An Exceptionally Bloated Post

At the end of the previous post, I foretold you the next post would probably not appear until “deep into June.”  I believe the 27th of the month qualifies.  (I’m beginning tonight; it will almost certainly be another day or two before I finish… although hope springs eternal.)  And my final words were, “And what a post it will be!”  That promise will also be fulfilled, to the tune of nearly 450 pictures.

We can start with an innocuous enough photograph of Didi from the first week in May.  Didi figures prominently in this period for reasons I’ll get to at the appropriate chronological point, but in early May she’s just happy, careless Didi enjoying a walk around the northern end of Søndersø, up by the cows.

There’s a deer in the next photo.  You may or may not see it.  Don’t feel bad if you don’t: Didi the brilliant hunting dog didn’t.  The deer managed to bound off into the woods well before Didi even had a hint that 150 kilos of venison were just a stone’s throw away.

With my usual dogged determination to chronicle just about everything, I actually took daily photographs of the drainage work being done by the kommune around our house, most of which focused on the ripping up and replacement of the sidewalk on the northwest corner of our property.

You will or will not be pleased to learn (depending on the doggedness of your own determination to see everything chronicled) that in light of the voluminous number of photographs I found myself confronting in the preparation of the blog, I decided not to include the 20-30 photographs so doggedly documenting this simple bit of municipal street work.

I keep saying doggedly.

And I suppose by “doggedly,” I must subliminally mean “utterly unable to spot a deer.”  Because here’s another one she missed just a few days later.

You know what she can notice, though?  A little puppy on her home turf.

Yeah, meet Billie:

She’s not ours.  She belongs to Chris and Maria, the Didi-loving couple that often house- and dog-sit for us.  They had just adopted Billie a few days prior to these pictures, and it was important to them that she meet their beloved Didi.

There’s something very Rags-like about Billie that warmed my heart.  Or maybe Ewok-like.  Either way.

And now, before and after shots of some intensive under-hedge trimming.  (Because Chronicle All the Things!)

(We’re well into mid May at this point, and I had by now realized that if the yard was going to be in any way presentable by the time of Molli’s big party on the 22nd of June, our forthcoming vacation in Florida meant I had better get things rolling.)

This was made a little extra challenging by the usual dizzying whirl of springtime events eating into what little free time we had — along with some once-in-a-lifetime events, like the baptism of Christopher & Enrica’s son William:

The baptism itself took place at the Kastellet church, located literally in the middle of Kastellet (the Copenhagen fortress).

The reception brunch took place at the restaurant Salt, located directly on the harbor.  Most guests walked the mile from the church to the restaurant; we drove, and therefore arrived well ahead of them.  So when I caught a glimpse of a U.S. Coast Guard ship across the quay…

…I felt compelled to pay a visit.

It was the US Coast Guard Eagle, embarked on a training tour that had taken it from northern Germany to Copenhagen, and would soon take it back down to southwestern France, at which point its crew would be rotated before making the Atlantic crossing back to Bermuda, and thence America.

Here’s a shot I took from the ship.  If you look carefully, you can see Trine waving at me from between the black and red ships across the quay.

Psych!  You can’t see her.  Even if you zoom way in, she’s just a pixel or two.  (But she is there.)

It still gives me little goosebumps to see the stars and stripes flying proudly.  (According to the sailors, whom I enjoyed talking to, the first question every Dane asked them upon boarding the ship was, “Why is the flag so big?”)

But enough about tall ships.  Let’s have a look at the star of the show, the newly baptized William:

In the middle of the reception brunch, an incoming photo of Maddie with her old (vuggestue) boon companion Astrid… with Astrid’s bunny.

My account of the wonders of the Eagle had piqued some interest, so after the reception Trine, Mormor, and Mette wanted to see it for themselves.

The Eagle, just so you know, is manned with 12 officers, 68 enlisted men, and 150 cadets.

It’s a training ship for cadets.  One unfortunate cadet I spoke to, a kid from Virginia, told me the most important training he’d had so far was learning how to handle his sea-sickness.

“Seasickness?” I asked.  “Why in hell did you join the Guard if you knew you got seasick?”

“I didn’t know until after I joined,” he said.  (I was going to add “a bit ruefully,” but I’m guessing that would have been superfluous.)

Also, all that fluffy stuff in the rigging?  It’s called baggywrinkle.  It’s made from old frayed lines (first rule of the sea: everything can be reused) and it’s hung from the rigging to prevent fraying the sails on the lines.

Also learned on this visit: the phrase “don’t get carried away” originated in the U.S. navy.  It was a warning sailors gave one another as they took the deck in inclement weather: getting swept off deck by a wayward boom was being “carried away.”

Enough (again) about tall ships.

The nice thing about being a little sister is being able to underbid your big sister for contract work.

(Am I a bad parent for encouraging some economic dynamism into the family?)

I like the shot below because perspective is a funny thing.  Is it a helium balloon tied to our apple tree, or a hot-air balloon soaring over Søndersø?  Or a little tomato stain on the lens of my camera?

We’ve now reached late May: the weekend of our departure for Florida. To ensure ourselves a sense of proportion while in the balmy tropics, Trine, Maddie, and I take our first non-Polar dip of the year in Søndersø.

To be honest, it didn’t feel much better than our polar dips.  I suppose the main difference is we felt like we had to pretend it was better.

I no longer remember why Maddie and I were on a train, or why I took this picture.  I just like her thoughtful pose as we pass through what appears to be Skovbrynet Station.

Molli doesn’t mind me taking pictures of her at handball.  She doesn’t like seeing me taking pictures or video during games.  So here she is getting prepped for a game at the Furesø tournament, held at Farum arena the weekend of our departure… the last handball event of the season.

