There are certain things that are synonymous with a particular region or state, Colorado has the rockies, Seattle has rain, Michigan has fat people.  Down here in Florida there are two things that are part of the state’s identity, alligators and manatee, which we had the pleasure of viewing on the first two days of our trip down to Florida.

Our first full day here was Saturday and we decided to take a forty five minute drive to go check out the manatee viewing area.  I wasn’t too terribly excited about going to see bunch of sea cows just float in the water, but having spent the entire winter in Michigan I would have been willing to watch cabbages bounce back and forth in a kiddie pool if the viewing conditions involved sunshine and warm temperatures.  Parking was sparse at the viewing area which kind of took me by surprise, I didn’t realize fat blobs that do basically nothing were that hot of a ticket, they certainly aren’t in Michigan, or we would have a lot more to offer potential tourists.

The first thing I noticed was that I was the only person wearing Crocs, I figured crocs would be almost as prevalent down here as citrus fruit, ugly but practical footwear screams Florida.  Wait a minute, had the generation that wore crocs down here already died? that was somewhat troubling to me.  Apparently it was time to find a different ugly but practical form of foot wear.  Ultimately we made our way to the viewing area to see, wait for it, wait for it, a bunch of blobs floating in the water.  The only interesting thing to see was when a shark jumped out of the water, there was absolutely nothing even remotely interesting about the manatee.

Our second full day in Florida we decided to go to a state park that offered the biggest fan boat in the world for people to ride on.  I was pretty excited to get on one of those fan boats until I found out it went a maximum speed of 3mph and had seats that were even more uncomfortable than church pews.  Regardless of the awesomeness of the boat, we were touring a lake that had nearly 1,000 alligators in it, it was going to be quite an adventure.  The fan boat captain started off telling us about the number of alligators and went into the fact that there were roughly 800 females and 150 males.  I like those odds.

The females actually move around the lake seeking out males to mate with and the males basically stay in the same exact area their entire life.  Sounds like heaven to me.  Can you imagine if that’s how it was in the human world?   Picture a bar or night club, the guys just hang out at one specific location by themselves and the women come over with drinks, presents, and cheesy pick up lines in hopes of bedding one of the seven or eight guys in the place. Exactly, it seems so far fetched I can’t even picture it.

There were many other fun facts we learned about alligators on our one hour tour and that was the focus of the boat tour, alligators.  Had the captain started immediately talking about the Blue Heron Crane I would have probably jumped over the rails and swam back to the dock, and I almost certainly would have done it had I known gators don’t try to feed during the day, they actually don’t do much of anything during the day but lay out in the sun and try to get their core temperature up to 85 degrees.

Their feeding takes place primarily at night.  The harsh reality is that alligators during the day are about as active and exciting as manatee.  For whatever reason, even though they are about as go getting as your typical person on disability or welfare, we still are entirely fascinated by them and will sit on a boat that goes 3mph for an hour to hear about them.  The captain actually fielded questions as we putzed around the lake and they were all about alligators. I actually wanted to ask him if an alligator would eat a manatee but I didn’t have the courage.

Fortunately the tour was only an hour long and we were able to make it back to the dock unharmed.  There was a restaurant and gift shop (of course) near the dock and our kids saw this as an opportunity to beg and plead for ice cream.  The kid scooping the ice cream never would have cut it at any of the high end ice cream parlor’s in Michigan, he averaged about one cone scooped every two minutes, but he was cast perfectly at this Florida state park in the middle of no where.  We ended up deciding to head to a trail that took us to a point where a river flowed into the lake we were on.  At the furthest point from a restroom Tod looked at me and said “I got to go poop dad!”  So, I put him on my shoulders for fear that any type of exertion on his part would lead to him crapping his pants, and we made our way back to the main parking lot.

The men’s restroom  consisted of two stalls and a pair of urinals, a handicap and a regular stall.  Tod took the regular one and began his business.  He was grunting and groaning trying to push the turd(s) out and it was quite comical.  Midway into his poop session the other stall filled and there was actually someone waiting for a stall to open up.  Tod has the habit of flushing after every turd and I thought he was going to break the toilet.  I told him to hurry up and he responded by saying he couldn’t because he had diarrhea, not sure how he went from having to strain with all his might to having the squirts, but the kid is somewhat of an anomaly.  The guy waiting for the stall to open assured me he wasn’t in a hurry so I let Tod finish his business on his own terms.

On the way back from the park I got to thinking, many people know the history of Gatorade, but for those of you who don’t, it was developed in the 70’s by a doctor at the university of Florida, hence the name Gatorade.  He offered to sell it to the university for $1 million dollars and 5 cents of every bottle sold or something like that (you may want to look it up just to get the completely accurate story) but needless to say he was fortunate the university didn’t take him up on the offer due to the fact that he has made hundreds of millions off his invention.  My question as I was thinking was what if instead of calling it Gatorade, they had instead went with Manateeade?  Has a ring to it doesn’t it?