On the Road for a Year - Florida

On our way back up Florida from the Florida Keys, we camped at lake Okachobee for a time. Then
we moved on up past the lake and reached Cypress Gardens. It was very beautiful, and had been there a long time. Since then, I hear it has closed. That's a big loss to the flower lovers of the world. Disney world was nearby, But Barbara and I have seen it before with the grand kids and all. Corey already had reservations to take his family there when 9/11 hit, and they went anyway. The planes were nearly empty, there was no waiting at the rides, and the Disney characters just mobbed a child when they could find one.

We moved on up to Gulf Shores, Alabama. We have spent a lot of time there in the summer. Our son  Corey, when he was a portrait photographer at Little Rock, advertised all year to his customers that he would be there on a certain week or two, and available to take portraits on those beautiful white beaches. He got all the takers he could handle, and he got Barbara and I to got to go down with them. We photographed during the sweet light near sunset, and at sunup, and played the rest of the day. A fun time. I was the human movable light stand, Barbara the poser. He eventually stretched his time out to a month, with a stay also at Destin, Florida, and stayed busy photographing. If you are good, they will come. And Corey was a very good photographer. And he got that way quickly, with a family to support. It only took him two or three years to move from asking us what an F stop was to speaking at photography conventions. He liked his customers to think he grew up in photography, honing his skill since childhood. But he got serious about “honing” when the bills started rolling in. Then he became driven, and has been a very self driven, hard worker ever since. 

We stopped at our favorite spot for ribs and big, red shrimp, and ordered a large batch. After we had eaten half of it, the manager came by, started looking at our shrimp, said they were bad, took them back, and started cooking us a new batch. Barbara and I just looked at each other. What about those we just ate?

We survived it, and headed on up toward Arkansas. Passing Vicksburg, Mississippi, we looked hard as we passed the golf course. Brother-in-law Bill Arrington could normally be seen, any day, during the daylight hours, out there, just slicing and hooking away. He must have been sick that day

When we arrived at Arkadelphia, we camped at the KOA campground. Other campers thought we were strange, camping at our home town. But Rhower BF Goodrich execs were still living in our house, which we had leased to them for a year. We hung around a week or so, and it was the coldest weather we experienced on our trip.

After Christmas, when our gifts were exchanged and goodbyes were said, we headed for Texas.

Aransas National Wildlife Refuge is on the Gulf Coast. They have a really fun, ten mile loop along the coast, just chock full of wildlife, some we don't have in Arkansas, like the javelina. They are a very distant relative of the common barnyard hog, lean, mean, and tough, with long sharp tusks. Before I got well acquainted with them, I got a really close photo of a large one, glaring at me, hair on his neck standing straight up. What I didn't know was, they will attack anything and anybody, and the hair standing up was his last warning before he charged over and cut a fellow's legs all up. I get a shiver every time I look at that photo. Well, Aransas had lots of different kinds of wildlife, but the king of them all is the whooping crane. At one time, there were only 16 of them in the world. They are coming back a little now. Most of them winter at Aransas. I had been there many times, but had never gotten a really close look at one, much less a good picture. This trip, I meant to change all that.

Barbara and I were talking to a pro photographer of some sort, who had a really big, really long lens. We got the word that a pair of whoopers had been spotted, and we headed out at a fast walk. We walked past a deep patch of grass, and heard a very close, hissing sound. Barbara wondered what that was. I was afraid to tell her that was a big, bull gator, telling us to get out of his space. After a mile or so, we could see the whoopers. But they were still just a white dot in my undersized lens. We're pore' folk, you know? I never could afford one of those really big lens, which really had no practical application in our type of portrait photography. The other guy set up his tripod and camera with his big lens, and got several good shots. Then he told me to put my camera on his lens. I jumped at that, and got a few really good shots of the whoopers. They were so big, they made ducks beside them look like mosquitoes. Barbara later saw a pair of pink spoonbills, so we were both happy

After a stop at Rockport, where we found the cheapest gas of the whole trip, and saw lots of birds, we headed on down to Brownsville.

     Brownsville is a neat place, a good place to be in the winter. It's pretty well as far south as most of Florida, but it often has a stiff wind coming off the Mexican coastline. That warm, moist air blows right up through Arkansas, and cold air coming in from the west meeting up with it cause a lot of tornadoes along the I-30 corridor, one of which I got a close up and personal look at.

At Boca Chika Beach, which runs right into Mexico a couple of miles south, a ship was stranded a mile out. It was foreign, and they had no papers, couldn't come ashore. The owners were bankrupt, so they couldn't sail home. They were running out of food, and local people were taking some out to them. A drawback for the eternal traveler, like us, was, we seldom saw the end game play out for situations like we run into. We never knew what happened to them.