4 things to remember when planning your Florida vacation

image from boktowergardens.org

So, you are traveling to Florida for the first time this summer? 

I have lived near Tampa most of my life and would like to pass on some tips the guide books and travel agents probably didn't mention to you.

1. The Weather and Our 2 Seasons.

• WINTER We have the best weather in the country from October until March.  There is low humidity and temperatures in the 60's and 70's during the day, with a usual cold snap in mid-January where it gets down to the 30's at night so we can wear our sweaters, and the 11:00pm tv crews invade the strawberry fields and orange groves to show cold farmers in heavy jackets out protecting their crops with heaters or spraying them with water so they get an insulating layer of ice overnight. 

• SUMMER However, in the summer (which begins in March and lasts until October) it is humid and hot. Like mid-80's to mid-90's every day and only down to 70 at night. It will feel like you walked into a sauna at 7am and will build throughout the day.  Save yourself some time and prevent blisters on your hands from the boiling hot steering wheel by purchasing a sun shade (here are some suggestions) for your car ASAP and use it all day, every day. You have no idea how fast you can burn in our tropical sun.  Forget the makeup and buy a big bottle of sunscreen with SPF of at least 30 and put it on every 2-3 hours. Don't forget the part in your hair, the tops of your feet, and your ears. Peak hours for sunburn are between 10am and 2pm.  Stay hydrated. Heat stroke is no fun. By the way, you will get delicious water out of your kitchen or bathroom tap, but it will not ever be really cold.  You have been warned. Hurricane season (June 1 - November 30) used to be a big deal, and those of us who have been through them do take warnings seriously, but we haven't had a hurricane since the infamous 4 that barreled through in 2004. However, it does storm every afternoon for about an hour or so, usually around rush hour, just to make that part of the day even more exciting.  Florida is the lightning capital of the U.S. so get out of the pool/beach, off the golf course, and away from tall trees at the first thunder you hear, even if it is sunny. Seriously.  

2.  The Scenery.

Yes, I know the postcards only show Disney and beaches. but Florida is more than either of those. Yes, we do have all kinds of palm trees, but we also have tons of pine, palmetto, cypress and awesome grandfather oaks that are hundreds of years old. No matter which major highway you travel throughout Florida (I-75, I-95, I-4, I-10) these are what you'll see, along with a lot of cow pastures lakes, rivers, and swamps. Of course, because more and more people are moving here, you will also see new house and business construction, too. Now, back to the beaches.  Most of them are wonderful, but be prepared.  They are not all the same.  On the east coast with the Atlantic Ocean, the beaches have coarser sand, much stronger waves and rip tides, and more shark attacks, but gorgeous views of the sunrise. The beaches are more calm on the west coast Gulf of Mexico side. Yes, there are rip tides, but not as often, and you do need to know about the stingray shuffle, and know that even though they are awesome, you need to leave manatees alone. I may be biased, but we have the best sunsets anywhere here on the west coast of Florida.

3. The Critters.

You really cannot imagine how much wildlife there is here. We have forests, swamps, beaches, plains, scrub, and caves. Many of the animals you already know about. Yes, we do have tons of alligators.  Do not approach them and do not feed or provoke them.  They will leave you alone. We have lots of snakes.  Some are poisonous, most are not. Be safe, and leave all of them alone, too. We have lots of creepy and just plain pesky bugs, too.  We have fire ants.  They are horrible, attack in a group and yes, their bites hurt like fire for a long time. So stay away from large piles of sand in the grass. Those are their mounds. We have lots of varieties of roaches, all gross.  Some fly. Because of our climate, mosquito repellent is a must. We have lots of good spiders, and some pretty venomous ones, too, along with scorpions.  Again, leave them all alone.  Do you see a pattern here? One insect you may not have heard of are love bugs.  They look kind of like lightning bugs and, although harmless, are the scourge of Florida for several weeks in May and September, when mating pairs, who are attracted to car emissions, fly awkwardly around and get creamed by cars.  It is not uncommon to have to stop several times a day and clean them off your windshield so you can see the road. If you let the remains bake on your car, they will eat through your paint. So, May and September are good fundraiser car wash months, but bad times to drive for hours on the interstate. You probably won't see a live armadillo or possum while here, but, unfortunately, you'll see plenty of them as roadkill, too. A couple more things about beach critters. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was go to the beach right near the water's edge and scoop up big handfuls of sand.  Most of the time I'd feel weird things moving in the wet sand. These are coquinas.  You'll find tons of coquina shells on the beach, many of them still hinged together, so they look like a butterfly. When alive and on top of the sand, they dig down and try to bury themselves. Their shells come in a variety of colors and I would try to find as many different ones as I could. Try it, it's fun! But here's a tip from someone who's been there, done that.  Do not collect a bucketful of live coquinas, sand, and ocean water, put them in the trunk of the car without telling your dad, and then have him find them the next day. They do not survive.  And they really stink when cooked in your 100 degree trunk.  So does your trunk. After you've played with them for a while, leave them where you found them. There will be plenty of empty shells for you to take as souvenirs. 

4. Most of us Floridians were not born here.

I have lived here most of my life, but like most people I know and also grew up with, I was not born here. I was born in Ohio and moved to Florida when I was 6.  I did time lived in Michigan for 10 cold years, but have been here the rest of my life (33 years as opposed to 16 elsewhere). Yes, there are some folks who were born here, but there are many more of us who have lived here longer than anywhere else, so that we, too, are Floridians.  We love Florida and are proud to be here.  We are glad you are coming to visit and we hope you find things to love too, maybe even some of it's quirks. 

Victory, or how I defended my feathered friends from my furry nemesis.

