Fiesta Keys... (continued)

Matt and I bought most of our camping gear at Habitat for Humanity in New Smyrna. Our twenty-four dollar tent, though, we grabbed from K-Mart before we hit the Keys. Been incredibly stormy here at night - rain pounds down so hard, it feels as if we showed up just in time to experience the monsoon season.... Every night, we wake up to rain trying to flatten us to the ground - every night, our tent prevails!

This campground draws the best stories! I long for a tape recorder.... I want nothing more than to ask everyone who they are, what they do, where they hope to go....

Last night, Mike introduced me to this fantastic couple - Jimmie and Laura who spend nine months out of the year traveling around in their sailboat. When they are not sailing - they are at their homestead in Alaska.... this is their site. Other than the fact that they have the most amazing stories about grizzly bears and building cabins in the woods - I just thought it was really incredible that they were part of the 'art team' for Sean Penn's Into the Wild - They were in charge of all the botanical stuff. Jimmie and Laura gathered all the moss for the old bus. They planted flowers and made sure everything was native and Alaska-fied for the set.

Neat fact. If you read the book or watched the movie, you will remember the part where Chris shoots a moose (it is a big dramatic moment in both the novel and the film).... Anyways, I guess they had a trained male-moose for the first scene (obviously, they did not shoot their trained moose). For the second scene, they had this roadkill frozen dead moose flown in which turned out to be a female moose - Being female, she did not have any antlers..... Did you know they have an art team on set to make silly things like fake antlers for dead roadkill?.... They used deadbolts to screw the antlers on female moose's head.... ha.

Donated all our tenting stuff to our neighbor who is running from the police. His wife just dropped him off at the campground until they could come up with some kind of cash to get him out of trouble..... Super nice guy. He has been sleeping on a swimming pool blow-up toy without any blankets for the past few days.... He was SO excited about our blow-up Mattress. Happy we could give it to someone who could use it....

Now Matt and I are in Miami. Staying at a really nice hotel that I found for $25 on priceline. Even has free breakfast in the morning! We have been storing up on breakfast food - mostly bananas and bagels. Still have no money, so .... bagels for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.