Day 18

Thursday, Oct. 13

We started off today by having a nice complimentary breakfast at our hotel – Best Western – in Homestead.  After that, it was get ready to leave, put the Everglades Alligator Farm into the GPS, and let “Jill” take us there.  It was only about 7 miles away, so it was easy to find.

We got there, paid our admission, and went in.  Part of the admission was an air-boat ride which was scheduled to begin in 15 minutes, so we had planned it well.  There were enough people there for 3 separate boats.  The first one was pretty full, but we were in the second one which only had 12 people in it.  Dawn and I got our own seat so we could each sit on the side.

Our skipper, JJ, started us off slowly and we saw quite a few alligators, some turtles, and a few birds.  After a slow ride at the beginning, we put on our hearing protection and he opened her up.  Those things sound like pretty big engines, and push the boats along pretty fast.  JJ did warn us that he was going to make some 360 degree turns, and that those in the front would get wet.  Also, the rest of us had to lift our feet when he did it, so that our shoes wouldn’t get too wet.  Well, he wasn’t lying.  A lot of water comes into the boat when he does this, but it gathers at the back and is pumped out.

He said that the average depth of the water in the Everglades is about 6 inches (15 cm), but they had some pretty big rains last week, and that had raised the depth about 10 inches.  The alligators we saw here were wild.  They found their own feed, eating mostly snails, small fish, and bugs.  They don’t feed them so that they continue to be afraid of people and don’t cause any trouble.  He said if they fed them (like they do with the captive ones), they wouldn’t be afraid of people and then would become dangerous.

After the trip, which was about 20 minutes, we returned to the dock and then went to where they were going to feed the captive alligators.  These ones were pretty big and fat and looked like they ate pretty well.  The guide had a bucket full of dead rats, and the alligators obviously knew they were for them as most of them gathered around where he was.  While he fed them, he showed how they could jump up, how they grabbed their prey and went underwater but had to come back up to swallow them.  He also told us that the average adult alligator only ate about 6 – 10 pounds of meat a year.  Every once in a while they had a large feed where all the alligators got something.  For this feed, only a few got something to eat.

We wandered around the farm for a while longer, looking at some of the animals.  We weren’t too interested in seeing the snakes being fed, so decided to do some shopping in the gift store and then left.

We wanted to travel along the coast, so we had to program in some fairly close places so that “Jill” wouldn’t take us on the turnpike.  Well, she did guide us over to the beach area, but things were very slow due to traffic and all the stop lights.  We only went a few miles in a long period of time.  Finally, we decided that we had seen enough of the expensive apartments, hotels and homes, and we punched in Cape Canaveral.  “Jill” then took us to the freeway and away we went.

As luck would have it, after travelling on the freeway for about half an hour, we noticed some signs indicating that the right 3 lanes were blocked ahead somewhere.  Not knowing anything about how far away this place was, we kept going in the left HOV lane, until traffic began to congest and things slowed down.  Finally there were periods of start and stop, narrowing of traffic flow, and generally slow movement.  When we got to the place where the accident was, it didn’t look like much.  However, there must have been more when it happened for them to put the warnings up.

Dawn loved this sign

After that, it was clear sailing.  There were a few detours and we didn’t know if that was regular to get to where we were supposed to go, or if it was because the maps in the GPS are so old that these routes were where traffic used to go.

By about 5:00, I was getting pretty tired of driving so we began to think about stopping for the night.  There were about 80 miles to go to Cape Canaveral and I decided to push on.  About 6:00, I had enough.  We were at Melbourne, and when I saw signs for gas stations and hotels, I pulled off.  After a false start registering at one hotel (it was pretty seedy), we finally settled on Hampton Inns.  Another very nice room with all the amenities we have become used to on this trip.

We didn’t even go for supper as we were still full from the lunch that we had about 2:30.  We bought a couple pops and some munchies and decided to stay home, watch the baseball games, and work with the computer.

Tomorrow, we are off to the Kennedy Space Centre, so we will get up fairly early and get going.  We are only about 20 miles away.