Heading To Miami For The 4th

Well, it's like I said, we were heading for Miami...

We found this neat bench with a great view of Biscayne Bay near one of the geocaches we were looking for.

As we were heading down the highway, we came across a transport of parade floats, heading somewhere.

Whoa! We almost took a broadside round from her port side guns!

And here is a rearward view of the ship-float.

This is a view of downtown Miami as we were heading to our hotel. Dang, those bicycles are fast around here!

Then we stopped at Billy's house to say hi. His wife took the picture. It's nice to see he is doing alright for himself.

And here comes the champion photographer! Sorry I don't have a better picture of her though...

And parked diagonally from Billy's house, was this trailer from Cub Scout Pack 357, of which I was a member and so was my brother Jody.

When we were tooling around Hialeah, looking for an auto parts store to get a replacement headlight bulb for our car, we found ourselves smack in the middle of a car show that was about to begin.

So, we slowly inched our way through the lineup, taking a tour of the "Golden Oldies" I each side.

Wow, tail fins. It's been a long time since Americans had fallen in love with those things...

And here is a Buick, which you can tell by the portholes on the front fenders. This is a feature that is specific to only Buicks. So, if you see fake portholes on the front fenders of a car that isn't a Buick, you now know that it doesn't belong that way and somebody made a rediculous choice..

A mid-60s T-Bird and a Cadillac behind it. These hail from the days when you didn't need to see the emblems on the car to figure out what it was.

And on the left is a Chevelle...

There was even a Ford Edsel here. It's still going, in spite of the bad press.

We also stopped off at the Coral Castle, a neat tourist attraction that is something of an engineering feat.

This the pit where Ed mined the stone he used to create wall.

Ah, this is a neat picture that Luann got of Karen. It wasn't set up, Luann was setting up for shot and Karen poked though the other side of the wall.

You know, everywhere we looked, there were these lizards all over the place.

And here is Karen standing next toa life-sized picture of Ed Leedskalnin at his true height of 5-feet nothing.

Not only were the green lizards all over the place, there were these tie-dyed lizards everywhere too.

Yeah, that's quarried limestone/coral he used to make his 'castle'.

Yeah, we found out that these guys like to pose.

We decided to look down into Ed's well.

He even carved a stone table in the shape of the state of Florida so the heads of state might meet here.

Karen decided to take a seat in Ed's open-air throne room.

Yeah, it looks to me as if this 'rainbow warrior' is giving us the 'Evil Eye'.

Wow, there are lizards everywhere. Definitely a non-native, invasive species.

Oh yeah, we're having fun here. Well kinda. I think...

Karen started studying the paperwork they handed to us at the front gate.

And when we left, she continued reading.

Next, we stopped by a house she lived in when she was a 'little thing'.

Smile!

She was surprised to see the columns out front and the extension at the back of the house. It looks like the house has been abandoned or something else (foreclosed, maybe?).

And then we stopped by our grandparent's old house, which triggered the slide show that I showed the girls at Kim's house later on. Yeah, lots of memories here.