Thursday, after some eight hours of travel on three planes and two cars, we arrived at Fort Myers, Florida. It was too hot, a situation which was to persist for the entire week. (Joni's parents don't have air conditioning.) Both of us got heat rash.
It was an action packed week. We did something different each day. On Friday, we went to see Edison's winter house and botanical garden. Apparently Edison was very interested in plants so he hired people to bring back exotic plants from all over the world. In front of the house is a Banyan tree. The branches of this tree send out new roots, so the tree looks like 50 small trees, but they are all actually connected above ground. This tree has a circumference of 390 feet, but they prune it back regularly. There is evidently one in Asia somewhere which covers 18 acres. The guide claimed that people get lost in the tree in Asia.
It appeared that we had picked the ideal time to go. Everything seemed to be in bloom, including a bunch of stuff that apparently blooms only for a week. (This is a sharp contrast to our visit to the botanical garden in Montreal where everything was closed either because of a worker strike or because of work on new exhibits.) There were flowers of all colors, a sausage tree (which has 15 pound sausage shaped seed pods) and a fig tree (which has vicious water seeking roots that spread out for hundreds of feet underground--this particular fig tree was recently truck by lightning and part of it fell off and damaged the Edison house).
Inside, we saw old light bulbs with unusual filaments. This was before soft white. One light bulb had an elephant inside. Another one had an airplane. There were neon light bulbs that flickered in such a way that it looked like a candle. (I've never seen those before.)
That afternoon, we went out on a small boat with Joni's father and brother, Jill and Jill's girlfriend. I never had any problem telling Jill and Joni apart, by the way. We went out into the gulf and Joni's father and brother fished for a while. There were lots of pelicans around. They caught a snook, a fish which is apparently noteworthy for being clever and hence difficult to catch. So we got to see its razor sharp gills and teeth. (They don't keep their fish.) After the we returned, a bit of live bait remained, so they threw it out into the water. Within 15 seconds, there were 3 pelicans at the side of the boat, and within 2 minutes, ten pelicans were looking for free food. Alas, only three live shrimp remained.
Joni's parents eat out a lot, it seems. That day we had lunch at a Japanese restaurant and we had dinner at a Thai restaurant. (They paid.)
On Saturday, we went to Sanibel Island and spent about an hour at the beach. The water was fairly choppy and my swimming skills aren't great (Joni felt uneasy watching me). So we didn't stay very long. I missed a spot with the sunscreen, so I got slightly sun burned.
That afternoon, we went to a wildlife refuge where we saw an alligator and a colony of roseate spoonbills. The spoonbills are pink birds with spoon shaped bills.
Saturday night we made cookies in preparation for Sunday's big event. Sunday was the day that Joni's mother was converting to Judaism and a celebration was scheduled for late that afternoon. So we helped set up tables and arranged the cookies on platters. (We went out for lunch.) And then the party happened. It was fairly dull for me. There were perhaps 70 people there, none of whom I knew. Even Joni didn't seem to know many of them. But there was some good food, and Joni's mother gave a fairly nice speech.
Monday morning, bright and early we set off for EPCOT. It's about a three hour drive from Fort Myers to EPCOT. We checked into a cheap hotel, and managed to get two EPCOT tickets at the Florida citizen rate. (Joni flashed her Florida driver's license.) That brought the price per ticket down to about $27, a fairly substantial savings of twelve dollars per ticket. EPCOT is too big to see all of in a single day (I think two days would suffice, though). It has two sections: Future World and the World Showcase.
We went to a color three dimensional movie called Honey I Shrunk the Audience. This was noteworthy because it had some surprising effects. At one point, mice are running around on the screen. And little things hit the backs of our legs. The audience screamed for that one. At the end of the movie, the dog who had been enlarged was looking out at the audience and sneezed. We were hit by droplets of water.
We saw a virtual reality setup for walking through a cathedral in Italy. The resolution was pretty lame. Joni was interested in it because she had been to the real thing.
We went to "Seabase Alpha" where we saw some Manatees in their natural habitat munching on aquatic lettuce (placed in the water by the attendant).
We went on a ride through the human body which was fairly well designed (though perhaps the science wasn't entirely right). We got into our little probe (about 30 people). A video screen was at the front of the probe. During the ride, the actual room we were sitting in never went anywhere, but it rocked and tilted, giving a fairly effective illusion of motion which combined with the image on the screen.
We listened to aural illusions: a scene is painted in sound of a thunderstorm with one element not quite right. What sounded initially like raindrops was actually sizzling bacon. We heard a train go by using the power of a hand saw moving back and forth through a piece of wood instead of an engine. We listened to a fireworks show which was actually the sound of popcorn being popped. These illusions were really quite convincing.
A common setup at EPCOT was a ride which moved slowly past different exhibits. When we went to the Norway exhibit (after I had a delicious Ring Cake at the Norwegian bakery) which worked this way. We sat little Viking boats that traveled through water and we saw scenes from Norway's history and mythology.
The China pavilion had a "CircleVision 360" movie showing panoramic scenes from various parts of china, including things like the great wall and some fairly weird looking landscapes.
