Florida Road Trip - Part 2

Alligator hunting!  After a flying tour of Miami, we drove further south to Homestead, the gateway city to the Everglades National Park.  This immense area of swamps, coastal forests, steamy mangroves and grasslands covers the entire tip of the Florida peninsula and is home to countless species of bird, mammal and marine life.  Strolling along a meandering boardwalk on day one, just a few feet from the rivers and swamps below and only a few hundred metres from the car park, we were stunned by the abundance of wildlife.  Turtles bobbed around in the water, fish jumped and splashed down in a flash of silver, Anhingas dried their out-stretched wings in the sunshine, Tri-Colored Herons and Ibis' waded in the muddied waters spearing fish and collecting snails and crayfish from the riverbed with their long beaks, and large Osprey circled overhead, flexing their talons in search of their next meal.  Being an avid twitcher, my mum was in her element, sighting species of birds in their dozens that fall under the 'extremely rare' list back in the U.K.  She barely needed her binoculars as everything was just so close (or so large!). 

Then, in the shade of an overhanging Cypress tree, a ripple spread out across the river's surface.  A dark silhouette moved beneath the water.  Two dark, stone-like eyes rose up and sank down again.  The ripple moved and a slow wake began to develop as whatever it was swam effortlessly along beside us.  Then the head appeared.  The two eyes, glossy and black followed by a long snout edged with white teeth.  A few feet behind the head, the rippled armour of its back surfaced and a giant tail propelled it with a slow but powerful beat.  We were looking at eleven or twelve feet of alligator, swimming by just a few metres from where we stood.  A rare sighting, so we thought.  To see such a large, supposedly deadly creature so close to a tranquil, tourist-friendly nature walk could not be normal.  As the day went on, we began to realise that these prehistoric creatures, made up of little more than muscle, armour and teeth, were, literally, everywhere.

Once we'd seen one, they began to appear all over.  Under the boardwalks, slumped on river banks, floating in the middle of lakes, stood by the side of the road, swimming in man made ponds and canals and lurking among the reeds of streams and swamps.  

Away from the visitor centres, car parks and boat ramps, the Everglades is a timeless place.  The seasons come and go, migratory birds arrive each year like clockwork, en route to South America, and dolphins and manatees play in the sparkling waters where the Gulf of Mexico meets the wild Atlantic.  The elusive and endangered Florida Panther lurks in the undergrowth as warm winds carry butterflies and clouds of pollen across the landscape, rippling the tall grasses like waves on a lake.  A heron darts a fish with pinpoint accuracy, a colony of pelicans, maybe fifteen or twenty in number, soar motionless across the sky, and the black and white face of a raccoon scurries along the riverbank as he forages for food before the nearest alligator spots him.

Florida Road Trip - Part 1

Within twelve hours of landing in Orlando and meeting up with my parents, we were back on the open road, this time sitting in the back seat for a change, heading towards Miami for a family road trip.  Delores, our dashboard hula girl, remained quite still on the long, smooth and perfectly flat Florida highways aboard the luxury SUV my Dad had hired.  Outside the window, with the temperatures breaching the 30C mark (86F) and the humidity soaring, wide expanses of lush green fields rolled by beneath a deep blue sky.  Journeying further into the heart of the sunshine state, small islands of tall palm trees appeared, dotted among the swaying grasses of the Florida marsh lands and mangroves where, according to our now battered guide-book, over a million fresh water alligators live.  On the distant horizon, immense storm clouds billowed and grew, creeping ever closer as our drive continued.  Soon, once the sky had been completely devoured, we were directly beneath it - a tropical storm of biblical proportions.  Traffic slowed to a crawl, the lights of the truck piled high with oranges in front of us vanished behind a wall of water, and white hot cracks of lightning tore the sky in two and shook the earth around us.  The wiper blades flashed across the screen at full speed.  Headlights appeared out of nowhere on the opposite side of the road and the world sank into a swirl of grey cloud.  As it competed with the roar of the rain on the roof, the chirpy country song floating from the radio buzzed and died intermittently as more bolts of electricity consumed the air outside.

After a mile or so, and as if someone had clicked their fingers, the rain suddenly stopped.  We crossed a line in the road where the tarmac switched from glossy wet to perfectly dry - the razor sharp edge of the downpour.  A seam between the clouds opened up and the tropical sunshine beamed down on us once again.  The gloomy banks of cloud lifted and fizzled into an empty blue sky as a great white heron took flight from a nearby river.

One hundred and fifty miles further along the dead-straight road, the houses, sprawling shopping malls and out of town chain motels of Miami's periphery began to appear.  The swamps and fields fell away behind us and a coastline fringed with sparkling white, five-star tower block hotels lay ahead.  Weaving through the busy streets, past boutique shops and trendy bars, we hopped over sparkling lagoons and canals and gasped at the size of the waterfront mansions (and luxury speedboats) which lined them.  Through the rush hour traffic, we made our way towards Miami Beach and our (almost) beach-side hotel.  Once our driver had been replenished with an ice cold beer from the cool box, we headed out for our first taste of Miami and, for my parents, their first taste of Cuban cuisine which is particularly abundant in a state that, at its southern extremity, sits around ninety miles from Castro's Caribbean island.

