April 6-11, 2019: Houston- Van Gogh and the Space Center
	February 26, 2019: A Day at Enchanted Rock
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As we have done for the last couple of years, we are timing our Spring trip down to the condo in Fort Lauderdale to coincide with the Fort Lauderdale St. Patrick's Day Parade, which this year will be held on Saturday, March 16th. We decided to drive down ten days early, leaving on Wednesday, March 6th and arriving on Thursday, March 7th. We will head back on Sunday the 24th.

Getting to Fort Lauderdale

If you've been through more than a year or two of this photo album, you are undoubtedly familiar with our route to Florida. Years ago we used to fly, but that has gotten to be such a hassle (and a good deal more expensive) that now we drive. This allows us to take all kinds of things with us- including, on this trip, our two youngest cats, Bob and Cole (who sometimes helps me drive. Both of them are good travelers, and we thought they should keep each other company.

Bob and Cole are young enough that they are still good travelers. Bob, for example, will come out of his carrier every hour or so and walk around the car and sit up front for a while. But then he goes right back in and curls up. Cole stays out of his own carrier more; he usually curls up behind my seat where I usually make a flat space on top of my computer and duffel for him. I like it when they come up front, and it is especially nice when they will stay in one lap or the other for a while. As the driver, I'm OK with that; I just try to ignore them and concentrate on the road.

The trip is routine; we stop at the same places to eat and to stay- almost without exception. And it's an easy route, too. Getting out of Dallas is easy if a bit congested, sometimes. We usually leave about nine-thirty, and by ten or so are on I-20 heading east towards Shreveport. We usually turn southeast on I-49 about one in the afternoon, reaching Lafayette and I-10 east along about three-thirty. Baton Rouge can be very slow if we don't get through there by four-fifteen or so, and then it is another 90 minutes to get across Louisiana to the Mississippi border.

The Mississippi River Bridge at Baton Rouge is one of the most interesting highway features on the way to Florida. (There are really only three other interesting highway features on the whole trip- the 30-mile bridge across Henderson Swamp and the Atchafalaya Basin, the tunnel under Mobile Bay, and the beautiful bridge that takes I-295 across the St. Johns River west of Jacksonville.) Unfortunately, the design of the approaches and exits from the Baton Rouge bridge tends to cause massive traffic jams. Today we were lucky, and traffic moved relatively smoothly. While I was driving up onto and across the bridge, Fred snapped a couple of pictures:

Approaching the Mississippi River Bridge

The Mississippi River

From Baton Rouge and the Mississippi River, it takes us another hour and a half to get across Louisiana to the Mississippi border. The trips across Mississippi and Alabama are an hour each, so we are heading east from Mobile about six-thirty or seven. This puts us north of Pensacola right about dinnertime about eight. After dinner, we have now developed the habit of staying near Pensacola so we don't have to do a lot of driving at night. We have two hotels here to choose from; this time we've chosen the La Quinta motel about ten miles east of where we have dinner.

We usually get away from the hotel in Pensacola about nine or so for the 350-mile drive to Jacksonville, which we usually reach about one in the afternoon. Then we take I-295 around Jacksonville to the south, going through Orange Park. This 14-mile stretch is kind of neat, mostly because of the long bridge that crosses the St. Johns River as it opens out into a large lake southwest of the city. (It narrows as it approaches and flows around downtown Jacksonville to eventually empty into the Atlantic.)

I-295 connects up with I-95 south of the city and we simply take that south for another kind of boring 300 miles down to Fort Lauderdale. This is another boring part of the drive, but it gets us to the condo around 5PM, depending on traffic in Fort Lauderdale on I-95 (which can be horrendous).

We unloaded everything at the condo, got Bob and Cole situated (and fed) and the laptops all set up, and then retired to the dock for a celebratory frozen drink. Then, as is our custom, we headed down to the Floridian Restaurant for dinner. I wish we had transporter technology, but the drive is not a hard one- although sections of it can be boring.

