Day 15: 3/5/22 9:05pm
Last night I was SO exhausted I didn’t even journal. We slept at Village Green Park in Key Biscayne. We finished dishes after dinner and I was out. We didn’t even put the bed into bed mode. We slept on the separate benches! Although, when Zak finally got to bed, Auggie came up on the bench with me and I got SO HOT I got off the bench and went to try to sleep on her bench… Which did not work well…
Today we woke up and went to a Goodwill in Coral Gables to look for some wall decor and gym clothes, and then we decided to leave the east coast of Florida and head west. On the way Zak stopped to pee at this airboat place on the road (Buffalo Tiger Airboat Tours), and I stayed in the car while he went. But then Zak came back and said that we were going to go on an air boat ride in the swamps and Aug could come too! It was actually super cool! And the captain’s name was also Zach (spelling?) and he was super nice. Probably somewhere around our age. He was really knowledgable about the swamp and the indigenous Miccosukee people too. Not only did he tell us all about gators and their general behavior patterns and answer all of our questions, but he also took us to this small island out in the swamp which had been inhabited by a family from the Miccosukee people until 1960 about. It was so cool to see. I did not even think that swamps could be habitable like that.
The van has been EXTRA hot these last couple of nights. We are going to have to move north pretty quickly. It’s getting a bit too hot for us! Today we also stopped in Everglades City which is super small, but as we were stopped at a little park playing with Auggie, a lady named Marilyn stopped and asked us all about the van because she wanted to have one too. It was really nice to talk to her because it reminded me that we are really doing such a cool thing, even if it is hard and doesn’t feel glamorous all of the time.
As we were driving into Naples today we saw a whole bunch of tents and people and we figured it might be a Farmers Market. Turns out it was a Craft Beer fest! By the time we got over there though it was closing down, but we did get some free paella! It was really good. Zak made me go back and get him another one! I also found the top of a broken ring. It is super beautiful. I am not sure if it is real or not! I will have to take it to a jeweler.
We had tacos for dinner tonight from Turko Taco in Naples. (Zak had an Uber Eats gift card.) We ate them at the Naples Pier Parking Lot. The tacos were good but they had a LOT of boxing and plastic— I wish that we could come up with a more sustainable way to package to-go food.
People seem to like Auggie a lot more here in Naples. Pitbulls/ Bully breeds are technically illegal to have in Miami-Dade county, which I personally think is ridiculous, and also caused a ton of people to get all freaked out when they saw Aug walk by. Anyhow, it is nice to finally be in a place where people can just appreciate good dogs regardless of their breed.
Lastly, our battery voltage still seems to be an issue. It always hovers around 13.15 by the end of the day and I don’t understand why…