Although rather too trendy for our tastes (and full of overpriced tourist trap bars) the Art Deco district in Miami's South Beach is (despite the shirtless frat boys posing along it's promenade) a beautiful trip into nineteen-thirties architecture.  If you can stand the college spring-break vibe (and the searing heat) for a few hours, it is certainly worth a visit for those "oh-so-Miami" postcard shots of pastel coloured hotels, sharp lines, bold curves and  vintage signage.

Look who we found in Orlando...

(Simon's parents)

And then we bumped in to this guy at Universal Studios...

Preparing to fly to Florida...

What's our baggage allowance again?

Things to be found in the desert

Heading south, back towards Los Angeles, we crossed the vast expanse of desert covering the Nevada California border, and made a few unexpected discoveries amid the miles and miles of sand, rock and tumbleweed...

Abandoned vehicles

The Ghost town of Rhyolite

The Goldwell Open Air Art Gallery

And, of course, a whole lot of nothing.

Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

'Where you from?' says the guy in the ill fitting suit now following us along Fremont Street in the downtown, old town district of Vegas.

'London,' we reply, barely glancing over our shoulder.

'Wanna see a show tonight?'  Our pace quickens. '...for free.'

Our pace slows.

'Nothing's free,' I suggest.

'Well, you'd be surprised.  Why don't y'all come on over to see my colleague and we'll see what we can do.'

It is then that we remember it and give each other a casual, yet all-knowing glance.

It was way back on a rain soaked night in Australia, with the latest deluge battering the tin roof of the camp kitchen above us, when a friendly chap from Liverpool seduced us over kangaroo sausages with talk of heavily discounted tickets for theme parks in Orlando.  So easy to find, he said, so quick and simple to do, and with a super money-saving pay-off at the end of it.  And it turns out they do it in Vegas too.

So on our second morning in Sin City, our own mini bus came and picked us up from our hotel and drove us down to "The Strip" (the long row of super casinos such as Ceaser's Palace, The Bellagio etc.) and delivered us at The Jockey Club.  Over coffee and doughnuts, a very friendly chap in a smart suit chatted to us about our favourite vacations, what we like to do on vacation, how important vacations are and, finally, how much we normally spend on vacations.  The idea, he said, is to introduce to us a new, cost effective way of taking five-star vacations for the rest of our lives.  No pressure, just a fun and informative ninety minute presentation about the exciting world of time-shares and we'd be on our way with our 'gifts'.  And it was for these 'gifts' and these 'gifts' alone that Rosie and I were there in the first place...

Do we want to make large, substantial savings on vacations for the rest of our lives?  No!  Do we want to make a life-prolonging (their actual words) investment to be handed down to our children and our children's children?  No!  Are we interested in the fun and flexible idea of a time-share?  No!  Would we like to make a $500 deposit today along with the $1,000 a year membership fee?  No!  Could we afford the $500 a month subscription for the next 45 years?  No!.....we'll just take our free show tickets and free meal coupons, thank you!

After an oh-so-polite "grilling" from a senior sales executive (who basically asked, 'how much money can you afford to give us today?') once we'd declined the junior salesperson's initial offer, we strode across Las Vegas Boulevard, into the Planet Hollywood casino and leisure complex, and booked ourselves in for two magic shows, an all you can eat, three course buffet (which turned out to be amazing - I had candy floss and designer cupcakes for desert!) and a live high-end stage production entitled "Vegas - The Musical" all for a grand total of zero dollars and zero cents...oh, and I won a giant blow-up Vegas sign in one of the magic shows!

And as if that wasn't enough of a bargain, our hotel had given us $10 in free slot play just for staying there, so we sat and hit the '1 line, 1 credit' button a thousand times on the penny slots when we got home - all washed down with giant cocktails in American football shaped cups.  Gambling grannies, Elvis impersonators, the single biggest screen in the world, cocktails so big you have to hang them from your neck, blinding neon lights, live bands playing in the middle of the street, a miniature Eiffel tower, a miniature Venice, a miniature New York, 24 hour bars, 24 hour diners, five dollar steak dinners, one dollar daiquiris, the biggest hotels in the world and the endless chatter of a billion slot machines.  If you don't gamble, you will always win in Vegas - it's just so much fun!

The Fremont Street Experience, Downtown Las Vegas

Getting Lucky in Vegas

From living in the back of a van in Australia, to this - a luxury suite in Las Vegas...

...all without gambling a single dollar.

The National Parks of Utah

The Arches

A million years of bitter winters and scorching summers eventually cracked open the sandstone plateau which sits high above the town of Moab.  As water and sediment flowed down through the gaps, the long, slow creation of this epic landscape began.  Rain waters froze, expanded, and forced open the cracks in tall vertical lines, cutting through the entire slab of stone.  Once the ice melted, water could run freely through the rock, collecting an abrasive mixture of sandstone particles which wore away at the walls of the ever widening channels.

