Ok, so, I don't have a lot of pictures of my trip to the Orlando area, but the ones I was able to take were pretty cool
I went down to visit my sister in that area, and her family.
So on Tuesday last week, I went to the beach at Jetty Park, right next to where the cruises leave from Port Canaveral.
Here is the pier next to the port:
Looking out the other way on the beach:
This was a really nice day, even though it looks rather grey in the pictures. I think the settings on the camera were wrong for the light conditions.
This is a pic of a cruise ship leaving port... I'm thinking it was Royal Carribean, but not sure anymore... (also not sure why I took it at an angle, but still kind of cool!):
My sister decided to take a pic of me out in the ocean. If you can't tell, I'm a little further back than the white capped wave coming in. I was about 300-400 feet out at that point swimming around
:
She was a little surprised I decided to go that far out, but I wanted to be where it was at least to my neck in the water (well, before the waves would go up over my head
)
An interesting picture of one of the sand dunes:
The other interesting thing that my sister and I did while I was there was a Kayak trip around the mouth of the Banana River, in an area called the Thousand Islands. There are usually a lot of dolphins and manatees in the area, and we were not disappointed (though, I wasn't able to get a lot of pictures of them particularly. Once I balanced my oar and got the camera out, they had already disappeared back into the water).
Anyhow, from where we took off from the dock:
A little further up, we went through a residential area, where we saw the first manatee of the day. Actually, there ended up being around 4 there, but, they were apparently feeding, and only one decided to poke it's nose out of the water (which I missed with the camera):
A Great Blue Heron on a sign post:
Same Heron taking off:
Shot of some distant trees:
One of the larger areas of water we paddled through:
Finally, at one point, we saw some dolphins! Now, we saw them a little further off behind us, coming up the channel we just came up, and we turned around to try to meet up with them. I grabbed my camera and tried getting a shot off, but they moved too quickly. Before we knew it, they were underneath us and then about 50 foot away, again behind us, when I got this shot:
. Then we decided to try to catch up to them, and as we were rowing over to them, one of them completely jumped out of the water while the other smacked its tail on the water.... while my camera was on the floor of the kayak, of course.... Oh well,
We actually chased them around for quite a while, and it seemed like every time they did something interesting, I wasn't able to take a picture. I did get one more of the,
, and you can see the mother a bit up out of the water. They seemed to be playing with us, trying to get us to follow them, which we did with no problem.
So... It turned out to be a beautiful day for being out on the water:
and we were able to enjoy a lot of great views:
Before we finished, the tour guide took us into a mangrove "tunnel". This was interesting, as, at first, it was wide enough for at least three kayaks:
Then, a short while later, it wasn't even wide enough to accommodate 2:
Before we knew it, it was almost narrow enough to where we couldn't paddle:
And, at certain points, we had to actually grab the branches and pull our boat through the area, while ducking in the process:
and
That was extremely interesting and a lot of fun! Only bad thing was, neither my sister nor I thought to put bug spray on, and I'm still itching the bug bites 4 days later!
Overall, a VERY good time! Also, we went to Universal Studios (
I've always liked how they made it look like you were actually in a big city
), though, I didn't take my camera, that pic was from my phone. While we were there, we got to eat at Emeril's restaurant
There was a fair amount more that I was able to do, but, didn't really take my camera for. The weather was great, and got to see two of my one nephew's football games (even though he was injured) and three of my other nephew's soccer games!!