Coconut Grove, FLORIDA

   Well, check off another state that we've visited! This week we were in sunny, humid and congested (in two ways) Florida! Michael had another work-cation. I love those! We left on Monday morning and got home about 3 hours ago. So while I'm chipping away at the mountains of accumulated laundry, I figured I'd share our trip with you! 
   Monday Morning (way too early) we drove to the airport.  We had a really quick layover in Atlanta, GA. Mostly it was a boring travel day. But Evelyn loved it because she got to be on screens almost ALL DAY!!! That NEVER happens!!! So it was noteworthy in her book. We arrived in Florida right as the sun was going down. Bummer. But while we were on the tram to the rental car agency, we got to see the silhouettes of palm trees in the dusk. And we decided wearing our winter coats for our travel day wasn't a good idea after all.
   Our hotel was in a suburb RIGHT out of Miami (were talking within a couple blocks) called Coconut Grove. Really it was only a few miles away from the airport but it still took us a good hour to get there thanks to traffic and our overwhelming fear of toll-roads. :D I was scandalized by the width of the lanes and parking spaces in Florida--especially since our rental car turned out to be a Ford Explorer. I needed to go on a diet in order to squeeze out of my door.
   We really liked our hotel--minus the big red cockroach that came in through our window one night and disappeared in the pipes. The thing was bigger than a half-dollar!!! (Okay, I wasn't going to write about that, because I don't want to remember it...) Here is the view from the little atrium in  our hotel.

 

 

   Right off we noticed something that would thrill us all for the durations of the trip: Geckos!!! The darling things were everywhere! We had fun chasing and frightening the poor things trying to catch one. I think the natives thought we were nuts because at every tree we would have to stop and chase geckos until they got too high to reach. Then we all pouted or bragged about how close we were until we came to the next tree and tried again.

Evelyn chasing geckos and finding snail shells

 

   We walked over to a little hole-in-the-wall taco joint called EL Taquito and ordered 8 tacos. We promptly fell in love with it and ate there the majority of the meals after. (We're some of those people who like to find what we like and stick with it....besides, it was WAY cheaper than anything else in walking distance!)

    Then that night, because it was really late for Miami but not so much for us, we went back to the hotel and watched "Beezus and Ramona" together. Cute flick!

 

Tuesday: Michael went to work bright and early. Pamela slept in until 10 AM  (love it, even if it was 8:00 Utah-time)! Evelyn watched a movie until lazy-bones got up. By the time Michael came back for lunch, none of us were hungry yet, so we skipped lunch. Then while Michael finished up the day working, Evelyn and I played homeschool. She had been given TONS of homework to stay caught up with. We had a really great time taking turns being teacher and having "recess breaks" when we got sick of it. Evelyn has decided she wants to be homeschooled. I decided never to homeschool. (It's not that she wasn't great or anything....just...eughh....work... j/k)

   That night we started really feeling like we were in Florida. We got a little more familiar with the area. We first went to a little Pizzeria named Harry's. It was super good, but super overpriced. We got a slow-roasted pork pizza with caramelized onions and figs on it. Evelyn wasn't a fan of the figs. But we really liked it.
   Afterward we walked down the road about 2 or three blocks until we couldn't anymore because there was a pier in the way. So Evelyn got to see the ocean for the first time and I got to see the Atlantic ocean! Michael wasn't as unimpressed as he's swam with barracuda and jellyfish before when he was in Florida with the army. There were coconut trees everywhere and Evelyn was determined to pick every single coconut up, but then abandoned that idea and decided she just wanted to break one and drink all the milk. She was unsuccessful. We also found a bunch of barnacle shells and debris that washed up on shore. We found bottles with no messages, and even a little porcelain lamp with no genie. Oh well, it was magical anyway.

