Florida

Hey everyone I made it back from Florida! It was so much fun, we took three days to drive down there and started canoing on the 31^st. Our days started off anywhere from 4:30 to 6 in the morning and then we would paddle 10-20 miles a day. The temperature was amazing and the hottest day was around 110 degrees, unfortunately that day there were no clouds so we were pretty toasty to say the least. I saw so much wildlife it was incredible! There were at least five alligators per day, dolphins, sharks, many birds, flying fish, two snakes and one fourteen foot crocodile! One of the snakes (a burmese python) lived in our outhouse at the chickee. Needless to say we decided that we didn’t want to spend the night with it so we paddled an extra three miles to get to the next chickee. We normally got to our chickee’s at around noon ate lunch and then set up our tents. After that people would take naps or read, I decided to journal every day so I did that but basically our afternoons we spent just chilling out trying to stay cool. The sun would go down around 5:30 so we tried to have supper cooked by then and once it got dark the bugs came out so we would normally retreat to our tent. So my sleeping pattern was severely messed up because I was often asleep by 8:00! Since you are only allowed to book one end of the chickee we had to split our group in two. Which was kinda sad but it was neat because we had a rest day on the 5^th at Highland beach. So we got to swap stories and hang out. The beaches in the Everglades are crazy one was pretty much all shells and the other one didn’t have as many but it didn’t have sand it was just finely crushed shells! I guess it’s because not many people go through there and they have a limit on how much you can take out. After ten days paddling I was so happy to get to a shower and real washroom but when we went to get our van, it was dead. So we were stuck at Flamingo Bay for over 24 hours. It was actually one of the best times of my trip, we got to know most to the rangers by name, we saw our first crocodile, and we hunted for coconuts. But don’t worry we got it fixed and made it home in no time.