On the Way Back from Florida

After swimming with manatees, kayaking with alligators, snorkeling with sting rays and jelly fish, and camping with mosquitos, we are back in a motel with internet access on the way back home.



Here is Anke and a whole gaggle of other tourists trying to pet a manatee (and succeeding in doing so):



One of the hundreds of birds we saw (I think this is an ibis):



And here is Anke kayaking:



Yesterday, we had a food day. We started with an amazing huevos rancheros at Rosita's in Florida City:



Followed by a famous rock shrimp restaurant, called Dixie Crossroads. They served corn fritters, which was a great (early) substitute for the obligatory oliebollen (Happy New Year!):



And these amazing rock shrimp:



We then drove on to a town that is even crazier than Williamsburg, St. Augustine (still in Florida). Anke found another great restaurant though, Catch 27. We had a wonderful fish stew:



And an even better main course of shrimp and grits:



We also had blackened flounder which was good, but paled in comparison with the shrimp.

We then enjoyed a little bit of the local craziness:





Happy New Year!

On the road to Florida

We left three days ago to follow the birds on their journey south. On our way, we encountered countless buffets with delicious southern food, beautiful beaches and wild camp sites, and, of course, hundreds and hundreds of old people who were enjoying their retirement in their RVs.
We would share our photos here, had Flickr not made it near impossible to do so. So, why don't you visit the bastards directly, and check out Frans's photostream?

UPDATED:

Here are the other photos:

It's the most wonderful time of the year

It turns out that Richmond is famous for its tacky Christmas lights. We only visited three houses on our first tacky lights tour. The first were two houses next to each other belonging to a mother and son, which is apparently a local favorite.



We preferred the second place we visited. The owners of the house invite passers by to drive through their driveway. They even created their own radio station that you can tune into. How awesome is that!?

8720 River Rd from Anke on Vimeo.

Cornell get together

We drove up to DC for a mini-Cornell reunion, meeting up with some friends from grad school. We also took advantage of this opportunity to eat insane amounts of food. Even now, I am still in a bit of a food coma, so I will just leave you to contemplate the vast amounts of food we managed to put away.

Fall

105 bags of leaves, ready to be picked up by the municipality.



Approximately 10 of these bags were filled by yours truly, and the rest of this back breaking labor was undertaken by the husband. Our neighbors keep commenting to him that he makes them feel guilty -- imagine how I feel!

Next year, I bet "we" will just blow them all into a corner of the yard and leave them to rot there.