Land of no snow and no gators....??

Friday was an early morning with a 6:30 trip to the airport. A "snowstorm" was coming through the area the night before and early morning. Flights were cancelled by the dozens and all of Southwest's flights were cancelled on Thursday night. By the airport and by us, we got maybe two inches of snow...maybe. Far out west and to the north though, they got hit with 6-9". We thought we were going to be ok, especially after checking with the skycap who told us the flight was on-time still. Unfortunately, by the time we go to our gate, it was already delayed two hours. Nuts.

Then the news got worse: our plane hadn't left Buffalo yet. Those poor folks were on the tarmac for two hours while we at least were able to walk around the airport. Fortunately the flight was only delayed the two hours. LL and I had a discussion about how long we'd wait before we'd scrap the weekend and use the tickets another time. Eventually we agreed on sometime around noon would be our drop dead time. That would have put us at the airport for 5 hours and not get us to Florida until close to 5 probably their time, which would have cut out half a day of our two full and two half days. Fortunately we didn't come up against the deadline.

We took off and everything went smoothly. Our gracious host, Doug, was waiting for us at the airport and off we went. Doug spends three months or so in a community with decidedly older folks for the most part, though very nice people. Everyone has a golf cart and tools around on them. Of course the speed limit most places is an appalling 20 mph, but older people have slower reaction times, so it's probably for the best. It's a gated community too, so no strangers are running around.

Inside the gates though is a marina, a bar/restaurant and 27 holes of golf. Good stuff! Doug took us around to where manatees swim into the marina and hang out. Unfortunately with just my phone, I couldn't get pictures of them as they were basically the color of the water. Pretty cool to see. But all we saw was wildlife all weekend: an osprey flew within 3 or 4 feet of Doug and I while golfing, an egret swooped really close to me while golfing on day two, not to mention the blue herons and several huge turtles. The big prize though was a gator!!

So on to my very limited amount of pictures.

Here's Doug's bulletin board of Christmas cards and such, including our card!! Yay us! Doug's place has 3 bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen and living room. As you might expect, there's no basement, as is the case with most homes in Florida I think.

This is Doug's lanai. A pretty good sized, heated pool. There's a table to the right and a TV up in the corner. Very nice to sit out there and watch TV. It's also nice to sit out there in the nice weather without bugs getting at you.

This guy was a LOT closer than the picture makes the bird appear (an Anhinga-species courtesy of Back-to-baseball). It was right next to the cart path on the course and was really strutting around for some reason. I wasn't sure if it was strutting for females or if we were getting too close to its nest and it was trying to scare us off.

And here's the gator! He's across the pond from me here and is about 6-7' long. All of the water on the course is connected by drainage pipes, so he has access to everything. We saw an egret catch a fish and something in the water was moving towards it, but didn't attack. We thought it was the gator, but there's no way it wouldn't have gone after the fish and/or bird being as close as he was.

And here's our last shot of sunshine at the airport. Thought it was deserving of a picture.

So now we're home where there is no snow (awesome) and no gators (not so awesome).