What remains are immense fins of sandstone, each the size of a skyscraper laid gently on its side, with wide crevasses carved out between them like streets, avenues and alleyways.  Through these streets howls a chilled desert wind laced with grit and sand whipped up from the ground.  Like eddies in a river, the wind collects and swirls in shady corners, blasting at the walls and creating ever growing indentations and bowls in the rock, deepening over the centuries.  And eventually, with the unimaginable determination of nature, these scrapings reach right through an entire vertical slab of rock, leaving us with the arches.  Curved, twisted bridges of stone stretched over impossibly wide voids.  A soaring masterpiece ready to crack and drop at any moment as the rain and wind continue to whittle away at their expanse.

Canyonlands

This is the Old West as seen by the world in countless black and white Cowboy & Indian movies. Sweeping grassy plains dotted with horses lay in the shadows of (motion) picture perfect castles of crumbling rock. Through the valley, rising up from a crisp blue horizon, snow-capped peaks shimmer in the heat haze like a cardboard backdrop lowered on ropes and chains.  The sky swells as yet another dust devil begins its slow arc across the desert, scattering the tumble weed and sending glossy black horses galloping into the distance.

Capitol Reef

As the earth buckled, twisted and crashed together in the formation of the American continent, slabs of rock, each the size of Manhattan, tilted, rose up like waves and crashed down on one another in infinite slow motion.  Now they lay stacked on top of each other like a row of fallen dominoes.  The Capitol Reef National Park now sits entirely at a slant with each flat, tree dotted plateau jacked up on one side, bordered by sheer faces of rock to the west and wedged beneath the peach pink cliffs of its neighbour to the east.  The long cliff faces resemble the walls of ancient cities buried beneath an all consuming layer of solidified sand and clay.  Like staring at clouds, eventually one begins to see pillars, beams, balconies, alters, even grand staircases sweeping up to immense doorways flanked by statues of gods and goddesses.

Bryce Canyon

Like the Arches, this park is a maze carved out of the earth.  Here, instead of fins and arches, the soft clay eroded into tall towers, each uniformly striped with the pinks, whites and reds of the layer of earth from which they were cast.  The pioneers who discovered the area called these human-like spires 'hoodoos', believing them to be a collection of magical, mythical sentinels guarding the area.  As the sun sinks and cool shadows creep far across the park, the outlines of human bodies, arms, legs and faces, start to appear in the crumbling formations.  The high walls of the canyon wrap around the scene like an ancient Greek amphitheatre complete with arches and windows from which an emperor might sit and inspect the ranks of stone warriors standing in perfect formations on the arena floor below.

Zion

Gouged out by the sparkling blue Virgin River and dressed in a thick blanket of pine trees, Zion Canyon runs between two rows of mountainous, near vertical slabs of stone towering several thousand feet above the valley floor.  Having climbed the steep footpath to Angel's Landing (a narrow ledge of rock sticking out high above the park with dizzying drops either side), we lay down on our stomachs and shuffled our bodies towards the edge, the warm sun beaming down onto our backs.  Peeking our noses over, the earth dropped away below us in an instant.  Our gasps tumbled downwards over the cliff face, stopping far, far below where the gushing river, now just a glinting stream of silver, twisted and turned through the canyon and into the late afternoon haze which had settled over the valley.

Monument Valley

The flaming red buttes and mesas of the Navajo Tribal Park puncture the desert plateau of the Utah-Arizona border like a city in the sand, rising up from an otherwise empty horizon and visible for some twenty miles around.  These immense bodies of rock soar up to 1,000 feet into the sky and stand alone, isolated from each other as if scattered from space into a once featureless landscape.  Like peak-less mountains, their summits lie as flat as the desert on which they sit.  At their sides, impossibly balanced spires of sandstone stand on crumbling pedestals of boulders atop sweeping banks of shingle, casting long slender fingers of light and shade across the valley floor.  A copper coloured dust hangs in the air over the narrow dirt road which navigates the alien-like formations.  Along this road, very slowly, we drove, our necks cranked backwards, the pair of us gazing up in awe at the giants looking down upon us.

Why we've given up asking people to take our photo...

Simon:  

Would you mind taking a photo of the two of us?

Stranger (with large expensive looking DSLR camera hanging from their neck - ergo, in Simon's mind, they know how to take a good picture):  

Of course!

Simon:  

Great, thanks

Simon hands stranger the camera and falls into place beside Rosie with a full 180 degree view of the Grand Canyon beside the two of them

Now, judging by the resulting photograph, this is what I assume then goes through the stranger's mind: 

"Oh, is that one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World behind them?...Okay, well, I'll just cut a whole chunk of that out in favour of getting that sweaty Chinese guy in the photo beside them....that's what they'll want"

Stranger:

Say 'Cheese'!

A click is heard

Stranger (handing camera back to Simon): 

Have a look, see what you think.

Simon has look, sees what think.

Simon (grinding teeth): 

That's brilliant, thank you so much, have a good day...............(rolls eyes)