And now it’s the Sunday of our departure.  Here’s the Denmark we were leaving behind:

I could bore you silly with the senseless tale of how our carefully planned Sunday of packing and shipping off got disrupted by a half-dozen little things that threw wrenches into the precisely calibrated machinery of our itinerary.

I really could.

Instead, I’ll just note that it was the Thursday before the Sunday of our departure that we discovered Didi was in heat.  And given our plans for puppies, that meant she needed to be mated.  Meaning she’d need to be tested for fertility and then mated for several days in a row — while we were in Florida.  Meaning we had to turn to Chris and Maria, Didi’s godparents and proud new owners of Billie, for help.  Which they offered… but for which services they would need our car, with Didi’s cage, because they couldn’t transport her in their own.

I will note without comment that this was only one of the complications that arose that chilly Sunday.

So we had no choice but to walk, luggage in tow.

That’s Maddie and Molli walking way ahead of me.  (Way up on the sidewalk on the right side of the street.)  I’m standing and waiting for Trine, who has run back to the house to retrieve one last thing she forgot.  It’s a beautiful moment.  Let it stand here forever as testament to our particular family genius for…  well, whatever it is that makes it impossible for any of our plans ever to unfold as intended.

It’s about two in the afternoon and we’re finally on a train that will take us to Nørreport, where we can get the Metro to the airport.

And here we are at the airport, where Mormor met us to see us off.

And here we are waiting by the gate.

And here we are are a little later — an 11 hour flight and a 2 hour drive later, at something like two or three in the morning U.S. Eastern time.

See the excitement!

Ah, but how quickly we bounced back.

The last time I drove in a convertible with Pop-Pop was in a bright orange MG in the early 1980s.  Here we are almost 40 years later, and Molli and Maddie get their own ride in a convertible with Pop-Pop and Nana.  La plus ca change…!

Nana and Pop-Pop treated us to a fine brunch at the Grandézza clubhouse, after which the girls wanted to do a little exploring.

They returned very quickly, and breathlessly informed us they’d spotted an alligator in one of the little water hazards along the golf course.  I took a bunch of pictures of it.  I don’t include them because the terrifying gator in question turned out to be a tree stump.

(In fairness to the girls, it could have been a gator.  They do exist at Grandézza, and we would later learn they had sometimes found their way into garages, and once even meandered into the entrance gate.)

Surprisingly enough, we swiftly found ourselves at the Miromar Outlet Mall, where Trine got herself talked into the modern equivalent of a traveling tonic salesman’s tent, where she allowed hideous chemicals to be applied to her face.  Or maybe it was some kind of cosmetic booth.  Who can tell?

The first three rules of Florida mall parking lots: location, location, alligators!

Outlet malls: the circle Dante neglected to mention.  The circle for impatient husbands and fathers.

Is it okay with Bernie Sanders that there are so many types of non-dairy milk available at the local supermarket?  I think it’s a stinging indictment of capitalism.

KARL MARX: We must eliminate private property.

FRIEDRICH ENGELS: Yes!

KARL MARX: And replace the family with the state.

FRIEDRICH ENGELS: Yes!

KARL MARX: ….otherwise someday people will face a dizzying array of milks extracted from nuts and grains.

FRIERICH ENGELS: Ah… maybe we can leave that last part out?

Sorry.  But hey, here’s a picture I sent to work with a text saying something like, “Well, this doesn’t suck.”

But I wish I had been taking a video instead of pictures, because it would have caught the moment between that picture and this one:

…during which Molli’s own mother merrily swam up to her daughter and flipped her off her float and into the water.

Such a golden family moment!

That evening we had dinner at Miromar.

Weirdly, given my nature (Chronicle all the things!), there are no pictures from our actual dinner at this actual restaurant.

In fact, the photographic log only resumes the following morning at Lovers Key National Park beach.

We’d had a hard time choosing which beach to visit, and the family mood had soured so badly by the time we settled on Lovers Key that I threw on my best phony smile and took a selfie to make it look like we were having a ball.

And it proved infectious.

But the force merriment probably wasn’t necessary.  By the time the sand crawler delivered had carried us through the mangrove forest to the beach, we were all simply awed.

Lover’s Key Beach was unquestionably one of the most perfect beaches I’d ever been to.  (I had not yet been to Bonita Beach.  But hang on, we’ll get there.)

Cloudless blue sky, turquoise water just cool enough to be refreshing, pristine white sand. . .

There’s no point writing anything; the pictures render exposition meaningless.

We went to the funky little café on the beach for lunch — the only game in town — and got some barely digestible burgers and a bunch of chips that turned out to be strangely significant and appropriate.

You take one of the most perfect beaches in the world, and you serve it with the most half-assed beach shack I’ve ever been to.  The quality chips were the only thing that prevented it from being an unmitigated disaster of a meal.

And yet… sitting there eating horrible food, no one complained.  I’m not even sure we noticed in the moment how horrible the food was.  One doesn’t sit in Paradise and complain about the ambrosia.

I won’t go into a big digression on the importance of mangroves to the continued survival of southern Florida — I hadn’t yet learned all that — but I was completely enchanted by the weird beauty of the mangroves flanking the inland side of the beach.

Good thing there was a path running through them!

The way home from Lover’s Key took us through Fort Myers Beach and Bonita Beach.  We stopped along the way for some homemade ice cream at Melissa’s.

It was not our last visit there of the trip (and this, too, was not yet known to us, although we did have some foreshadowing since in the course of this beach trip we also swung by the motel Trine and I would be staying at a week later; so we did know even then that we’d at least be in the neighborhood again).

That night we went out for a round of mini-golf in the obscene humidity.  We chose this particular course (also in Fort Myers Beach) because it advertised that one could “feed the alligators”).