Standing there dripping, I decided that this had gone far enough. I had tried to be kind.  I had been persistent in using my garden hose and great aim, but not nearly as persistent as she had been. I kept telling myself she was no different than the fiery red cardinal and his family, the sweet little tufted titmice, or the noisy blue jay that all visited regularly.  But did any of birds hog all the birdseed, and then scatter the remains all over my flowerbed to come up as grass and weeds?  No.  Even when there was a steady stream of birds all day long, my feeder would slowly empty throughout the week, instead of swinging empty and forlorn an hour after I filled it up. I have given up filling the small feeder  that I can see outside my office window.  The pole attaches to the fence, and therefore is very handy. I greased the pole. I greased the top of the feeder.   It just isn't feasible to put Vaseline on the entire fence, but I have thought about doing so. So, now I just have the one feeder right outside our porch, where we can see it from the kitchen, so we can relax and feel at peace watching the lovely birds. Or so we thought.

So, today I went to the hardware store, and I found it.  Guaranteed to stop her. Cue maniacal laughter, ala Bill Murray in Caddyshack. Because as I mentioned at the beginning of this tale, I was done. Every morning at around 8am, I see her out there stuffing her little fat face.  I let the dog out, who is so excited because she knows this is something awesomely fun that she and mom do every day, and she tears out the sliding glass door, and to the porch door.  But our arch nemesis is already sitting on top of the screened enclosure above the pool, mocking us.  So, I let the dog out, who just runs around the backyard and barks because that's about all she can do 16 feet below the culprit, and I get the hose, take aim, and squirt the intruder right on the belly.  The next stage of the game involves her flying off the screen and rocketing down the slope, through the fence, and back into the woods, with my clueless dog convinced that the intruder is still on the enclosure.

Usually that's the end of the game.  I bring the dog in, finish getting ready for work, and look at the feeder a half hour later as I am about to leave, only to see our adversary munching happily away. All I have to do is open the sliding glass door quickly this time, and she is gone.  My mission complete, I leave for work, but with a sneaking suspicion she comes back the minute she hears the garage door creak shut.

But today was different.  Oh, she was there as usual at 8am. And there I was with my hose, and the dog was doing laps in the yard, frantically looking for the little twerp. But, instead of her dashing off to the woods, she sat on the far corner of the screen enclosure mocking me.  So, I squeezed the trigger of the hose nozzle even harder to make the water go farther, and it jammed.  So, as I tried to unjam it, the pressure knocked the nozzle out of my hand and it went flying around like a demented cobra, and I got sprayed.  A lot. After I turned off the hose, rounded up the dog, and wiped the water off my glasses, I knew I had to step up my game.

Hence the trip to the hardware store and the successful purchase of my secret weapon.  Designed to only allow lightweight birds to sit on the perches to eat. The guaranteed squirrel-proof bird feeder. She's tenacious, but I hope I have stymied her once and for all.  Only time will tell.  Excuse me, I have to go get my clothes out of the dryer now and wind up the garden hose, but I must admit I will keep it handy, just in case. 

No one will play Trivial Pursuit with me - the downside of being a librarian.

Trivial Pursuit was created in 1979 and celebrated its 35th birthday on December 15, 2014.  I received my Masters degree in Library and Information Science in 1993, but worked in the library field for 11 years before that, mainly shelving lots of books.  In library school I had a class on library technology and the instructor briefly mentioned this thing called "the Internet," but not to worry about it because we had no need for it in the library field.  There was a great post floating around for a while that read "Librarians are the original search engines."  After all, Google did not launch until January 1996.  So, we librarians had to rely on books, magazines, and newspapers to find all that information people were requesting.

So, when you have memorized all of the Dewey Decimal section numbers (500's - Natural Science), physically walk to the correct section (Children's non-fiction, Aisle 8A) and glance through the indexes of a couple of likely-looking books (call # 594.56), you can tell that desperate kid that, weirdly enough, octopuses have 3 hearts and show them other interesting facts they can use in their research paper...due tomorrow.  Its not my fault that people ask me to find the answers to the same kind of questions as Trivial Pursuit. Maybe Trivial Pursuit's questions were created by a bunch of librarians.  However, once I have looked up the answer and told the patron, then it is stuck in my head forever, whether I want it to be or not.  You are going to remember that octopuses have 3 hearts now, aren't you? See...

Yes, there are plenty of times when I wished I had a pensieve like Professor Dumbledore, who could siphon off his excess thoughts to make more room in his brain, but unfortunately, I seem to have an enormous capacity in my noggin for hanging on to useless facts, as do most other librarians.  We thrive on learning new things.  That's the real reason most of us became librarians in the first place. And, on a side note, we are extremely organized, too.  What? Your spice rack isn't in alphabetical order? (It really does make it easier to find the spices quicker if they are.) Thanks, Melville Dewey and Library of Congress. The problem is that now I seem to have so much information in my head, that it is getting a little crowded in there and sometimes there just isn't room to store facts that I really do need, like where I just set my car keys, and whether or not I was supposed to pick up the kids after practice today.  But, I can always recall song lyrics from the 80s and what Alfred Nobel invented (dynamite, ironically), and that the Mariana Trench is 35,994 feet (almost 7 miles) deep, deeper than Mt. Everest at 29,029 feet is tall.

So, no, Trivial Pursuit opponent, I did not guess.  I did not memorize all of the cards.  I did not cheat and have my iPhone on my lap, cued up to Google.  I read it for fun, or researched it, or helped someone with that information.  Remember, we librarians really are the original search engines.  So, come on, play another round with me.  You just might learn something new.