New Adventures

 

If the past few months has taught me something it is that life is short and should be lived :)

Getting my motorcycle license was something I wanted for ages but never got around to it. l have gotten my lessons and l passed my driver's test last week, here a little video from before the test.

This week I also took my sidemount diving course. I have been a scubadiver for 30 years now but always only dived with backmount. Now I can dive with sidemount and two tanks, so I can stay longer underwater. I also will do my enriched air exam for longer dives as well in preparation of a dive excursion I'm planning for November and another for next year!

This year I after the initial first 4-5 months of grief, I needed to focus on my mental and physical health and am spending more time doing fun things and less time focusing on work.

First Dive of the Season

I finally went diving this past week. People who come on vacation in our town go much more to sea than us who live right next to it, I guess you get spoiled or the fact that it is just there makes it less important to go.

Weather was around 40 degrees Celsius and the water 24 so perfect, although deeper it does of course get colder.

There are some shipwrecks, sunken purely for divers, although it does give a nice grip for critters and fauna.

 
Fish like to seek shelter under it.

This was also once part of a ship, now it is flourishing.

And Squid eggs, dancing with the waves, they were pretty deep, hence the quality of the photo. The sea is beautiful from each and every angle :)

The Keys of Florida

After Everglades City we went to Homestead on the first of January and stayed there for 2 nights. This was to get closer to the Keys.

On the third of January we went to Marathon, which is about half way to Key West, and this is where our cute Motel was.

White Ibis. The garden was like a tropical island, wait a minute, we were on a tropical island!! :)

They are huge!! We saw several iguanas. These are green iguanas, although they are only green when juvenile.

And their babies.

A beautiful dainty heron.

All these mages are from the garden of our motel, which was about the cheapest we could find in the keys but was wonderful.

We did go all the way down to Key West, which is the most South-East point of the US and only 90 miles from Cuba.

The weather in December is like Summer for most places in the world. In Summer though it becomes hellish hot and Hurricane risk is high.

Key West turned out adorable, fun fact, there were hundreds of chicken on the street. They are wild and free :) Somehow we forgot to take a picture, but they were wandering everywhere. I did read that some locals are not happy with them as their wake up call can be day or night.

We had not many expectations of Key West as often touristic places are disappointing but it was lovely. Just a very long drive to the mainland. Because of that, gas was the highest priced here of all the places we went.

Bamtam tree.

We had a wonderful time here, and even managed to thrift here :)

You are a real Christmas fan when your ornaments are larger than your car and almost as big as your home :)

Black vultures, a native bird of Florida

The manly polished islands did have some old bridges/ roads that were not in use anymore and were just rusting there. I'm guessing that the poles in the water are home for lots of seaweed, barnacles etc and might be more harmful to remove them.

I found this picture above look like a 1970's postal card :)

I love the amount of nature despite the number of people.

At one part of the road, there was a sign saying 'endangered key deer' and we had to drive very slow. I was so happy to actually see two of them! The Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium) is an endangered deer that lives only in the Florida Keys. It is a subspecies of the white-tailed deer. It is the smallest North American deer.

I also went diving! The most amazing dive of my life.

Unfortunately, I had no underwater camera but I saw 3 sharks, amazing corals, fish it was like swimming in an aquarium. Here is a video from Youtube from the place I dove.

On our way there we had to pass cute little canals, which was basically the back gardens of some homes.

Once at the open ocean we saw 4 dolphins, unfortunately, my phone was not good enough to take decent pictures of them. On the 5th we went to Miami and spent our last 3 days there, one last blogpost about that coming soon!