Man vs. Wild

This past weekend I went to a conference in Florida. I have been serving as the National Vice Chair for the Student Osteopathic Surgical Association. We have 2 conferences annually. This was our spring conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. The conference was hosted by Nova Southwestern University. The conferences are more geared towards 2nd and 3rd year students, so I was not as interested in the content this year as I have been in the past. On Friday before the conference and our main conference day (Sat), I spent most of my free time at the beach. I had a nice long run along the coast both days.

The conference was nice, but the thing that I was most excited about was that a couple of friends and I added a couple of extra days to our trip and spent some time camping in the southern state.

On Sunday, we drove to Everglades National Park. We canoed about 4 miles out to our campsite and spent the night on an empty beach. The weather did not cooperate though, and we had a very significant thunderstorm that lasted all night.



The next morning we canoed back to the ranger station to return our canoes. On the way, we saw


a 4 foot shark that swam to about 10 feet from our canoe (That is his dorsal fin poking out of the water),


an 8 foot croc sunbathing,

and a bunch of less dangerous flamingos, pellicans, a bald eagle, ospreys, and other wildlife. It was a very neat experience.

Then we then drove down the Florida keys to Key West.


This was our view as we drove.

We stayed in a KOA campsite about 20 minutes from Key West. The campsite was adequate, but seemed to be full of ants. We had to try 3 different campsites before finding one that was not overrun with the little biters!

Back in Key West, we ate and walked around. We saw some street performer shows on the pier and went to the Southernmost Point of the US (that is not a military base with restricted access).



The remainder of the evening was spent at a sports bar watching the NCAA final. Don't worry, I had Diet Coke.

I got home Tuesday eveening after a 15 hour travel day. It felt GREAT to be back in my own bed after sleeping in a hotel and then on the ground for the past 5 nights.

To top it all off, we got another offer on our house last Thursday morning as I was packing to leave for my trip. It was pretty good, but we countered nonetheless. I got a call after I touched down in Ft. Lauderdale that they had accepted our counter offer. We are officially in escrow. We close on 5/6/08. While on my trip, I was faxing back and forth documents and other necessary things to my realtor. It has been a crazy process (securing a spot and moving for residency), but it looks like things are falling into place.