More Palm Beach

5/30/07

I have been waiting for the paperwork to show up in the mail so I can actually take possession of the boat and get her ready for the trip. I figured that I will have plenty of down time over the summer so I drove to Singer Island to pick up a very cheap guitar that I found on the internet. The guy who sold it to me was a University of Wisconsin alumnus but was a bit strange. I drove down to Fort Lauderdale in the afternoon to buy a used dinghy for pretty cheap. The guy who sold it to me was also very strange. One entire wall of his living room was covered in fish tanks with exotic fish in them. He kept talking about his fish even when I was asking him questions about the dinghy. As I was carrying the boat out to my car, he made sure to follow me out and began a long lecture about the origins of the shrubbery in his yard.

I drove back up to Palm Beach and decided to go for a walk on the beach at sunset. I came back to the parking lot and discovered that it was closed for the night and someone had closed and locked the gate to the parking lot for the night. I began to get worried because it was several miles from my camp site and I had no way of getting the car out the gate. I drove down the entire length of the parking lot and got to the end before the guy could lock the last gate for the night.

I was reading in the camp site in the car because it had a light. All of the sudden I heard a tremendous rustling in the woods right next to my tent. It sounded as if two enormous beasts were having an epic battle. I naturally wanted to see what was going on so I grabbed my flashlight and ran over to where the sounds were coming from. I just saw the brush wiggling for a minute or two until an armadillo popped out. He lazily waddled across the camp site. I decided to get a photograph of him so I ran and grabbed my camera. I turned it on and crouched down and just as I was about to push the button, my phone rang. The armadillo’s leisurely stroll instantly became a frenzied sprint for the cover of the bushes. His sudden movement startled me so I jerked the camera up and to the side and just got a picture of some bushes.