Swamp fever

We are at Disney World this week, spending money and pissing away our retirement. I mean, pissing away our early retirement. Because these kids aren’t going to be young forever! I mean, neither are we. So anyway, we are busting the budget.

At any rate, we planned for one non-park day, to enjoy the resorts and not feel so stressed out. When I was telling the school I was taking my kids for a week, I wanted it to appear as though we were educating them somehow with this trip, like we weren’t just running away to an amusement park, so they wouldn’t be mad at me. That’s when the idea popped into my head to do a boat tour of some sort. Well, the first idea was to swim with dolphins but that idea clamped itself right down when I saw how expensive it was.

Boat rides seemed more reasonable. I got very excited about a glass-bottomed boat ride for $11 a person, but it turned out to be 90 miles away. Who knew Florida was so big?

The swamp rides looking for alligators was my next choice. It was going to be about $40 per person (could do cheaper for half an hour. But not half price, and what if we went for 30 minutes and didn’t see any alligators?) I worried about it all night on Monday night, finally begrudgingly deciding that it would be educational and memories are more important than money.

I warned the girls we might not see any alligators – you never know. I geared up for supreme, expensive disappointment.

It. Was. The. Best. Part. Of. The. Trip. My screen-hungry kids were hanging off the side of the boat, immersing themselves in the visual environment, trying to spot the next gator. We saw a bald eagle! We saw a huge turtle! We saw cows standing in the middle of what seemed to our uninitiated eyes to be a LAKE.

We saw THIRTEEN alligators.

We totally, completely blew out the budget on this trip. We are totally, completely exhausted, and we aren’t even done. We spent an hour skimming a swamp looking for alligators, and I’m not even sorry.