Day Sixteen: St Pete to St Pete . . . say what?

I'm asked all the time about the difficulty of planning and carrying out the road trips for Veritas.  Even though they involve relatively small numbers of teens, compared with traditional private schools, they are still potential logistical nightmares!  My answer is simple and straightforward, "Be Flexible!"  This, of course, is Rule #1 for any kind of travel.  When you over-plan and insist that everything go according to those plans, it's like trying to force the proverbial square peg into a round hole.  Try as you might, it just isn't going to work, so why bother?

Today (Sunday, Oct 16) was a classic example of this paramount rule in action.  We departed St Pete (St. Petersburg, as it's known to locals) at 7 a.m. with the intention of driving all the way to Key West, the last of all the Florida Keys spread out from the mainland to Castro's Cuba.  Our first stop of the day was the Everglades National Park, encompassing much of the southern tip of the Florida Peninsula.  We arrived just in time for the 10:30 boat tour of the mangrove land of 10,000 islands (this portion of the Everglades).  After our hour and a half trip, where we saw all manner of water fowl, including osprey and a bald eagle, and observed a number of dolphins feeding in the Gulf, we headed back to shore just as the rains came, and in the form of a tropical deluge.  The forecast had been modified with a 90% chance of continued downpours (through Tuesday) from the Everglades south to the Keys.  Since our time at Key West was all dependent on good weather for outside activity we had to cancel and return to St Pete.

Although sacrificing stops where we were guaranteed to see alligators up close and personal and having to forgo our tour of Ernest Hemingway's home in Key West, along with Harry Truman's version of FDR's "Little White House," we did make it back to St Pete in time to go the beach, play in the surf and sand for about an hour and await the sunset.  And as the photos here attest, a beautiful sunset it was.  We weren't the only critters playing in the surf, either.  At least 2 dozen dolphins traveled along the coast line not more than 100 feet from us, foraging and frolicking in a leisurely manner parallel to the shoreline.  All in all it wasn't a bad trade-off for what we had given up.  So our day began with the dolphins just off the Everglades and ended with even more dolphins just off the Gulf Coast of Central Florida.

Rolling with the whims of Mother Nature, this is Veritas -- discovering our world, making a difference!