a girl, a house on the beach, and a one-way ticket...day eight (nine?)

Against all odds--cottonmouth snakes, crocodiles, alligators, panthers, black bears, thunderstorms, mosquitoes, menacing dragonflies, yellow-bellied turtles, bogs, swamps, slightly off kilter pontoon operators, poisonous coffee beans*, and daunting ferns, I made it to, through, and back from the Everglades.**

Oh, yeah, and I did it in heels.

So take that, Carrie Bradshaw. It is one thing to trek in heels from Bergdorf's to Scoop in NYC without tripping*** on one of those ill-conceived (obviously by a man) sidewalk grids; it is quite another to trek from salt marsh to salt marsh through a black water terrain that is an eerie, oxymoronic brew reminiscent of scary junior high sleepover movies, such as Jurassic Park (post security meltdown) and Predator.

Now since I am writing this, it is apparent that I was in fact not swallowed by a crocodile (see, dad, I told you). The crocs, it turns out, are rather shy. The snakes, on the other hand, are rather not.

Regardless of my disappointment in not seeing nary an alligator, I was rewarded with the peculiar beauty of the cypress trees and the water orchids, as well as all sorts of other unidentifiable botanical curiosities. And, I learned that a mangrove is not at all what it sounds like--that is, it is neither a man nor a grove nor a grove full of men.

*a sick joke, isn't it?

**If you possess the same etymological curiosity as I, you are probably already wondering from where exactly the word "everglade" came. Its definition is agreed upon--a large, subtropical, marshy swamp south of Lake Okeechobee in southwestern Florida--but as far as the origin of the word is concerned, no one freaking seems to know--not even Dr. E. Wallace McMullen from Hartley, Iowa whose 1953 PhD dissertation on the matter I read almost in its oh-no-this-isn't-a-waste-of-a-perfectly-good day entirety in search of the answer.

***tripping on one of these things is the best case scenario. Legend has it that more than one well-heeled woman on her way to dinner has unknowingly lalalallala laaaaaaaaaaaa fallen through a sidewalk grid to the subway tracks below-- much to the consternation of her blind date, who, several months later, is still bitter about being stood up.