Indeed one could.

I have no pictures of the alligators taking the bait off our lines — little pellets of whatever alligators go for — but I do have video.  It’s just chilling watching those jaws slam shut on something.  And when I say chilling, I mean terrifying.

And these were just baby alligators.

As for the mini-golf…  we made it through, barely.  Even in the dark of night, the heat almost conquered us all.

Apparently Daddy’s preferred motif in the tropics is pictures of palm trios.  (Palm tree-os?)

This particular shot was taken back at Grandézza on my evening walk with Winnie.

While shopping most of the next day, we stopped in Ford’s Garage for a lunch that included the best onion rings any of us had ever tasted.

The beers and burgers were also good.  Were in fact fantastic.  Idea: put Ford’s Garage in that stupid shack on Lover’s Key Beach.  People would never leave.

I think this was Friday, by the way.  Nana and I had driven Pop-Pop to the hospital in Naples that morning for his knee replacement surgery.  That night we went for dinner at Beth and Gene’s.  Unfortunately, I have not a single picture of that evening!


Except for this one, of Nana taking the girls for a whirl in the convertible.

The following morning we set off on the “Everglades Adventure” tour that I’d booked weeks in advance.  They ordinarily ask participants to meet them in Fort Myers; based on something I’d seen in an online review, I emailed a day or two ahead and asked whether we could meet somewhere else since it seemed silly to drive up to Fort Myers only to then drive right back down through Estero on our way down into the Everglades.  The tour-guide wrote back to me that he could pick us up in a Publix parking lot in southern Estero.  It poured rain on our early morning drive there, and did not look promising weather-wise.

We drove about an hour down into the heart of the Everglades, to the Wooten’s property (the only privately owned tourist-serving location in the federally-protected area).

Our guide had the unlikely name of Greg, and he was fantastic.  He taught us so much, and showed us so much, and though I’m tempted to recap everything we learned from him, I don’t think browsers of this blog would look kindly upon a lengthy discussion of southern Florida water table issues.

As soon as we arrived at Wooten’s, the girls had to use the bathroom.  Meanwhile, Greg called me over to where he was standing by a little canal.

“Get a load of this guy,” he said.

In retrospect I’m not sure if he was talking to me about the guy in the photo below, or talking to the guy below about me.

Yeah, that shot was using a zoom, as I’m sure you can imagine.

The following shot is without a zoom.

I have never in my life stood so uncomfortably close to an alligator with nothing between us.  Had he come up and made a run at us, I surely would have perished, because at this point I still believed that the only way to escape from an alligator was to run a zig-zag pattern away from him.  No: you do that, the alligator wins.  What you must do is run in circles around the alligator, who will keep trying to adjust course to follow you, and will be too exhausted after about 50 seconds to pursue you.

Didn’t know that yet at the time, however, so good thing he wasn’t after me.

Here are a couple of pics of us on the airboat that Greg emailed me later.

The big guy in back (in the picture below) was our driver, a local who’d lived his whole life in the Everglades.  He knew every nook and cranny of the waters he was taking us through.  I’ve already forgotten his name, but he was a spectacular guide with a great sense of humor.

See that thing in the water out there?  Gator.  I mean, we’d barely left the dock, and there it was.  A big male.

The guide was explaining all this to us: here (below) the male had swum a little too close to a female’s nest, and she was letting him know in no uncertain terms that his presence was not desired.

Once the waters settled again he brought us alongside them so we could witness their uneasy peace up close.

It was a very uneasy peace.

In the next few pictures you can see the female hounding the male away from her nest.

But he was too slow.

And she was not very patient.  How many times in your life have you seen two adult gators fighting for their lives?

It’s a hell of a thing to behold.

Now, they’d fought earlier (in the midst of the “uneasy peace” pictures, above), and I got video of it.  It was a phenomenal thing to see.  Two alligators engaged in mortal combat less than a yard away from us.  And yet maybe not so extraordinary: I have seen for myself how the female beside me in the photo below can react when she believes her nest is being threatened.

(The earmuffs are because the sound of that air propeller was loud.  And when I say loud, I mean ohmygodjesuschristmakeitstop!)

For some reason the mangroves and palms and weird isolation and pristinity (pristneness? pristinehood?) of the area made me feel like we’d stumbled onto the set of a new Jurassic Park movie.  It honestly wouldn’t have surprised me to see a brontosaurus lift his long neck above the tree line.

I took about three dozen pictures on that wild airboat ride, but they all look more or less the same, and none of them really capture the magnificence of what we were seeing.  Or feeling.  We kept trying to impress upon the girls the fact that for like at least 50 miles around us, and in most directions more like 100, there was almost nothing other than what we were seeing: raw, unspoiled, and extraordinarily dangerous tropical nature.

(Other things we’d learned from Greg: there are black bears all over southern Florida.  It’s the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles both appear naturally.  Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of Burmese pythons in the Everglades: they can grow up to 18 feet long and can consume a fawn whole.  There are also rattlesnakes and two other species of poisonous snakes — and poisonous frogs.  And even, as you will shortly see, terrifying parasitic trees, the sociopathic Ents of the Everglades.)

Another thing Molli discovered for us as we deboarded from Greg’s van at the “Swamp Buggy” tour place across the street from Wooten’s: the Everglades are full of gigantic yellow grashoppers or circadas.  (She made us aware of her discovery by means of the scream she emitted as she stepped out of the van — and almost directly onto one of them.)

And seriously, they were everywhere on the swamp side of the highway.

Jiminy! 

(Heh.)

The intrepid naturalist:

It doesn’t really play in the photo below (although in full size it does), but the bannister and the posts are just crawling with those yellow suckers.

Another couple of photos from Greg of us boarding the buggy for our swamp tour.