   Wednesday: Michael only worked a half-day that day, so we got to go to the Everglades! Before our trip, we had told Evelyn that we were going to a national park to see some gators. Evidently she misunderstood because I heard her telling Grandma Shelley that we were going to a park to climb on gator-statues. I corrected her and suddenly she was terrified of getting eaten by an alligator. So all the 2 hour trip down to the Everglades Evelyn made little comments like, "I'm not sure I want to do this..." and "Mommy, can gators jump? How fast can they run?"  We stopped by the visitors center and she clung to me and made frightened little cricket noises whenever they played the sound of a gators roar. But by the time we were out on the swamp (the Anhinga Trail), she was having the time of her life. We had brought her little Disneyland telescope and she loved searching for gators and other wildlife with that. It probably helped that mostly we saw lots of cool birds, like herons and buzzards and stuff.

Evidently there are also panthers in the Everglades. But this was as close as we got to seeing one.

This cute little blue bird could walk and run on the lily pads!

Some kind of vulture??

This Heron was probably 6 feet off the walking path

We probably saw the most of this kind of bird

  
   We also saw snapping turtles and fish, but we just weren't finding any gators. I told Evelyn that if she spotted some gators for us, I would buy her a toy gator. A few minutes later, we found our first gator.

   After that we saw quite a few gators, but our favorite was the 8 foot gator sunning a couple feet off the trail. We seriously could have reached out an petted it if we were dumb enough. A few feet down the trail was another, smaller gator.

Here is a full view shot of the big one right by the trail

He looks like he's made of cast iron, but we know he wasn't--we could see his pulse!

here was the cute little 4 or 5 footer by the trail

   We didn't go any father into the Everglades as we were running our of daylight and it was going to rain. But Michael's co-workers who hired a boat got to see manatees and dolphins. We were just happy we didn't get eaten by any gators....so then to make our trip complete, we had to EAT gator!

We ordered a gator taco. Again, Evelyn was a little....ok, a LOT hesitant. She was pretty much insisting she wouldn't taste it. Michael was bravest and took the first bite. "Mmmm! This is REALLY good!" he exclaimed. So then I got the nerve and tasted it. It tasted like chicken. No really, it did! It's a white meat, but slightly tougher than chicken. Right at the end, it started to taste more like shrimp though. It was really good! With Michael and my approval, Evelyn couldn't hold back any longer and she had to taste it too. She loved it more than me! Between her and Michael, that taco was gone so quickly!

    By the way I did buy Evelyn her gator toy. Because it is almost Christmas, she named it Gingersnap, but she just calls it "Snappi". Any time we mention eating gator, she covers Snappi's ears.

  I loved these trees. No idea what they're called yet. But I love the moss and other airplants that grown on them. I always thought the plants would get blown up there by a hurricane and just survive because of the humidity. But that is actually where the plants grow: they aren't parasites though, they are just living on the tree.  Orchids are another type of airplant that grows on the trees in the everglades. There is a kind of fig tree that is a parasite and kills the tree it grows on. We saw that in the Everglades. Here's a picture of an airplant:

Look at the moss growing on this one!

At the Everglades

Thursday: Beach Day! We drove up to Miami and went to Southbeach.

 Evelyn was so excited to play on an actual beach. She wanted to pick up shells and starfish and build a sandcastle. We weren't early enough to pick up any shells or starfish, but Evelyn was having so much fun in the waves she didn't really care. I've never seen such wonder and pure joy on anyone's face as when Evelyn took her first step in the water. Check it out:

She did get to build her castle. Pretty good too, considering we had no buckets and no shovels.

 
   When we got back from the beach, Evelyn practically snoozed on the couch for the rest of the night. That was good because we had to get up at 4:00 to go to the airport. (That would be 2:00 AM Utah time!!)
   Here are some more pictures of our trip:

Background: Man's creations

Background: God's creation

Michael wading out to play

Wave bashing or being bashed by waves



 We let Evelyn buy a dessert one night. She picked gelato. But she had a real French experience because she picked the flavor: Violette! It was lavender, so of course she bought it. She felt very grown up and sophisticated, until her chair slipped out from under her and she landed on the floor: hence the red eyes.

