All I Want For Christmas, FL
- Christmas, Florida
- Feb 18, 2016
- 4 min read
Alligators, pelicans and swamplands: not exactly the things I expected to see when we left for Cape Canaveral this morning. Cape Canaveral is a coastal area in Florida that's known for hosting the Kennedy Space Center. Taking a tour around the Space Center is quite pricy, so we decided not to go the park itself. But you can't blame me for trying to sneak a peak, can you? Besides, the Cape is also the home of Cocoa Beach, which had been recommended by a waitress we met in a restaurant a few days ago. And so we set out! Let's see some rockets, right?
No, no, not quite. The Space Center is, well, why did we expect any different? It's quite far from the inhabited part of the Cape. Unless they'd happen to be launching a rocket at the exact time you're there, I don't think you're going to see much of the Center at all unless you go to the park. Bummer. But no worries! At least we've still got Cocoa Beach to enjoy, right? Right? Well, no. We drove over an hour from Kissimee to Cape Canaveral just to spend another 45 minutes trying to park our car. Finally, we managed. That beach had better be good! 20 minutes of walking later we finally arrived at the beach. I had given up on trying to fix my hair 19 minutes ago, since the wind was, well, rather prominent. But we made it. What we found was... not really spectacular. It was just a random beach. It was cute and all, there were some pretty plants, but the site was almost entirely deserted and well, just a normal beach. We spent about 15 minutes there, scavenging some pretty sea shells, but after that we'd really seen enough and returned to our car. Which was still a 20 minute walk away. Great.
Slightly bummed (that's an understatement) we returned to the highway. Still looking for something else to spend our day on, we passed a town called Christmas. Christmas? In the Sunshine State? That sounds ironic. We need to see that! We got off the highway, filled up on gas ($1,54 per gallon, while we spend €1,60 on a liter at home. That's more than 4x less. Ridiculous!) and drove around until we saw some signs with "Orlando Wetlands Park". That sounded interesting enough, so we went to check it out. And that was how a day of disappointment turned into a day of glee!
Not knowing what to expect, we parked our car on a large but emtpy parking lot and went to the entrance. It was mandatory to sign the guestbook, which seemed quite ominous, because the reason was so they could come look for you if you didn't sign out in time. Oh dear, what could possibly happen? We seemed to be on dangerous grounds. You were allowed to stay until sunset, so we had about 3 hours to sign out. Let's see if we can survive in this park of doom until then.
Upon entering the park, my jaw dropped. This was the last thing I expected. We appeared to have entered a kind of swampland. Everything was completely flat, and between some scattered trees we could see until the horizon. Except for the chattering of birds, everything was completely quiet. The place had an eerie kind of serenity to it. The trees appeared to be growing out of ponds, so we decided to stay on the sandy path. You never know where the ground may end!
By now we had seen some signs indicating the presence of alligators. We couldn't possibly run into one, could we? Wild alligators? Still, we securely checked out every log and inconsistency in the water. No luck yet. The weather was lovely, so we just enjoyed the walk. About 10 minutes in, we started to get lucky. We didn't need to be so cautious about checking everything out: there it was, right in plain sight. An actual baby alligator! It was so still, we thought it might be dead, so I slowly creeped closer to take a look. When I was close enough, I saw the tiny beast was just lazily enjoying the sun. Amazing!
After gawking at the cute little reptile for quite a while, it was time to move on. My day had already been made. But it only got better! Not even 200 meters further, we spotted a group of birds in the water. Closer inspection: pelicans. Real, live pelicans. I couldn't believe my eyes! I didn't even know they lived in Florida. Two bird spotters joined me in staring at the fowl and told me that if I liked looking at birds, I should borrow their binoculars for a bit and look in a certain direction. I didn't know what I was looking at, so they proceeded in telling me to look at a certain tree. In the top. Did I see that dark blob? That was a Bald Eagle. A what? An actual wild Bald Eagle. I'm done.
With my head in the clouds, we proceeded along Alligator Alley and spotted 3 more wild gators and a nice little trail one of them left for us. I was living the dream! I loved this place. Before I knew it, our 3 hours of roaming the massive grounds had already passed and the sun started to set. Although it was breaking my heart, we had to leave this place. I suddenly understood why they had to look for people who didn't get out in time. While walking back to the entrance, we got one last surprise. A column of smoke started rising for somewhere in the back of the park. We encountered the same bird spotters from before, and they told us it was a deliberate fire to contain the growth or something. Nothing to worry about. That's good to know!
This day almost turned out to be a disappointing one because we didn't book a tour through the Kennedy Space Center. In hindsight, I'm sure it was the right decision. If Cape Canaveral hadn't bummed us out so much, we would never have ended up at the amazing and typical Floridian place called Christmas. The Space Center would've been fun, but it wouldn't have been as impressive as the Orlando Wetlands Park. I'll never forget this place!
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