Worth noting: in the rainy season, which is also peak tourist season, everything you’re about to see is under about 2 feet of water.  That’s why the buggy is elevated the way it is.  (Well, that and the fact that half the things running around out there would just as soon kill you as say hello.)

Why a picture of a tree trunk?

Because if you look closely, you’ll see the claw marks of some black bear that had used the tree to clean or sharpen its claws.

And below: the strangulating parasite tree of the Everglades, doing its best to kill its host.

Apparently the Prohibition Era was a golden age for bootleggers in the Everglades.  (Personally, I think I’d have rather run the risk of cops busting my garage moonshine operation in the city or suburbs than have to worry about black bears, alligators, crocodiles, rattle snakes, and strangulating trees, but that’s obviously just me.)

As usual, so much of my sightseeing is done over three blonde heads…

You can only just make it out here, but a family of deer crossed our path at one point.  Pity we didn’t have Didi with us, she would have had three or four deer not to notice!

After the Swamp Buggy tour, Greg drove us into Everglades City (population 426) for lunch.

The lunch was included in the tour package, but although we got to choose our own entrees, an appetizer of fried alligator tail was the mandatory appetizer.

That’s cocktail sauce in the basket with the gator, by the way.  I’ve often said, while dragging a finger through the leftover cocktail sauce when all the shrimp was gone, that I’d eat just about anything as long as I could dip it in cocktail sauce.  This was a pretty good test.

Enjoy the girls’ first tastes of fried alligator…

They liked it!  We all liked it.  It was kind of like calamari.  The flavor was just… chewy.  Like calamari.  Who said, “That was some tasty calamari, dear lord I love the taste of squid!”  The answer, I’ll wager, is nobody.  Ever.  It’s just chewy.  (And if you’ve got the really little tentacles, and they’re really well fried, sometimes a little crunchy.)  Same thing here: the alligator tail didn’t have a whole lot of flavor, just a lot of chewiness accented with a bit of crunchiness.

Even more interestingly, with menu options of a variety of sandwiches and fried foods, Maddie had opted — had insisted — on getting the frog legs basket.

(How I read her expression: “Okay, I have no one to blame for but myself.  If I don’t eat them, they’re gonna tell me I told you so and make me eat Daddy’s chicken.  So I have no choice.  They say it tastes like chicken.  I like chicken.  I’ll pretend it’s a drumstick.”)

And yet…  she actually kind of liked it.

Molli tried some too, and was also surprisingly unhorrified by the taste.

Now, the sandwiches we’d all ordered came with fries and a hush puppy.  You remember hush puppies, right?  Deep fried corn bread.  Delicious.

Toward the end of the meal I noticed Molli hadn’t touched hers.

“Saving it for last?” I asked.

“No,” she said, with slight disapproval, “it looks gross, I don’t want it.”

“It’s corn bread,” I said.  “You love corn bread.  And it’s deep fried.  What have you ever not liked that was deep fried?”

“I just don’t. . .  I don’t want it,” she said.

I said, with some irritation, “C’mon, Molli.  You never try anything new.”

She stared back at me incredulously.

“I just ate alligator and frog.”

Got to admit: she had me there.

Fortunately we were all in a good mood, so I was not excessively shamed for my stupidity.

In fact, I was even allowed to get them posing happily in front of the diner.

The next part of the adventure was Greg’s “Nature Tour.”  He drove us around the area — this absolute middle of nowhere part of the Everglades, where about 60% of everything around us wanted to kill us or eat us or strangle us or poison us or all of the above.

And there in the middle of nowhere — in a nothingville “town” by the name of Ochopee — he showed us the smallest Post Office in America.

I could tell you about it… but instead, here’s a picture that’s worth…. (*counting*)  … 125 words.

And another picture worth about 20 words:

(You’re a tough crowd.  I’m actually worried that someone’s going to write me to say that “am” and “pm” don’t count as words, or haggle over whether the initials “J. T.” count as one word, or two, or none.)

Back into the van.

And deeper into the nothingness, where we got to see a lot of wildlife (mostly avian and reptilian) in its natural environment.

I will have nightmares for the rest of my life of running out of gas or getting a flat tire in the middle of the Everglades, just before sunset on what has been a very hot day but is shaping up to be a cool evening.

In addition to signs like that above, there were many saying simply, “Feed an alligator, go to jail.”

You know why?

Because alligators are naturally afraid of humans and will avoid them.  Always.  You have nothing to fear from a wild alligator.

Until a human feeds them.

Then they come to associate human beings with food.  That’s not good.  Creatures that can run 20 miles an hour and have jaws that can crush a human skull as easily as we can a peanut, should not be taught that humans have anything to do with food.  So once an alligator has made that association, it is called a “nuisance alligator” and has to be brought into captivity or killed.

There were many alligators in the little stream here.  And a couple of redneck guys fishing with their very young sons.  And Greg told us one of the alligators watching them wasn’t behaving correctly.

“I don’t like the way he’s watching them,” he said.  “It’s not right.  He might be a nuisance alligator.”

In front of us (us being in the van), the rednecks and little boys (outside on the banks of the stream) continued fishing while the alligators watched with distressingly keen interest.

“Maybe you should say something?” we said.

“Not my job anymore,” Greg said.  And we drove on our way.

Eventually he drove us back to Wooten’s to see the alligator show.

I forget the alligator’s name.

I also forget the trainer’s name, but he was amazing.

I took the pictures above: the trainer offered to take our cameras or phones and take some pictures of the gator from within the cage.

As the highlight of the show, he actually put his head in the gator’s mouth.  Yikes.

Afterwards, we were all permitted to hold a “baby” alligator…  two or three years old.  But only after its snout had been strapped shut.

