Florida with Heidi

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On Thursday, September 4th, we flew to West Palm Beach, Florida to visit Eva's friend Heidi - our last ´parent figure´ we could lean on before venturing off by ourselves into Latin America. Heidi lives in a small town called Lake Placid, near Sebring. It's in the center of Florida and 2 hours from everything. Heidi is a woman of action - she used to wrestle gators. Nethertheless she dropped everything to pick us up at the airport, about 4 hours round trip. Thanks Heidi! That Friday, we took a trip to Tampa Bay to visit the aquarium. Its pretty impressive, focusing mostly on wildlife in and around Florida's wetlands, beaches, oceans and waterways. On Saturday, we went to the island of Sannibel to visit the wildlife refuge where Heidi used to work. The J.N. Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge is the largest undeveloped mangrove ecosystem in the world. We didn't see any aligators, but we saw plenty of birds including multiple kinds of herons and egrets, roseate spoonbills, white ibisis, and shorebirds. We even saw a manatee, or at least the nose of one.

After Floridean wildlife, it was time for some Floridean culture. Heidi is an amateur thespian - well, she's the lighting tech for the Highlands Little Theatre in Sebring. So on Sunday after visiting the cypress swamp of Highlands Hammock State Park, we were treated to the final performance of Smokey Joe's cafe. The singing was good, but the lighting sublime.

On Monday, September 7th, Heidi drove us the 3 hours to Miami airport bright and early in the morning. With that we said goodbye to North America for a year and headed to Central America with our first stop in Guatemala.

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Photos

Us & Heidi
At the Wildlife Refuge on Sannibel Island

Cypress Swamp
at Highlands Hammock State Park in Sebring, FL.