In the Japan section we saw an exhibit of netsuke which were used as counterweights for carrying stuff when wearing a pocketless kimono. Evidently ostentatious displays of wealth were frowned upon in Japan, but one could wear a different finely carved netsuke every day of the week in order to show off. Apparently there is a Japanese mythological trio of three monkeys representing the admonitions to hear, see and speak no evil. The first monkey covers his hears with his hands, the second covers his eyes, and the third covers his mouth. One of the netsuke was a carving which combined these three dictates into one money. He was covering his eyes and mouth with his hands and covering his ears with his feet.
Outside the Italy pavilion were a pair of white statues. People would pose with the statues and take their pictures. At one point, one of the statues grabbed a woman's purse and wouldn't give it back. The statues were actors who would move into different statuesque poses. Inside the Italy pavilion I bought some cookies and chocolate.
We finished off our tour at the French pavilion. Joni's father had told us to eat dinner there with his money, so we had made an 8:30 reservation at an expensive sounding restaurant. The food there was excellent. We had onion soup and a goat cheese salad as appetizers. Then, the 9:00 fireworks show was approaching, so we asked our waitress if we could slip out to watch the show.
The firework and light show, which they have every day at 9:00, was fairly good. They did some interesting things with the fountains and the lasers and played nice music. After the fifteen minute long show ended, we returned to the French restaurant and our entree arrived (we shared one). It was snapper and scallops in lobster sauce on a puff pastry. We finished off our meal with a nice chocolate cake.
After spending about ten hours at EPCOT, we returned to our hotel and collapsed on the bed in pleasant air conditioning.
The next day we drove back to Fort Myers, but we took a short side trip to St. Petersburg where there is a Dali museum. This time, I flashed my student card and got two tickets at the student price, even though Joni is not a student. We only saved a total of $4 that way, though. (Amusingly, I later heard one of the desk clerks talking about letting in some man with the senior citizen discount but denying the discount to his 60 year old wife who wasn't old enough to qualify.)
I particularly liked Dali's paintings which have a double image like the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire.
We returned to Fort Myers and went to a local Aikido class there. It was an interesting class -- it's nice to experience different instructors.
Wednesday we didn't do much. Joni had a doctor's appointment that morning. We went to some shops and I got some key lime juice and some key lime cookies. We ate stone crab claws, and oyster sandwich and a key lime pie at a local restaurant (where we paid). That evening we cooked dinner for Joni's parents, brother, and two other people. (Jill and her girlfriend had left on Tuesday.) We cooked chicken and made pasta and tomato sauce (following my mother's secret recipe), mustard butter sauce and a salad and a garlic vinaigrette (which stayed emulsified reluctantly since we didn't use an emulsifier). Dinner was a big success.
On Thursday, we packed up and left for the airport at about 2. We pulled into Ithaca at 1:30 Friday morning. My lease at maplewood ended on May 20, 1995 and my new lease starts June 1, so I'm staying with Joni right now. She had to be at work at 7am on Friday, so we didn't get much sleep.
Joni's parents were very friendly. They didn't ask me any annoying questions. :) I had the obligatory discussion about investing with Joni's father and managed to convince him that I know about as much as he does about the subject.
We returned to Florida three years later in November, 1998. This trip was much less action packed than the last one. We arrived Wednesday night to 89 degrees. Our shorts were in the luggage that the airline lost. We didn't do anything noteworthy until Friday when we tried to go to the Ding Darling Refuge on Sanibel. It is closed on Fridays, so we went to the Nature Center instead.
At the nature center we saw zebra butterflies in the butterfly house. They have wide short black wings with yellow stripes. We went on a tour of the nature center's trails. Sanibel had wetlands in the center and ridges along the sides. Development began on the ridges, but eventually the wetlands were interesting to people. In order to control the wetlands, they were connected together by an artificial body of stagnant water called the Sanibel River. The water level is controlled by two "weirs" (little dams) which connect to the outside. Every inch of height makes a difference in this part of the world. We could see the wetland areas which had a thick grass growing in them; surrounding ridges were marked clearly by the sudden appearance of larger plants. A scourge of the island is Brazilian pepper, a non-native plant that takes over areas huge areas and will eliminate the wetlands if not dealt with. The water level and frequent fires are the natural obstacles to the dominance of this foreign plant. They did a test once during a drought. A region populated by the pepper was flooded to a level of 36 inches. This killed 75% of the Brazilian pepper; the surviving plants were on 18 inch high hills. Fire is also important because all of the local plants are highly resistant to fire. Palm trees, for example, have their vascular system in the center of the plant unlike hardwoods. The nature center schedules frequent burns. We also saw a "fishkill" plant which is toxic to fish. The native Americans would grind it up and put it in a pond, killing the fish. The dead fish would rise to the surface where they could be easily collected. We climbed an observation tower and spotted an egret. We could hear a moorhen, but not see it. Joni mistook the egret's reflection for another bird.
We returned to Sanibel Saturday afternoon to go to the refuge. We listened to the information about the refuge on the radio. The program said that some mangroves excrete salt on their leaves, whereas others prevent it from entering the plant at the roots. The refuge was described as being a mangrove forest by our guide at the nature center. It is located on a ridge rather than in the wetlands. Mangroves come in a variety of types that each like different water levels. The red mangrove lives where there is lots of water and got the name "tree that walks on water" because of all of its little roots that enter the water. These roots act like a reef and provide an environment for a variety of water life. While there, we saw some flying spoonbills from a distance. We got there a bit late, and it was getting dark. We saw ibises---medium sized white birds with curved orange bills---flying in V formations over to the same two trees. Across the water we could see the trees covered with white dots.