(“You girls never want to try anything new!”… man, I am never going to live that down.)

Possibly the most effective warning sign I’ve ever seen:

(That was outside a crocodile cage.  Crocodiles are not like gators.  Crocodiles will attack humans.  Just for fun.  Just because they can.  Every crocodile is a nuisance crocodile.  And also: Florida is the only place on earth that crocodiles and alligators both inhabit.  Yay Florida!)

Wooten’s seemed to fancy itself a kind of zoo, and they also had a Florida Lynx (not to be confused with the Carolina Panther or the Mercury Lynx):

And the, uh, African lion:

There was also a Bengal tiger.  I don’t know why I got no pictures of him.

From Wooten’s we had a long drive back to the Publix parking lot, and that was that.

What an adventure!

The following day was Sunday — Pinse!  Time for the annual Kammer family picnic in Frederiksberg Garden!

We obviously didn’t make it this year.  But pictures were shared, and I thought I should include one just for the permanent record.

With Pop-Pop recovering in the hospital, we had a couple of dinners out with Nana.  One at the Mexican restaurant, where the girls discovered one of the all time great desserts.

I don’t remember what they were…  sort of like deep fried, sugar-dusted crepes with Nutella as a dipping sauce?

Another tree-o shot:

The next night, another dinner out with Nana, this time at a stir-fry place down at Coconut Point.

Maddie and Molli had each ordered sushi rolls, and were worried whether it would be enough for a meal.  Until they arrived at the table.

Trine and I, on the other hand, opted for the Mongolian barbecue.  It was a little different than what I’m used to, but hey…  Florida, man.

Then Nana treated us to ice cream at Sunshine Sundaes.

Pop-Pop was discharged Monday: Nana and I picked him up, and of course there are no photographs of the happy homecoming because who the hell wants pictures of themselves coming home from a hospital, still all groggy on drugs?

That night Trine and I met Mike and Leslie at Bonita Beach.  (It was the equivalent of our overnights in Salem during our northeast visits.)  We had dinner at a place called “Doc’s Beach House.”

(The photo above is taken from a sand-dune with some cafe seating, on the other side of which lay the beach and the Gulf.  We ate inside because it was too hot outside.)

Then we went back to the motel, changed into our bathing suits, and crossed the street to the beach.

What a beach!

That sunset was approaching made it all the more spectacular.

Sunset over the Gulf of Mexico with my wife and my best friend from childhood.  And a scotch in my hand.  I don’t take a lot of selfies, but I thought such a moment deserved one.

At this resolution they get mixed up with the wave foam, but this is in fact a picture of four pelicans.

We bobbed around in the water with our drinks for quite a while, the pelicans flying and fishing around us.  It was paradise.  Then the sun began to set — and set.  I’d never seen anything like it.  One minute the sun was above the water, the next — plop! — down behind the horizon.

I asked if it were true that sharks only fed at night.  Someone said yes, but it hardly mattered: the four of us were already hurrying to dry land.

I took about fifty pictures of those pelicans, by the way, that kept soaring and swimming and fishing around us, and the actual sight of them — the live, real-time, with-our eyes sight of them — flying off in the sunset was spectacular.  Didn’t come out very well on “film,” but here are the best pictures I managed to get.

Trine also looked pretty spectacular in the sunset.

Even the tall grass — weeds! — looked spectacular in the sunset.

After our twilight cocktails in the Gulf, we settled onto the terrace of their room (really both our rooms were apartments; theirs may actually have been bigger than our apartment in Astoria) to watch a thunderstorm over the lagoon.  Fort Myers and Estero appeared to be taking a beating: the clouds were just throbbing with electricity — great flashes of heat lightning that lit the containing clouds like lanterns, and then sudden spikes of lightning that streaked from heaven to earth like thunderbolts from Zeus.  I took so many pictures, and yet virtually all of them look like this:

…and even the video is unimpressive.  But it was the most spectacular show of nature I’d ever seen from afar.

Eventually the bugs and humidity got to be too much, and we did what Mike and I have been doing for, oh, around 35 years: we sat around a table with lots of drinks and junk snacks and talked the night away.

We started the next day with a morning swim.

If I owned my own tropical island I would declare it an independent country and this would be my national flag:

We had breakfast with Mike and Leslie and returned to Estero HQ.

Maddie and I enjoyed an ice cream while Trine and Molli got their eyebrows darkened.

Then we made our way to the mall, where Maddie finally got to try the climbing walls.

One of them had a timer, and the record was listed as something like 3.8 seconds.  On Maddie’s first attempt, it took her about 50.

She did it over and over and over, cutting chunks of time off her speed each time, pausing now and then in exhaustion (it was about 33 Celsius at the time).

Her best photographed time was 10.88 seconds.  She was determined to break 10, and though she tried like hell, and although I do think she actually got as low as 10.3 (which I didn’t photograph), she didn’t manage to break the 10 second barrier.

Only toward the end of her hour did we learn that the 3.8 second record had been set by a 15-year-old boy who happened to be the brother of one of the employees.

And only now do I notice that the wall she’s climbing in the pictures above is not the timed wall.

Not that it really makes a difference; I just don’t want to be deliberately misleading.  I’m misleading enough inadvertently!

I should note that none of the pictures of our visit so far really capture every day life.  We started most days with a slow and leisurely morning… breakfast at our own speed, a walk with Winnie before the heat kicked in, a sighting or two of Mr. Bunny hopping around the house…

…then most often a swim and some lounging by the pool.  (Nana and Pop-Pop were able to join us before the surgery; afterwards Pop-Pop was barred from submerging his leg in water, so only Nana could join us.)  We tried to do anything but swim from about 11 until about 15 in the afternoon, since for most of our visit the temperatures and sun were almost intolerable to our delicate Nordic complexions during that time.  Most evenings we wound things down with a nightcap or two and some TV.  It was all of it slow and leisurely and relaxing.  I mention all this only because to judge by the pictures I’ve posted so far, and am posting below, you might think we were bouncing around southern Florida like maniacs for two weeks.  We were not.

