I woke up early, no idea why cos 5.30 was totally uncalled for. Unsuccessfully trying to go back to sleep I gave in just after 6 and went out on the balcony to finish off last nights blog. It was sunny with no land in sight, it was wet so at some point we'd had rain. After only half an hour the weather turned a little with the sun giving way to heavy clouds, hopefully not something that's going to settle in for the day. By the time we saw land the skies were cle...

It rained over night and drizzled off and on through the day per the forecast which had also said there would be isolated flash flooding along the pan handle. The news tonight proved that to be correct and much of the road we travelled on is now flooded and impassable. Given we have to head to the airport tomorrow morning for our flight to Puerto Rico we are feeling a little bit lucky :-) We took the scenic, non highway route entailing more long bridges, gorgeou...

Firstly before I go into today I forgot a huge thing from the swamp tour yesterday. All through the swamp there were very healthy looking marajuana plants. It must take a really keen smoker to retrieve the crop from gator infested swamp, presumably under cover of dark to go undetected. Today's plan was to head East & see how far we get, as close as possible to Tampa so we only have a short drive to get there by tomorrow night. We crossed from Louisianna int...

A grey morning gave way to constant rain. We headed into the city & checked out down by the mighty Mississippi or as they call it, with good cause, the big muddy. It really is massive, it's not often you see a river that can take full sized ships. We weren't there long before the rain came down big time so, as would all good reef nuts when faced with a rainy day, we headed for the local aquarium. We tried the same trick we'd pulled a few times, any discount ...

Slept in a little, far too comfy beds at the Ramada lol We went to breakfast & found they had a distinctly southern twist to it. Aside from the usual stuff there was a Cajun sausage (awesome) and biscuits and gravy. So as most will know biscuit translates to plain scone but down south here they have it for breakfast with what they call gravy, thankfully not even vaguely the same as what we think of as gravy, more a thick white sauce with ham or sausage or so...