Everglades

My Grandparents house that my Dad built, called a dome.


Part of the reason I wanted to start this blog was to record some of the CRAZY stories of my past. My father built dome houses all over the United Sates and we traveled with him everywhere, so I have A LOT of fun stories, stories pretty much no one believes. One of my good friends from college told me she though I was a compulsive liar because every time someone mentioned some place, I would say, "Oh yeah, I lived there once... and this and this and this happened." I ended up rooming with this girl and she found out that they were all true (with sometimes a slight exaggeration for impact:-) )

Today I was thinking back to this crazy time in my life. I must have been 10 years old. We lived in a 14 foot travel trailer. That's right. 14 ft long! It was Me, my mom and dad, and my THREE younger sisters. That is six people in a 14 ft long trailer for longer than a weekend. Much longer than a weekend. Several months to be exact. Not only did we live in this 14 ft trailer, the trailer was parked in the Florida Everglades. And not only were we in the middle of swampland, it was during ALLIGATOR MATING SEASON. If anyone has been in the Florida Everglades during alligator mating season, you will know...it is NOISY! All night long we were lulled to sleep by what sounded like...hmmmm I can't describe it so listen to this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ5GJdZr5ew

Fun! At least fun for us four girls, probably not much fun for our worried mother.

Since we lived in a 14 ft trailer, we had to use our bathroom for storage, so we used the bathhouse for showers, toilet, etc. I remember we had to take a small course on how to outrun an alligator. For those of you who don't know, you cannot outrun those creatures, you just have to run zig zag and they wont be able to turn fast enough. We had to take this course because alligators were everywhere. There was a nine foot long one on the playground near by one day. Also because we went to the bath house in the middle of the night, we had to take parnters and be on the lookout.

Because we used our bathroom as a storage place, I would keep my violin stuff in the shower. One day I went to get it to practice and everything in the shower was floating! Our tank had backed up for some reason and everything was soaked. Thankfully, my violin was only slightly wet and we quickly dried it off. I still have it! I also still teach from some of my books from back then and they are waterlogged. I think about it every time I open them up.

Another funny thing about Florida was that the man my dad (Mr Mark we called him) was working for had a huge pool and would let us come over any time to swim. As a mother of four young children, my mom saw it as a perfect opportunity to get some of our energy out before retiring to our tiny home. We are definitely water babies and would swim and swim for hours and hours and hours. One time we went and no one was there and several of us jumped in. There was immediately screams of terror as we were shocked by the water! Quickly we jumped out crying. Turns out there was an electrical short in the heated pool and we were very blessed not to have DIED. Later that week Mr Mark sent us a post card that had a picture of an alligator with his mouth opened wide and he wrote on it in ink pen, "Swimming in Mr Mark's pool...AHHHHHHHH".

Well those are just a few of my Florida memories...