It’s amazing to think about, but Elizabeth and I graduated from college 5 years ago. Those years were a great time for many reasons. One of the biggest? The wonderful friends the two of us made. After graduation, we all gradually went our own separate ways (well, maybe not all – there are several of us still in Norman). That makes it harder to get everyone together in one place at one time. There’s the occasional wedding, but otherwise group chats and fantasy football leagues are all you have.
That’s why Elizabeth and I sat down earlier this year and really tried to figure out how we could visit Florida. That’s where Kins and Keer have settled down in the Tampa area, and they had been pushing for people to come visit for a while. Elizabeth and I had Best Western rewards burning a hole in my pocket after my WFO Fairbanks trip last year and a long weekend for me in late April 2025 after a string of mids. We bandied about the idea of going with free nights in Springdale, Utah to visit Zion National Park. But then I had the idea – what if we actually just visited Florida? We could pick up Kins and Keer and then drive down to the southern part of the state to visit Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. Heck, we could even invite James and Moriah.
And it was actually that easy. “Easy” is a relative term when you’re coordinating a friends trip I guess, but everyone was fairly content to sit back and let Elizabeth and me do what we do best – travel logistics. By the time my last mid on Thursday, April 24 rolled around, we’d booked an AirBNB in Homestead, a Best Western in Hollywood, a rental car, and worked out reservations for some fun watery excursions in Biscayne. Everything was on track – right up until my last mid shift before the end of the string, where I ended up working a nerve-wracking severe weather event with multiple tornado warnings at 5:00 am.
But the shift did eventually end and I got to go home and get some sleep. Elizabeth and I weren’t flying in to Tampa until later in the afternoon so that I wouldn’t be totally sleep-deprived all weekend (I’ve been there, done that. It’s not fun). James and Moriah flew in earlier in the day and beat us there, spending the evening at Kins and Keer’s place. Elizabeth and I landed in the late evening, picked up the rental car, and drove around the bay to where they live in Riverview. Heartfelt hellos were shared among friends who hadn’t seen each other in well over a year. We shared travel stories, met their cats, and I got the chance to eat a belated fajita or two for dinner. My master itinerary called for leaving the house by about 8:00 the next morning, so we all needed to get to bed at a reasonable time. It wasn’t a huge deal for everyone else – Kins and Keer were in their own beds, and James and Moriah slept peacefully on the couch. Elizabeth and I got the guest room (once the cats had been wrangled out of it). She fell asleep almost immediately while I tossed and turned coming off of a midshift sleep schedule.
Like it or not, the next morning dawned bright and early. It was sort of a novelty to not be the first person awake on vacation – Moriah beat me to that distinction, which she would continue to do all weekend. I had been a little bit leery about having to wrangle everyone out of Tampa and all the way down to the Everglades that Friday morning, but it wasn’t all that bad. We were behind the itinerary but within sniffing distance of it by the time we got both cars packed up (I was inordinately proud of packing 4 peoples’ luggage into the tiny back of the tiny Kia that Elizabeth had gotten at Hertz the night before). There was a minor mishap getting the morning’s Starbucks (who knew that suburban Tampa would feel the need to open a Starbucks right next to a Starbucks, and of course we’d pull into the wrong one), but Elizabeth followed Kins closely afterwards to keep us tightly convoyed.
If you’re going to visit your friends in Florida, you should make sure to visit all of your friends that live in the area, don’t you think? I personally think this is true even if the friend in question happens to be 30 years or so older than you. You see, Kins’s dad Tim and I are homies. He’d offered to make us brunch at his house in Venice before we headed down to the Everglades, and one can simply not pass that up. For Elizabeth and myself, this was our first chance to see his house, his tomato plants, and his insanely sick pellet smoker. We hung out and chatted for a few hours next to the pool. This put us a little bit further behind the almighty itinerary, but there’s no question that it was time well spent.
From there, we (Elizabeth, Moriah, and myself – James was in the other car with Kins and Keer) got a head start on the way south from Venice toward the Shark Valley Visitor’s Center; in part because Elizabeth was the slower driver, but also because I had realized that being in Florida meant that Culver’s was an option for lunch. Don’t pass up a chance to get yourself a butterburger and custard while on vacation, it makes everything better. On the way down, we passed by a local news van being driven by a former schoolmate of ours at OU, which was amusing. What are the odds that two different members of the OU School of Meteorology would cross paths like that?
After a couple of hours of coastal driving, we followed the Tamiami Trail (it took me a long time to realize that that was a mashup of Tampa and Miami) inland toward Shark Valley. The others had passed us by at some point (once again, there was a LARGE difference in cruising speed between the two cars), so we all met up at the Visitor’s Center. Elizabeth flashed our America the Beautiful pass that was NOT lost, just sitting in my wallet for safekeeping, and it was official: I was at my 23rd national park.
There is NOTHING that gets Elizabeth going quite like a Visitor’s Center. The Shark Valley one was very much on the smaller end, befitting our position here in the less-developed northern part of the park.
