Friday, May 20, 2016

I almost ran over a turtle today.  We were between Tampa and Fort Myers on a state highway when the car in front of me swerved slightly.   At the last minute, I saw why.  I missed it, but a dinner-sized dark green turtle was just stretching out one leg to take a step when I went by.  That prompted the question - how much of a fine do you have to pay for crunching a turtle?

It was raining heavily when we left Tallahassee this morning, and had been for awhile.  We had rain for at least 200 miles.  Traffic wasn't too bad on I-10, but when we turned south on 75 it was heavy all the way until it split off to go to Orlando.  We were kind of sad to leave I-10 since we'd been on it since Phoenix and were only 70 miles from where it ends in Jacksonville.

North Florida is really cattle country, lots of livestock in the area.  Corn was growing in a few places, too.  That's the only crop we've seen in the south.  Still lots of pines, oaks and a few magnolias along the highway.  As we came further south, palm trees were in the mix. And it's flat here.  No more rolling hills.

We are staying in Fort Myers the next three nights.  We have a room with a balcony that looks out over the bay.  It's humid and hotter here but not unbearable.  Rain is in the forecast, but we're hoping it holds off for awhile since we are taking a ferry to Key West tomorrow.  It's three hours from here on the ferry as opposed to six driving.  We'll do a round trip and won't get back until 9:30 pm, so I may not do a blog entry tomorrow.

We saw our first surfboard on a car today.  It was strapped to a Ford sedan.  Later we passed two teenaged boys in an open air Jeep and thought that would be more appropriate.  Lots of road work going on here.  Because the freeways are mostly three lanes, there are usually two lanes open.  The speed limit in construction zones is 60 mph.  I was doing 70 to keep with the flow of traffic and still getting passed by everything from Priuses to Hummers.  The state troopers were out today though.  We saw a number of them working accidents and giving out tickets.  One came up behind me and I thought Stella would be taking a picture of me signing a ticket (press hard, five copies) when he went on by.