Spotted enroute to our cruise ship in Port Canaveral, Florida.
According to several sources, the tie to Elvis is a tenuous and indirect one. The song “Heartbreak Hotel” was co-written by songwriters Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden. Durden possibly did stay at this hotel, and was possibly inspired by a local newspaper article about the suicide of a lonely man who jumped from a hotel window. Although not this one.
I suppose if I had thought about it I would have realized that somewhere on this planet had to be a place that had palm tree nurseries. Today we found them!
Kathy & I are in south Florida and decided to head out to Biscayne National Park near Homestead. On our way there and back we passed dozens of palm tree nurseries, covering thousands of acres or more. I shot a few examples of them on the way, but it was amazing to see the sheer number of palm trees – of all sizes and types – being grown all in one place!
* Some sources suggest that the original song lyrics are “the land where the bong tree grows,” but this is the version I remember – from “The Owl & The Pussycat”
Caught this guy napping yesterday and took photos with both my camera and my phone. Only took the time to mess with the phone version in Snapseed.
Off on another cruise tomorrow, back in a week!
This is a little roadside stand along Highway 301 in Citra, Florida. Orange you glad we stopped? 🙂
I’ve been finishing up some of the photos from our first trip this year, the one to Captiva and Sanibel Islands, Florida. These are a few more from the mangrove swamp at Ding Darling NWR. Not all of these are of mangroves per se, but you get the idea.
I felt like these needed to be in black & white. Partly because of the weird color of the water due to the brackishness (is that a word?) of the marshland water but also because of the patterns themselves.
Kathy & I spent the day yesterday exploring the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island. I was channeling my buddy Don Brown just a little bit, as he is one of the best bird shooters I know. I was handicapped a bit by a 200mm lens on my Fuji, not really long enough for serious wildlife work. But I came away with a few shots that are reasonably well exposed, acceptably sharp and representative of what we saw.
The most amazing thing we saw I wasn’t even able to record! we walked back a trail into a wood, and soon found a group of egrets lounging in an area well off the beaten path. There were easily a hundred or more there, but the brush was so thick that there was no way to make a photograph. But the sound! I said it sounded like the morning after a frat party – lots of guttural sounds and weird noises. It was quite an experience, but you’ll just need to take my word for it!
I’ve written previously about how Kathy & I like to seek out train stations on our travels through different areas. I hadn’t paid too much attention to train stations when we planned this trip to Florida, but almost by happy accident I realized that southern Georgia and Florida contain many examples of train stations. Here more so than in other states they seem to generally be in pretty good shape, many of them currently used as museums, social halls or offices.
While we were visiting the station in Avon Park, a volunteer at the museum there told us that the Silver Star passenger train passes through there daily, and that it would be there within the hour. He also mentioned that there is a station in Sebring that hadn’t come up on my search, even though the Sebring station is an active Amtrak station.
While we were in Avon Park, a CSX freight train came through, then we drove to the Sebring station in time to catch the Amtrak train making its stop there. We aren’t usually fortunate enough to actually see trains while we are at these stations, so to catch two on the same day was a real treat!