The educational exhibits in the park were topical and helpful, though. They focused on the impacts of seasonality in the park. Right now, it turned out, the Everglades was just coming out of a long dry season and about to enter the wet season. That sort of made sense meteorologically, I thought. It also made the drive down the Tamiami Trail earlier make a lot more sense. There had been a lot of tall grasses and squat trees and low depressions filled with shallow water, but there wasn’t much water, and the whole “River of Grass” thing that the Everglades are famous for wasn’t showing anywhere. But if you’re at the end of the dry season AND there’s a drought on top of that? Sure, that makes a lot of sense. We also learned that the Shark Valley Visitor’s Center was so-named because the Shark River Slough, a shallow depression in this near-sea-level landscape, meanders its way through the valley. The slough is filled with water year-round, even during the dry period, and during the wet period this is what forms the River of Grass.
I don’t know about all of my friends, but I learned a lot from the park rangers and exhibits. I know what Elizabeth got from the visitor’s center – half of the gift shop! She hit it with a real gusto. If you’re going to have a place where you let your credit card go crazy, you could do worse than to let that money flow into the NPS.
One other thing I should mention from this area: I had decided that the Everglades, lacking the kind of mountainous scenes that I tend to focus photography on, would be a great place to start becoming a wildlife photographer. Specifically, this seemed like a great park to try shooting some birds. Bird people love what they do an inordinate amount. I figured they had to be on to something with their hobby… right? Evidently not, because the following bird pictures are among the only in-focus ones I got all weekend. Bird people: your hobby sucks. With that said, please enjoy this green heron:
And please enjoy this anhinga, one of the most-famed birds of the Everglades:
I’ll say this: birding may be dumb, but birds themselves are pretty cool.
The Internet, my parents, and just about anyone else with a voice are quick to tell you that the best way to experience the Everglades is to take an airboat tour. There are a lot of airboat tours available in south Florida, but Elizabeth wanted to take a tour inside the national park boundaries. Everglades National Park partners with a select few vendors that operate off of the Tamiami Trail and give airboat tours through the Shark River Slough. After some careful research, I booked us 6 tickets at Gator Park. It was just a short drive from the visitor’s center, and then a short trip to the front desk to claim our tickets, and then a short wait at the dock right off of the highway where the crew was getting an airboat ready for the six of us and a few other tourists.
This was my first time in an airboat. I’ll be honest, I don’t know that I had ever really stopped to think about what an airboat looks like until a coworker of mine at NWS Fairbanks showed me a video he had taken of him taking a ride on his friend’s airboat. That sort of prepared me, but not for this one. An industrial-scale fan stuck up in the back of the boat, which otherwise was just a floating rectangle. Since our group sat in the back, the fan was right behind us. We each got a pair of earplugs to put in, which straddled the line between funny and ominous for me. What was this, an Indycar race? The tour operators were quick to invite us to stand up as long as the boat was NOT flying at top speed. Which is probably a good call, because an airboat can go about 30-40 mph, and this operator was about to demonstrate that he had no problem whipping around corners.
After a couple of minutes, we shoved off and out into the little canal. The boat hadn’t gone more than 50 feet before we passed by a gator.
Along with one that had been hanging out by the visitor’s center, this marked two very quick gator sightings before it felt like we had even gotten going with our Everglades adventure. How many more could we possibly see? (The answer, it turned out, was zero. Funny how life works like that).
Our guide took the boat down the canal for another 200 or so yards, then pulled out into the more open water. It’s really something when you get away from the levees and the man-made structures and trees out there – all of a sudden, it feels more like you’re on a watery prairie, with only the overgrown sawgrass preventing you from seeing for miles and miles in any direction.
And then the guide told us to put in our earplugs and he fired that baby up.
We were flying – almost literally, it seemed. The boat had such a shallow draw that it really seemed to just skim along at the surface of the water. Sawgrass obstacles were nothing. The high ride of the airboat also meant that it could drift like nobody’s business. I’d like to see a jetski come close to the turn radius that this thing had. I don’t normally attach videos to blog posts because they don’t seem to handle WordPress well, but what the heck. It was too cool not to show.
A part of me wanted to throw my hands up in the air and yell “WOOOOOOOO” like I was on a roller coaster – not that anyone would have heard me through their earplugs and over the roaring of the engine.
After about 5-10 minutes of absolutely ripping through the Everglades, our boat operator pulled into another canal. We were free to stand up in the airboat again.
I figured that freedom was temporary until we passed through this channel to the next spot where the boat could move a little more freely. We saw some birds but no more alligators. Trees began to grow closer and closer together around our channel, and our guide constantly had to fire the engines to keep us from running into a mangrove. A nugget of doubt crept into my head – was that short stretch out on the open water the only one we would get? The answer, it turned out, was yes. The airboat was already on its way back to dock. I don’t know if everyone else felt like they could have gotten way more of the airboat experience, but I felt vaguely short-changed by it. I suppose that’s what you get when you pay $30 apiece for an Airboat tour instead of the longer, but much more cost-prohibitive, options out there. Regardless, I had seen enough to get the hype surrounding an Everglades airboat ride.