Making a wish in a fountain

 Every night workers would come to try and make Coconut Grove look a little more Christmassy. They would put lights on palm trees, ribbons on street lamps, snowflakes in store windows and they even started putting up a fake evergreen up in the middle of the plaza. It didn't really work with 88 degree weather and such, but oh well. It was pretty.

Evelyn trying to climb a palm tree



Halloween vs Day of the Dead

   Whatever has happened to Halloween? You look up what Halloween is on Wikipedia, and you get a conglomeration of cultures with Catholic/Christian beliefs, Celtic pagan beliefs and outright devil-worshipping. And this is what we "celebrate" on Oct. 31st. I personally am a little disturbed about what Halloween has become. I think the puritans would turn in their graves to see what we have done with All Hallows Eve. To them, it was a day to remember departed souls; now we flaunt violence, gore, sorceries and immodesty.
     Ever since I was a pretty young child, I've been morbidly fascinated with and yet determined to avoid all scary parts of Halloween. I hated the sinking feeling in the gut, the inability to get enough air and the on-edge, panicky adrenaline rush that came with telling scary stories or going through my brother's homemade haunted houses. Even knowing it was all fake, and recognizing my brother and his friends: a bunch of ketchup and a plastic knife would keep me awake for nights at a time. At the age of 11, I watched a TV show about a haunted house and ended up waking  my entire household at 5 AM screaming at what turned out to be my own shadow (They still tease me about that one.). In high school I almost broke up with my boyfriend at the time for pushing me toward a chainsaw guy in a haunted corn maze (I really should have followed though with that impulse...). I have never liked the feelings of fear.
   As I have tried to set my own Halloween traditions, I've tried to stick with mostly harvest themed celebrations. We've done apple bobbing, pumpkin carving and cooking and day time corn mazes. We've gone on hay rides and hiked up mountains for the fall  leaves. We've also been supportive of trick-or-treating because I've liked the community interactions.

Evelyn's trick of treat costume this year: she was a bat (a cute one, not a scary one)

   And there are things about cultural Halloween celebrations that I do like: I like skeletons and graveyards a lot: they remind me that life is fleeting. I also like all the fancy goblets and chandeliers covered with dust and spider webs because it brings to mind the scripture Matthew 6:19-21.
   It has been a bit of a challenge balancing our Halloween celebrations with both. Then, this year I watched "The Book of Life" and everything became clear. Instead of celebrating Halloween, we were going to celebrate Dia De Los Muertos, with a Mormon kick. So I planned a family party and issued a challenge to do temple work for an ancestor sometime in the month of October.

Michael Calavera

   We had the party on October 30th. (Offically, Dia de los Muertos begins on the 31st and ends today as it is associated with the triduum of Allhallowtide.) While we got our faces painted like calaveras  and decorated paper mache skulls, we listened to little biography introductions of ancestors. We had a salsa bar and we broke a piñata. We folded paper tissue carnations and colored day of the dead skulls. It was really fun! I think I'm going to celebrate Day of the Dead every Halloween. Perhaps next year I'll bake some pan de muertos for trick or treaters.

Pamela Calavera

Evelyn Calavera

Miriam decorating her skull

Ester Calavera

McKaylee Calavera taking a swing at the piñata

Michael's skull is the black on and mine is the white one



 This is the tribute alter. It has all 4 elements represented (sort of): Fire isrepresented by the fake little candles, wind was the streamers (we didn't cut papel picado), water was the goblet of water, and earth was the clay pot with the red flowers in it. (Technically they chould be marigolds.) We had pictures of our ancestors and some of their old belongings represented. The only thing I feel we left out that we should have had was the dead bread. I need to find a recipe for that without eggs.

Grandma Lois Calavera

doing crafts

all the little Calaveras dancing with their maracas

Andrew Calavera

Sarah Calavera hitting the piñata