Avoiding Tourist Traps... Almost

 

With the extreme cold weather in Florida, and our plans to spend lots of time at the beach dashed, we adapted our plans as best as we could. On one day, we drove to a place called Turkey Creek which I would have sworn was called Turtle Creek to the point that when we arrived, I thought we were at the wrong place and had to look it up on my phone and reassure myself that indeed all the information I had saved said Turkey and not Turtle.

It is a fresh water creek that flows from somewhere to presumably into the Gulf of America (which the Apple Map App now refers to it) and during warmer times is a place where people bring floaty things and float on the current for maybe a half mile or so. Indeed, the bottom was nice and sandy and it would look mighty refreshing on a warmer day. Being that it was in the trees though and it was sunny despite being cold, we found it warm enough that we could hike the mile long board walk along it and enjoy the fresh air.

Another day found us at an Airforce Armament Museum. I have seen a lot of military planes over the years and indeed, this place had plenty of those too, but I hadn't seen any of the arms that they carry that I could recall and here they had them all. For the first time I saw Tomahawk missiles and even the above MOAB (Mother of All Bombs) which has only been used once in a war back when we were bombing caves in Afghanistan. 

Besides a B-17 which I didn't take a picture of just due to the enormity and the inability to really frame it in a photograph in tight quarters, the only other plane I really recognized what the SR-71 Blackbird seen above. Having read a couple books back in the day about the Skunk Works, the military's advanced development program, I knew it had been one of the first working planes that it produced. 

Overall, I really enjoyed walking around the grounds looking at the planes and arms on display but the actual museum itself was only so-so for me. It was way to crowded with material and sort of chaotic in organization making it hard to really digest. But it was inside, heated and was absolutely free to see so it had that going for it.

We spent some time perusing a number of thrift shops where we met some interesting people and I bought a jar of local honey, the only thing I bought on this trip besides fuel for the car. Although one might consider a museum a touristy thing, we had up until our final day avoided what I call "tourist traps", areas specifically created to part a tourist from their money. But some in our group wanted to see some alligators and there was a place in the local literature called alligator beach in nearby Destin so one cold afternoon, we headed over that way across the bay.

It was as touristy as a tourist trap can be. Basically it was a tiny shallow pond lined with layers of boardwalks all built around a restaurant and souvenir shops. Although free to enter and look at the alligators, everything else cost money. One of the big attractions was that you could pay $5 and feed the alligators with a tiny chunk of some sort of sausage died to the end of a rope, itself tied to the end of a long wooden pole. Somewhere in my data banks of trivia knowledge, I knew alligators couldn't eat when it was below a certain temperature and it evidently was below that temperature. Scores of people shelled out their five  bucks and dropped their meat baited ropes down on top of the alligators who just ignored them. After flailing around for awhile, the inevitably de-baited their rope and threw their chunk of sausage at the alligators who still ignored it. As the saying goes, a fool and their money are soon parted and we idly saw a great number of fools during our short time there. I am proud to say we left maybe thirty minutes later without leaving behind a dime at that place.

Most of the time we spent just being an extended family with lots of food cooking and consuming going on along with nightly games of Monopoly of which I won only once and a game called Telestrations which is a big hit in our family. Once we went out to eat at a local spot called Stewey's Seafood Shack or something similar and I had the best grouper sandwich I have ever had in my life. We had no idle time to get bored during our four days in Florida.

The rest of the people comprising my wife's cousins decided to leave early the next morning and so we did too. We flirted with the thought of driving five hours to my brother's house, spending the night and driving 12 hours home the next day but in the end, chose to simply head towards home 15 hours away. We didn't know if we would make it or not but being that it was New Year's Day, the roads were largely deserted and we made incredibly good progress with low stress of dealing with traffic. We pulled into our home 15.75 hours after starting, still within the bounds of normalcy as far as staying up late, i.e. 9:45 p.m. and called it a night.