Ft. Myers, FL~

***Edit: After a number of concerned phone calls and a couple of e-mails I find it necessary to include the following disclaimer: The photos in the gallery below were taken with a powerful zoom lens from an observation deck at least a story above the subjects being photographed. The photographer (read: me) was never in any danger. We now return you to your regularly scheduled entry.***

I lived in Florida very briefly back in 1998, in the Sarasota area, and had such a negative experience that I actually met with a fairly high level of anxiety the first time I traveled back through on our first tour together a few years ago. My experiences these last few years have thankfully been completely the opposite, given the acquaintances of fabulous people and excursions into very different parts of the state. One thing that hasn’t changed at all in my working memory, and of which I am growing more and more fond, is the distinctly different wildlife here.

I can look up and see ibis on the telephone lines and parakeets grazing in the grass. There are Great Herons, blue and white, standing at roadside as if waiting for the bus and flying overhead close enough for me to distinguish their different flight feathers. Anoles are absolutely everywhere, alternately green or brown, swift to dart into a safe crevice if a shadow looms. I even watched an ornate box turtle wander directly through our campground one afternoon, just like she owned the place. I took her out to the woods in back and set her down, well away from the pickup trucks that typically raced through the campground. But it simply wouldn’t be Florida without the one quintessential reptilian citizen I wished to see more than anything else, out in its natural habitat.

I of course speak of the alligator.

I had never actually seen an alligator in the wild while living here. I’d seen wild dolphins frolicking just off the sandbars, and sandhill cranes way too close for even my comfort level, but never a gator. Not even on the multiple trips down here since then had I ever spotted a single one, so I resolved that I would see one come hell or high water while we made our way back from the Keys via the Everglades. I got my wish in spades.

I asked Alex to pull over when we both spotted no less than three enormous gators canal side along U.S. 41. Walking back to where we had spotted them I saw four more. In and out of the state of Florida for nearly 9 years with not even a whiff of a gator and here I’d seen half a dozen in less than ten minutes. Then when we got underway again we couldn’t stop seeing them. They were suddenly on every rock every twenty feet or so and I was like a kid at the zoo, nearly leaping out of my seat every time we passed another. When we stopped to make some dinner at the Visitor’s Center I scampered off with the camera to see if there might be more lurking below the observation decks. The results are in the gallery below.

It’s a wonderful thing to have such amazing colorful experiences to add to my mental file on Florida. I think I’m beginning to warm up to the place again. We’re even talking about buying some real estate here in the near future, something that makes sense given our touring schedule, but also something I would never have even considered just last year.

They have a lake there and there’s even an alligator living in it. I’m taking that as a favorable sign.

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