Return of the Coots The Flamingo Visitor Center at Everglades National Park is at the end of the main Park road, 38 miles from the entrance gate, on the shore of Florida Bay. That’s where I went on the second day of my visit to the Park. Boating and fishing are the major activities there. [...]
Archive for the ‘Trip Reports’ Category
The Everglades, Part 2
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged Animals, History, Outdoors, Society, The South, Travel on April 28, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The Everglades, Part 1
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged Animals, History, Outdoors, Society, The South, Travel on April 25, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
A Taste for Rubber If you need further proof that mankind is its own worst enemy, consider what I learned last month at Everglades National Park. I was in Florida for two weeks. I drove south along the Gulf coast, went all the way down to Key West, and followed the Atlantic coast back to [...]
Swimming With the Manatees, Part 2
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged Animals, Boating, Nature, Outdoors, Travel on April 4, 2012 | 2 Comments »
In my last post, I wrote about my trip to Crystal River, a little town on the Gulf coast of Florida where large herds of manatees spend the winter. Crystal River is on King’s Bay, which is fed by a series of freshwater springs bubbling up at a constant 72 degrees. In winter, the manatees [...]
Swimming With the Manatees, Part 1
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged Animals, Boating, Nature, Outdoors, Travel on April 1, 2012 | 2 Comments »
The manatee, sometimes called the sea cow, is a large, aquatic, herbivorous mammal that has the overstuffed look of a walrus. Manatees are air-breathers, yet they live entirely under water. While awake, they come up for a gulp of air every few minutes. During sleep periods, they surface as infrequently as every 20 minutes. They [...]
New Orleans Report #4
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged Humor, People, The South, Travel on November 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Tough Way to Make a Living Last month, while I was wandering through the portrait galleries in the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA in NOLA), I came upon a gigantic oil painting of a monarch striking a royal pose, looking splendid and self-satisfied, peering back at me. The portrait was placed high on a [...]
New Orleans Report #3
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged People, The South, Travel on November 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The Streetcars of NOLA Riding the streetcars of New Orleans — the locals emphatically do NOT call them trolleys or trams — was a new experience for me. They didn’t seem to run on a schedule, and you never knew if 2 people or 200 would be aboard the car with you. But they were [...]
New Orleans Report #2
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged Food, The South, Travel on November 9, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Le Vieux Carré One morning on my recent trip to New Orleans, I was wandering down Bourbon Street taking photos with my big Nikon. I was hard to miss among the tourists wielding their wimpy point-and-shoots; the Nikon is a massive thing with a telephoto lens the size of a Starbuck’s Grande cup. Suddenly, a [...]
New Orleans Report #1
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged History, Music, The South, Travel on November 6, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Lafayette Square Oddly enough, even though I’ve lived in the South for a good chunk of my life, I never got around to visiting New Orleans until this year. I thought regularly about going. In fact, a few years ago, I was fixing to start to think about preparing to make preliminary plans — and [...]
Missionary Zeal, Part 2
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged History, Opinion, Society, Travel on June 13, 2011 | 2 Comments »
If you go to the southwest side of the Acoma mesa, you can still see under the overhanging bluff the smoke-stains from the Spanish cannon, made when the conquistadores came and took my people’s land away from them and tried to break down the rock mesa with their cannon, and there is still the remains [...]
Missionary Zeal, Part 1
Posted in Trip Reports, tagged History, Opinion, Society, Travel on June 10, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I just got back from a two-week vacation in New Mexico. I went there for the express purpose of seeing the 19 Indian Pueblos clustered in the northern part of the state. Yes, I got the job done. I saw the last one, Isleta Pueblo, on the morning of June 1. That afternoon, I drove [...]