Gator Park also had an enclosure in the back of the property that had about a half dozen or so gators chilling in it. Employees made several announcements that the next “gator show” was beginning soon, whatever the hell that was. The enclosure was reasonably large and nothing seemed inhumane, but it still felt kind of chintzy to be at a place like that inside a national park. I visit the parks to try and find some sort of connection with nature, not the facsimile of nature that tourist operators feed like slop to the little piggies out there. It seemed like one or two members of our group might not have minded sticking around for the gator show, but I was pretty adamant about wanting to move on toward the AirBNB. The motion passed by acclaim and we headed back to the cars.
It was apparently rush hour in South Florida by this point in the day. Even though the path to Florida City and the AirBNB Elizabeth had booked was relatively simple, Waze felt like navigating us down all sorts of side streets right on the periphery of the national park to avoid what must have been a complete slowdown on the state highway. Or maybe Waze was just an unconscious poet. This way, Elizabeth, Moriah, and myself all got a chance to see fruit country at its finest. There were so many farms that all looked like they were operating at peak productivity.
The AirBNB was in a condo complex in the heart of Florida City. I wouldn’t say it was the nicest neighborhood, but it certainly felt decent and safe, and the condo itself was impeccably clean and furnished. Elizabeth and I ceded the master bedroom to Kins and Keer and headed into the second bedroom to share a queen bed. Across the room from us, James and Moriah placed their things on a bunk bed. Unpacking and settling into our home for the next 2 nights took a little while. Then it was time to figure out dinner. There were several options in the area that stood out, from Jamaican food trucks to the Everglades Grill that my parents recommended. Because it was a little later in the day, some of them had already closed. I played the trump card then and suggested Exit One Taproom, whose website promised food trucks out front. You can almost never go wrong when you eat at a taproom. Worst case, you can drink off the bad food.
I don’t think we had to drink off any bad food. Everyone seemed pretty happy with the food truck du jour, which was some sort of fusion truck that let everyone be happy. I got the pulled pork tacos, Elizabeth got buffalo wings and mac and cheese, and James got a Cuban. Two of the three of us remembered that we were in South Florida when we ordered, at least. The Taproom’s beer selection was distressingly small and even more distressingly lacking in local options. I think a part of sampling the local culture should include sampling the local beers, so this was a disappointment. But at the end of the day, what really mattered was sharing the meal with good friends, telling stories, and having some jokes at each other’s expense.
The sun started to go down toward the Florida horizon. A band showed up at Exit One and started getting set up to go live. Inside the bar area was a stack of board games including the old college favorite – Cards Against Humanity. We got a nice little round going to finish off the night. As usual, hilarity ensued.
Our first day in the Everglades region was coming to a close. There was plenty to do and see on Saturday, especially in Biscayne National Park, but I think we all felt like we could use one more Everglades adventure to finish off the night. Maybe the airboat tour gave us just enough entertainment to leave us wanting more. Or maybe we were just all having a good time with friends and wanted to keep the good times rolling a little bit longer. Regardless of the reason, Elizabeth suggested entering the park to do some stargazing. I don’t think the Everglades are an official Dark Sky park due to the encroaching light pollution from Miami/Homestead/Florida City, but they certainly are much darker than the rest of the urban landscape. You can see plenty of stars for city-slickers like us. After I dove into my research document for a second to determine where to go, we settled on the Anhinga Trailhead at the Royal Palm Visitor’s Center.
It was pretty surreal leaving our condo firmly in the suburbs, taking a few suburban side streets, and all of a sudden popping out in what might as well have been an open prairie with nothing around. The border of the park really is that abrupt. There was suddenly nobody around us – just a lonely entrance station in the darkness and a dark road leading up to the visitor’s center. Stepping out of the car felt more like it was entering the wild than the airboat tour had. Crickets chirped in the trees, splashing noises from nearby ponds told of something looking for its midnight snack, and in the distance, the sky flashed with lightning from a few thunderstorms over the Keys. There was plenty of open grassy space next to the visitor’s center to lay down and enjoy the night sky, which was in fact replete with quite a few stars. The whole thing would have been an amazing way to relax and wind down for the night – if it weren’t for the hordes of mosquitos that were all too delighted to find 6 dinner buffets arriving in their swamp. Because of that, and because Elizabeth has been blessed with a very active imagination that let her hear a gator in every splash coming out of the pond, we only stayed out for maybe 10 or 15 minutes before heading back to the condo. It was 100% worth it, though.
And with this, the first full day of the friends trip down in Florida came to a close. We had much more to see and do the next day – specifically, I wanted to wake up early to find a crocodile at the far southern tip of Everglades – but it already felt like the trip was on its way to being a resounding success and potential start of a new annual tradition. I thought about that while laying on the lumpy mattress next to Elizabeth, listening to the heavy breathing of everyone else as they slept. And then I joined them in their slumber.
