Saturday, October 28, 2006

Our First Flights

We took our first flight on Monday 10/23/06, and we started to get a real feeling for beginning the trip. While we did not leave the country we did go to Miami or, as one might call it, Cuba Del Norte.

Our good friend Autumn blew off her incredibly important law school class to pick us up from the airport and show us good ol’ Florida hospitality. We ate very tasty Cuban food before heading out on an Everglades tour. We saw swamp chickens and a few gators. The Florida Fish and Game Dept. estimates there are over 1.5 million gators now living in the Everglades, so they do allow gator hunting three days of the year. Our guide informed us that you must keep the gator alive until you get home. There are a couple reasons why:

1. The authorities want to make sure your gator weighs and is long enough. They use physical measurements to calculate the age of the gator. Gators grow about one foot a year for the first six to seven years, then a couple inches a year after that. Basically, they don’t want anyone catching the young ones.

2. If you kill the gator right away, it ruins the meat and the skin.

You have to get selected in a lottery (which costs about $400 to enter) to even hunt gator. If selected, you get three days to catch up to three gators. Our guide caught one, and he got 168 pounds of meat. To clean the skin, he placed it over a red ant hill and left it for a few days. The ants do the rest of the work.

After the Everglades trip, we went to the beach. We did not see David Caruso from CSI: Miami investigating any grisly crime scenes. Disappointing. Autumn cooked an incredible meal (which if you know Autumn is something new). We discussed politics, the declining state of schools and the over-scheduling of kids with Autumn’s aunt. I also caught some of the Giants-Cowboys MNF game. (T.O. drops, Big Blue rolls.)

On 10/24 we got on the plane to Honduras, and hopped a bus to La Ceiba. The next day we would take the ferry. That night we stayed in a plain but friendly hostel, and we met Jenny and Harry, a mother and son traveling together. Get this: Harry is home-schooling eighth grade as he and his Mom travel around Central America. They have spent most of their time in Guatemala, which is apparently safer, nicer and cheaper than Honduras. We had dinner with Harry, then caught the bouncy and nausea-inducing ferry to the island of Roatan the next day.

The picture below shows the view from the ferry of fishing boats, the La Ceiba port, and the mountains in the background.