The trip we took to south Florida from Louisiana in 1984 was a real eye opener for me. I had never been to south Florida and really reveled in the totally different climate and also how different it looked down there.
I was excited to finally see Coral Castle in Homestead, something I had wanted to see for several years.
The same day we went to Coral Castle, after we had left, we went out to Key Biscayne, an island just off the coast from Miami.
The southern end of Key Biscayne was and is a National Park. We brought stuff for a picnic, and went to the southern end of the Park and found a picnic table right beside the sea wall that surrounded the end of the island.
This picnic table was not only right next to the Atlantic, it was in the midst of a thick grove of Australian Pine trees. Australian Pines were planted for decades in Florida, and I had never seen them before. They grow to be bigger and bushier than the pines like we had in Louisiana, but the pine needles are kind of soft and they are really droopy. They smelled good, and they looked really neat and exotic to me.
In short, this simple picnic table was in an absolutely glorious location. This Louisiana boy just soaked up the beauty all around me.
But the end of this wonderful day just kept getting better. The sunset we sat and watched that evening was the best I had ever seen in my life. The colors of the sky kept changing to different pastel colors as the sun went lower and lower. The water was relatively smooth but the natural ripples in this green ocean water reflected these pastel colors in amazingly beautiful ways.
It stayed my number one sunset that I had ever seen until December of 2002, an eighteen year reign in my mind.
These are some of the slides of that evening, and although I will admit that I think I did a pretty decent job of capturing the beauty of this particular evening in my life, they still are just vague reminders of how awesome it REALLY was.
This day stayed with me and I looked at the slides from that sunset many times over the years. Then in 1998, we got to go back to Key Biscayne after moving to Central Florida in 1996. What we saw at Key Biscayne in 1998 was one of the biggest shocks I've had in my life.
I'll talk about the shock I recieved tomorrow.
2 comments:
My goodness, can you say proof read? Sorry, that was me above, all fixed :)
Cool story and shots! Funny, I saw this after I had made my recent post to my blog. Very similar lighting! Great minds I suppose :) Thanks for your comments on my blog tonight, very cool.
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