RV was a blast and it was really good to see sharon and dave who we hadn’t seen in a long time. it was sucky to leave them at the end of the trip, but luckily we were dead tired after only 2 hours sleep, so that mitigated the sadness.

oh, one weird thing happened on the trip. at one point sharon and dave said they wanted to show us some of the crazy shit that they had acquired over their trip. for some inexplicable reason, the first thing that came out of my mouth was “oh, what did you guys get, Nunzilla?”. and lo and behold… that’s what it was. what the fuck is the chances of that?? a one in a billion guess?

oh actually, one more thing. we found a very weird candy bar from the UK. it was called the “yorkie” and apparently, girls aren’t allowed to eat it?!

*v