We went down the way through Illinois and stopped by the "big confluence", where Ohio joins the Mississippi river. From one spot we could have touched both the rivers.

We continued our trip to Nashville, where we were surprised for the first time by the coexistence of an old style architecture with new modern glass and metal towers.

Comming to Orlando, we could not miss the atraction of Walt Disney World. It is quite commercialized, however still a lot of fun. Among the big number of different rides we most enjoyed "Splash mountain". On the picture you can see only the upper half of the waterfall.

Kennedy space center on the East coast of Florida offers not only commercialy attractive exhibition, but also a lot of educationaly interesting inormation. And you can almost touch the real space program equipment. (Actually, you can see from quite close distance what is used right now and you can touch some old stuff like real Appollo racket or some old racket engines and a lot of others.)

Even if the east coast of Florida is not considered to be as nice as the west coast, there are still some famous places, as West Palm Beach. You can feel the wealth and prosperity all around you. Main activities here are swimming, eating and playing golf.

We passed through Miami, as well. However, being warned against the high level of crime there, we rather did not stay and continued to Florida Keys, one of the biggest atractions of our trip. Seing many small islands and long bridges was an interesting experience. Only the little bit cold weather did not realy comply with expected atmosphere of subtropical seashore. Anyway, the flora and fauna were real subtropical and quite different from what we were used to.

The most famous place is the most distant island - Key West. It pertained its old 19th century architecture with many old wooden houses. Also thanks to its history it is the main turistic atraction of the Keys. Here we discovered how people are confused in northern countries. The rubber plant, which we know as a room plant at most a couple yards tall, is in fact a big tree.

Usualy people take a boat ride to close coral cliffs and dive there, but the weather decided differently for us. We at least admired hunting pelicans and the spectaculous sun set.

As having no other chance, on Key West we turned back and after 120 miles we arrived again on the main continent. Our next destination was Everglades National park. National parks are not only high mounatins or deserts, but also flat lands without any particular scenery. However, with enourmous number of various birds and animals. We particulary enjoyed herons ...

... and aligators.

Once being on a trail little bit further from the main road and civilization, we met an aligator resting just next to the trail. I did not miss the chance to take a close focused picture.

Everglades used to be a shallow, slowly flowing river of a width about 50 miles. Even if roads and drainage changed the original conditions, even today Everglades are mostly swamps and shallow water, were the main mean of transport is canoe. We took part in one trip to the swamp guided by an experienced ranger.

Travelling back along the west coast of Florida, we discovered why people prefer it to the east coast. Small islands with palm trees and long beaches, stripes of land separated from the continent by narrow bays and beautifful waters of Gulf of Mexico are together with snow white beaches the real pleasure for your eyes and soul and in the warm wheather undoubtably also for your body.

Especially the white sand is unrecognizable from snow, which we are rather used to here, in Iowa.

The last but not least stop on our trip was in New Orleans. We managed to visit the city of carnevals exactly between two events so we missed some of its joys. But there are still other things to be offered. We visited the "Preservation Hall", where each evening a croud of poeple can listen to one of old jazz bands playing in the original New Orleans style. Flashes were not allowed inside, so I had to expose for 2 seconds, which made the picture little bit fuzzy.

In New Orleans, similarly as in many other cities, new scyscaper areas neighbour to old quarters, creating pictoresque views.

Both us and the car survived the trip and we came back full of experiances and eager to make other trips to next, for us undiscovered, parts of the Unated States.

Back