During our second week we drove across the state to Cape Canaveral.  I’d booked a hotel, and the plan was to spend the night there and then get an early start at Kennedy Space Center the next day, then drive straight back to Estero after leaving KSC.

We figured we’d check into the hotel, lounge around the pool for an hour or two, then go out to dinner.

The weather had other plans for us.  Here was the view out Trine’s and my window just after check-in:

Here’s the view out the lobby door about ten minutes later:

Now, we tried to swim anyway.  We like swimming in the rain!  So we got into our suits and went out to the pool area.  It wasn’t crowded at all.  Maddie and I lowered ourselves into the jacuzzi; it was lovely!  But there were menacing clouds not far off shore (the Atlantic shore, now, since we were on Florida’s east coast).

“If we see a single flash of lightning near us, we hop out right away,” I said.

Maddie understood the wisdom of that suggestion.

A moment later Trine came out to join us.  She stood beside the jacuzzi and looked doubtfully out at the weather.

“It looks bad,” she said.  “I don’t want to bother getting in and all wet if I’m just going to have to hop out right away.”

Maddie and I told her how nice it was and persuaded her to join us.  The storm was pretty far off, we could surely enjoy at least ten or fifteen minutes.

She no sooner lowered herself into the jacuzzi than a massive thunderbolt struck uncomfortably close to us, and we had to leap out of the water and run terrified into the hotel.

So we dried off, changed, and went out to dinner at a local steakhouse.  We were all a little burnt out from the drive.

After dinner we went back to the hotel, the girls to their room and Trine and I to ours.

And the next day, we were up (and checked out) bright and early for our big day at KSC.

The Space Center was a joy.  I could talk endlessly about the cool things we saw, and angrily about the poor logistics of the Center, but I have so many pictures that if I tried to explain the significance of each of them, we’d never get through this post.  So I’m going to bite my tongue a little and let most of the pictures speak for themselves.

(Logistics problem number one at KSC: the lines were insufferable, and to compound the horror most lines led to places where you then had to queue up to go through a door, which let you into a seatless room where you had to see a video explaining how amazing the thing you were about to be allowed to see actually was.  So here we are, below, in minute 45 of what a sign had told us would be a 15-minute wait for a bus out to the Saturn V and launch area tour.)

The next sequence of pictures are from the bus taking us on a tour before dropping us at the Apollo museum.

Our first glimpse of the VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building), which measured in cubic meters is one of the largest buildings in the world:

A “transport crawler” — the vehicle that drives the fully assembled launcher and rocket from the VAB to the actual launching pads (max speed 1 mph).

Triva note: those doors (above) are in the Guiness Book of World Records as the largest doors in the world.  It takes 50 minutes to close them.

The famous Launch Pad 39!

The actual mission control room from the Apollo program.  They literally just moved it into the museum.

The boosters of the Saturn V:

Once again, the boosters (ie, the ass) of the Saturn V:

And the tip of its top:

(Don’t worry, full shot of the “sectioned” Saturn V ahead.)

But first: I don’t think it counts as a hologram, the photo below: what it is, is, it’s a veil of mist onto which the Apollo logo is being projected.  So it’s a sign you can walk through.  (Or, as you can see Molli doing, kick your leg through.)

So here’s the full length view of the Saturn V (almost: the tip extends out of frame: that’s just the little rocket designed to pull the manned capsule away to safety in the event of a catastrophic launch failure; also, the booster section is pretty much lost from sheer perspective).

The van that drove the Apollo astronauts out to the launch pad:

Inside the van.  For some reason I half expected to see ash-trays.  And maybe a cooler for some beers.

They had the never-actually-used “moon car” in a display case.  The wheels fascinated me.

Actual Apollo return module:

Actual human beings sat inside that thing while orbiting the moon.

Oh, how I tried to share my awe with the girls!  Would they board such a thing for a trip to Mormor’s house 23 kilometers way, much less the Moon — an additional 384,377 kilometers away, most of that distance being the empty void of outer space?

Because a bunch of guys did that.  A couple of times.

Here’s Alan Shepard’s suit (if I remember correctly), still coated with a little moon dust.  Because, wearing this suit, he took a stroll on the moon.

It’s a damn shame they couldn’t bring back enough rocks from the moon to sell some in the gift shop.  Seriously, I would have bought a pebble of moon rock embedded in anthracite.  I would have paid a lot for it.

Sigh.  Maybe one day.  Until then…

One exhibit that caught my imagination was that of the “beta” moon suits — prototypes that didn’t make the cut.

The one on the left (with its own shot above) is my favorite.  It’s like the designers had just watched a bunch of 50s sci-fi and figured what worked for Martians trying to invade the earth would work for Earthlings trying to invade the moon.

I would normally have passed on the picture below:

…which I took upon the instructions of our tour guide, to whom this sight represented the climax of our bus ride back from the museum to the Space Center proper.  The nest in that tree in the middle of the photo has been there for the duration — a full fifty years.  And the same eagles have occupied it.  (I had no idea eagles had such long lives.)  The guide counted down utility poles to the tree, telling us to have our cameras out.

Why?

It’s an eagle nest.  Okay, cool.  But I wondered: how many people on this tour came to Kennedy Space Center from a love for eagles?  What’s the overlap of ornithologists and space enthusiasts?  Why is this nest so damn important?

We may never know.

