Spring Break!

Yeah! Our first guests are here. Matt’s sister Sarah and her boyfriend Brandon (whom Matt has known since middle school!) are visiting this week. It’s spring break for University of Louisville but we’re 2 hours from Panama City and 1.5 hours from any beach at all. So it’s not that kind of spring break. We’re nerds. We’re going to museums! Maya worked on Tuesday so the rest of us kind of bummed around. Wednesday we really did a lot though. We went to Wakulla Springs State Park and took a river boat tour on the Wakulla River. It’s nine miles of crystal clear water packed with all kinds of birds and alligators. We saw seven or eight alligators. We would have seen about a dozen but the people in front of us kept standing up and blocking our view. Crazy people! We paid to see too. Also, there were manatees in the water. Real wild manatees, just hanging out in their natural environment. We said, “What’s up manatee?” It was so neat to see them. The pale blob in the picture doesn’t really convey the coolness of seeing them alive and flapping their little flippers like good 1000-pound little manatees. The clear water of the spring means that several movies have been filmed at the springs. A couple of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films and The Creature from the Black Lagoon were filmed there.

We also went to the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science which was pretty fun. They have the typical kind of discover-for-yourself science stuff but also there was a guy in the lobby playing bluegrass and the top floor had an exhibit of art by Enrique Chavarría. He’s a Mexican surrealist. You can see some of his paintings here. We also saw an IMAX film at the Challenger Learning Center. It was called Dinosaurs: Giants of Patagonia. It was narrated by Donald Sutherland, so it was awesome. Also, it had giant dinosaurs which is also why it was awesome.

Today we saw several bat-mobiles at the Tallahassee Antique Car Museum and Florida panthers in the mini zoo at the Tallahassee Museum. In addition to the awesome car collection the car museum had the most random collection of stuff. There were piles of teddy bears, lots and lots of knifes, arrow heads, old cash registers, old motor boat engines, and old jute boxes. Plus an apparently authentic 19th Century vampire-hunting kit. Matt decided he wants a ’71 Chevy Nova Super Sport. And a bat-mobile. The Tallahassee Museum has several native-to-Florida species in their mini zoo including red fox, alligator, turkeys, and black bear. They also have all the buildings from some 1800s farm that they’ve moved to the site. There are the various barns and animal pens plus a smoke house, an out house, a hen house and the main house. It’s a nice re-creation.It’s been great to hang out with friend and family. It’s like we are all on a big vacation together. Of course, they’ll be leaving soon and we’ll be staying. Maya works this weekend and maybe every weekend for a while. We’ll see what happens.