TRAVEL TALES: Florida

As i sit at my computer on Feb. 13th, if I close my eyes, I can imagine being in sunny Florida earlier this month, first in Miami and then on a short cruise.

Our motel the first 4 days was an interesting experience, because the restaurant next to the motel, Shucker’s, had a major accident last summer. (You can go to the Internet and still find the articles online with photos. Here’s one link: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/13/3450248/breaking-deck-collapses-at-shuckers.html).

Their deck that sat over the bay collapsed, injuring many people. The days we were at the motel, we watched a huge barge with an enormous crane dredging up the reinforced concrete deck with men in wet suits using underwater jack hammers and other equipment from a company called Underground Engineering Systems, Incorporated. (UESI) We were fascinated by what they were doing and did not even change our room to avoid some of then noise because we did not want to miss what they were doing. Here are a few of the photos we took:

Pix of the barge & crane & workers.

Pix of the crane dropping a long piece of concrete onto barge.

Photo  of  one of the workers making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The work they were doing was physically difficult and this is the only time I saw anyone eating.

This is a photo of one of the larger pieces of concrete that the worker in the wet suit drilled underwater in order for a cable to be threaded through the hole so the crane could life it out of the water.

The day we left, the barge was still parked below our 3rd floor room. The pieces they retrieved were then removed to the parking lot of the restaurant where I believe experts on this kind of accident tried to piece together the broken concrete to see what caused the accident.  This would have been a great opportunity for a follow up article for the Miami Herald. I sent them a note about the photos,but heard nothing back.

Here are some photos of our cruise time, including a set of photos my husband took of the sunset on the balmy water on the way to the Bahamas:

We were taken to an island that we think was man-made by the cruise ship companies as a private island experience. It was crowded with several ships coming and going with their vacationers. This person found a spot on a rise that seemed perfect!

Here I am leaving the island with the tenders in the background to take us back to the “Mother Ship.”  Their was a small shopping bazaar nearby where people could buy clothes, straw bags, souvenirs and whatever else their budget would allow.

This is a photo of a small lighthouse taken from our cabin patio as we departed from the Bahamas.
The Atlantis Hotel is in the background.

Here are three of the several sunset pictures that Alan took of the sun’s descent into the ocean.

This last photo was of the afternoon sky on the last full day that reminded me of artist/illustrator Maxfield Parrish.+