Back at the Space Center, we eagerly scrambled into the Atlantis display, excited to see the actual space shuttle Atlantis in its final resting place.

A set of unused shuttle launch boosters stood sentinel outside the complex.

The logistics of getting into the display were once again horrible: long line, finally admitted into a big empty chamber, a few minutes’ wait in the big empty room with no obvious exits, then a 15-minute video sharing the history of the shuttle program in general and the Atlantis in particular.  Then the wall on which the film had played out drew aside, and there she was before us.

Why I will never be an astronaut (until things get a little better), reason number thirteen: the space toilet:

Oh, Atlantis…!  (Isn’t that an Allison Krauss song?)

Imagine driving something powered by that!

This is the actual original countdown clock from the Apollo missions.  It’s at the front of the space center, where you enter, and just counts down from 03:00 to zero over and over.

We ended our visit with a guided tour of the “rocket garden.”

Trine and I did, anyway, while the girls partook of what was for them the highlight of the whole visit: a space shuttle launch simulation.  If they took pictures of that, they didn’t share them with us.  So we’ll stick to the rocket garden.

Finally, we concluded our visit with some kind of weird granular space-age ice cream.  Space beads?  I forget what it was called.  It was just ice cream in pellets or something.  Maddie got the Oreo flavor, Molli got the rainbow flavor.

We didn’t get to see a launch, unfortunately (there had only been one planned during our whole time in Florida, and that mission had been scrubbed by the time I was making our KSC reservations), but thanks to the miracle of NASA technology, we did get this:

We left KSC around 17:15, which Google Maps told us would have us “home” by a little after 21:00.  But Google Maps also told us to ride home via a different route than the one we’d taken due to a bad accident on the highway having caused a total stop of all traffic just south of Orlando.

So we had to drive way south on 95, and then cut across the state, instead of cutting across the state and then driving down 75.

Not a big deal, right?  I mean, what Nagan vacation would be complete without some time on I-95?

The bonus of this route was that the cross-state highway we would be taking wrapped right along the northern coast of Lake Okeechobee, which had figured so prominently in Greg’s history of the Florida water tables.  Given the timing, it seemed like a good idea to try and grab a little dinner in some restaurant overlooking the lake.

As we approached the lake, we drove through a very typical resort town: tons of fast food places and beach shacks and boat rental places and hotels and motels, alongside malls and gas stations and even some finer restaurants.

The girls were hungry by now, and shouting out the names of every restaurant we passed that aroused their interest: “Taco Bell!” “Burger King!”  “KFC!” “Rib Shack!” “Captain Jack’s Seafood!”

But I knew better… I could tell from Google Maps that the long strip we were driving along led straight to the lakefront, and our route would then go right and follow the northern end of the lake for quite a few miles.

“Never mind these places,” I said, “it’ll be so much nicer to eat somewhere with a view of the lake.”

Funny thing about that: we reached the lake, took our right, and saw… nothing.  The lake was hidden from view by a tall, wide berm about a hundred meters south of the little rural highway we were driving along.  There was marshy nothing on our right.  No sign of anything in particular ahead of us.

“Guaranteed there’ll be some little something up ahead here,” I said.  “It’s a big lake, we’ll be following the shore for at least 20 minutes, surely there’ll be some restaurants.”

There were not.  We reached the end of the lake (which we only knew due to Google Maps: the lake itself had remained hidden from visual contact the entire drive) without having seen anything much more inviting than a couple of trailer parks.  Not even nice ones.

“Well,” I said, “my bad.  I was sure there’d be something along the lake.  It was a reasonable supposition.  But we don’t have time to turn back, so I promise we’ll stop at the next restaurant we pass.”

Indeed.

The tale of that trip will surely live in family lore forever.  How Daddy drove past three dozen restaurants because he wanted to eat somewhere he didn’t even know existed, and then made his fateful promise: we’ll eat at the next restaurant we pass.

For the next 75 minutes, we drove through the most godforsaken land I’ve been through outside of Utah or eastern Washington state.  Vast fields of nothing on either side of us all the way, flat and endless.  The sun slowly going down, shadows growing longer.  Plenty of cattle — thousands and thousands of cattle — but nothing else.  No homes, even.  I doubt we saw more than five or six other cars the whole way.

And in the middle of that, with Google Maps showing nothing but the blue line of our highway surrounded by nothing at all for miles and miles and miles, our gas tank light went on.

We only had 45 miles left in the tank.

The nearest town Trine could find on Google Maps was 35 miles away.

It was so horrible and hopeless that Trine and I couldn’t help starting to giggle.  We were in the absolute middle of nowhere, on a lonesome road sure to be covered with gators warming themselves once the sun went down, with the sun about to go down, all of us hungry, and with barely enough gas to get us to the nearest outpost of civilization.  What wasn’t there to laugh about?

So we used the opportunity to teach the girls about vanishing points.  Because we were on a straight, flat highway with utility poles on one side, spaced regularly so that you could see them shrinking all the way to nothing at the horizon.

They thought that was interesting, but we were all relieved to finally turn off onto a another highway — until we realized it, too, was just offering another lesson in vanishing points.

And then another turn, and another 10 mile lesson in vanishing points.

And so it went.

Until we reached the city of Labelle.  And pulled immediately into a gas station.  And then a Burger King.  And didn’t die.

And were back in Grandézza an hour later.  (Another story that might live in lore forever is being elided here out of sensitivity to its subject…  but family history will surely recall the family member whose bladder demanded relief the minute we got off 75 onto Corkscrew Road.)

That was Friday night, leaving only Saturday and then Sunday, the day of our departure.

We took things slow.

The weather began to turn a little…

But what did we care?  We just had some last minute shopping to do, and packing, and relaxing.

…and attempting to beat old personal bests…

At last it was time to go.  That was sad.  We were all sad.  And I do mean all.

Yes, we had reached that point in every trip where we suddenly realize: holy crap, we don’t have any pictures of all of us!  Quick — group photo shoot!  *I include what is probably too many for fear of including not enough.)

…and that was it.  We hit the road for Fort Lauderdale.

I’d saved the location of a “safe” rest area on my trip back in February, and we stopped there again on this trip.

Except it didn’t seem so “safe” after all — the whole area was lousy with idling black vultures, whose very presence had an air of menace that creeped us all out.

(Not just us: every one there was very wary of these wicked looking birds.)

My favorite: “Reserved for Security.”

Fort Lauderdale airport seemed to suffer from the same logistics problems as KSC.  It took us almost 45 minutes to check in at the Norwegian desk.

…and, fast-forward about 14 hours from the photo above…

HOME!

We were shocked that first night to have it light outside until well after 22:00.

We made it through that first week back as best we could — it wasn’t easy.  It was complicated because Maddie was starting a two-week trial at Atheneskolken, about 10-15 kilometers from home, and had to be picked up and dropped off every day.  Also we had to start making all the preparations for Molli’s forthcoming birthday party.

And we had a birthday party of our own to attend – Jette’s 50th, which was held on a boat in the harbor.  Not here in this picture below, but on the other side of the opera.

The following Wednesday evening, we were notified by Atheneskolen that the staff had voted in favor of accepting Maddie to Atheneskolen.  I trained my camera on her as we shared the news.

I love the excitement of the photos above, as the took in the news, but there’s something even more interesting in the photo below…

You can almost see her (future Maddie: you can almost see yourself) thinking through all the implications.

“I’m very excited,” she said, “but I need to think about it a few minutes, just to be sure.  I mean, I’ll be leaving Søndersøskolen and all my friends there; I think I should think about it a little, shouldn’t I?”

Of course we let her think it over, and in the end she decided she would go to Atheneskolen.

So that was the end of her education at Søndersøskolen.

For the permanent record: this was also the point in time where she became obsessed with Rubik’s Cube for some reason.  Here are the cheat sheets she made for herself to help solve it:

Okay.  We’re finally nearing the end.

We’re in the home stretch of preparations for the big party.

We spent most of the week prepping the yard and prepping the house.

Thursday night: time to set up the tent.

Friday night the rental place delivered the tables and chairs, and we set them up.

By late Friday night, we were ready inside and out:

At last the great day was upon us — Saturday, June 22 had arrived.

And the 32 guests arrived almost all at once, right on time.  The guest list was evenly divided between Danish family and Molli’s friends.

The picture below is Molli with her two best friends: Molli I assume you can identify; immediately to the left of her is Freja, and to the left of Freja is Selma.

Here’s a copy of the song Trine did:

And of the one Vibeke did:

Not long after dinner, virtually all of the adult (family) guests left, and a fresh influx of an additional 15 kids came streaming in.

The kids partied long and hard until 01:00, at which point they dispersed.

What they left in their wake was not so bad as we’d feared it might be.

Nor was it much better.

A few hours of cleanup later, and that was that!

So here we are.

It’s the 30th of June as I wrap this up, a very hot and blustery Sunday here in Værløse.  The girls completed their school year on Friday (Maddie actually had her last day at Atheneskolen on Thursday; Friday morning she went to Søndersøskolen for a final farewell to the students and teachers of 4.b. at Søndersøskolen). 

The ending of the school year is a little more meaningful than usual: next year will be Molli’s last at Søndersøskolen, and much of the year will surely consist of determining which gymnasium she’ll be entering in the fall of 2020.  Meanwhile it will be Maddie’s first full year of Atheneskolen — and our first year having a child commute to and from school.  So by this time next year, we’ll have no kids at Søndersøskolen for the first time in over a decade.

Trine and I have one more week of work before our week of “staycation.”  It’ll be a very domestic week off for both of us: we have no real plans and are hoping to keep it that way after what, as you’ve all seen, has been a pretty lively spring.  (The gods of the Danish weatherbook have clearly turned against us: after beautiful summer weather all this weekend, we’re looking at an upcoming week that would probably be more at home in March or April, with highs around 15 or 16 and plenty of rain.  This, while continental Europe is almost literally melting in the most significant heatwave ever.  We can only hope that by the time our vacation begins, a little of that heat makes its way north.  Or south: for some reason Norway and Sweden are baking above us while France and Germany broil below, the North and Baltic Sea corridor is being kept unseasonably cool.)

We have Molli’s actual birthday coming up this week, but that has already been honored enough that we’ll observe it with a simple family dinner — at her request, steak and bernaise sauce, artichokes, and homemade potato “boat” fries.

Molli won’t even be with us for most of our vacation week: she’ll be heading down to Italy with Selma and her family.

I expect to take it very easy this summer, mostly to recharge my batteries in preparation for another round of freelancing later in the summer and fall, to the extent that I can almost promise the next blog post will not be until August — and its subject matter will probably focus on puppies.

Yeah, puppies.

As I mentioned, Didi surprised us by going into heat the week before our departure to Florida.  And complicated our lives still further by revealing (through veterinary tests) that she would be at peak ovulation by the following Monday — while we were in Florida.

As I also mentioned, Chris and Maria were kind enough to take care of the logistics of getting her mated.  The first attempt required insemination, but nature finally worked for Max and Didi on the second and third tries.

As I have not yet mentioned, about a week ago we had her scanned, and she’s got at least five little buns in the oven.

Her due date is somewhere at the end of July.

So you can all look forward to an August blog post full of adorable little golden retriever puppies.

After what happened last time, we should all temper our expectations, but there’s really no reason not to expect things will work out better this time.

And that’s that!