We have been here to Florida so many times that we have pretty much photographed everything worthwhile anywhere nearby. The pictures we take now are just candid shots around the condo, at the dock or perhaps at an Art Fair or other event that occurs while we are here. So I've begun the practice of just grouping the pictures for these Florida trips by topic.

Boat Traffic on the New River (Installment 46)

Over the many years that I and then Fred and I have been coming down to Fort Lauderdale, the boats that go by the condo on the New River have been a frequent subject of photographs that we have taken. But we have seen so very many of them that by now they cease to be interesting enough to photograph very often. In fact, on this trip, we only photographed one particularly crowded moment on the river and made a movie of one unusual yacht going by.

A Crowded Moment on the River

A Large Yacht Passes Riverview Gardens (Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

Going Up!

I have mentioned on the pages for previous trips that there is a lot of construction going on in downtown Fort Lauderdale, and that includes two big projects.

One of those larger projects is a building known simply as 100 Las Olas (because its address is 100 East Las Olas, which puts it a block east of Andrews Avenue). 100 Las Olas has topped out at 45-stories, and it is a combination luxury hotel and residential high-rise. In addition to the hotel, which I don't know much about, the tower will house 121 condominium units and feature all sorts of high-end amenities that cater to the 1% (with an average cost per square foot of close to $700, you can see that even the smallest unit would be pricey.

Here are a few other pictures of other downtown projects:

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

Around the Riverview Gardens Neighborhood

Of course we are always wandering around the neighborhood- from right at the condo property to walks along the Riverwalk, and we occasionally find something interesting to photograph. This time, there were just a few such pictures.

(Click on Thumbnails to View)

Bob and Cole in Fort Lauderdale

A common subject of our photographs here is/are whichever of our feline friends we have brought along with us, which this time, of course, was Cole and Bob. They are quite photogenic sometimes (although being all black, Cole is a little trickier to photograph clearly).

The St. Patrick's Day Parade

Today, Saturday, the 16th, Fort Lauderdale held its annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. This will be our sixth time at this particular event; more often than not it corresponds with our March trip down here, and we attended it the last five years straight. The first couple of years, we both took a great many pictures, and you can see them particular on the pages for our spring trips down here in 2015 and 2016. In the last few years, we've tired of taking so many pictures, and now just take some candid shots of whatever seems particular interesting.

The staging area for the parade begins about at the Cheesecake Factory. There is not nearly enough room for all the units right there on Las Olas (unless they closed the street most of the way to the beach). So what they do is use the side streets near the Kinney Tunnel, which runs under Las Olas at this point, and funnel the units into the main parade route as they are ready. Below is an aerial view of downtown showing you how the parade is staged and what its route was (the red lines):

The parade actually begins at the yellow star, so there and to the west is where the crowds line up, three and four deep, to watch the various units go by. Intersections are widened so that units like motorcycle police, bands, and other units can pause and "perform". As you may already know, the condo is situated just a block off Las Olas and two blocks from the Cheesecake Factory, so getting to the staging area for the parade involves walking north one block and then turning west (along a route marked by the yellow line). As soon as we turned west to walk along the south side of Las Olas, we could see many of the parade entries getting ready.

As we had done last year, we will be meeting Ron Drew and Jay Silbert on the corner by Broward County Community College so we could watch the parade together. Once we passed the first units, we just had to make our way through the crowds that were already three- and four-people deep behind the barriers. We did get down to the community college building, waited a few minutes, and then connected with the guys who had driven down and parked over at his office a couple of blocks away. From there, we watched most of the parade.

At left and right are two pictures that bookended the parade- a couple dressed in their Irish finery before the parade, and a mounted policewoman after the parade (Didn't anyone tell her that texting while riding is a bad idea?) As for the other pictures, they are in the slideshow below, in no particular order. Use the little arrows in the lower corners of each picture to move from one to the next, and track your progress by referring to the index numbers in the upper right. Enjoy the parade! 1/23 2/23 3/23 4/23 5/23 6/23 7/23 8/23 9/23 10/23 11/23 12/23 13/23 14/23 15/23 16/23 17/23 18/23 19/23 20/23 21/23 22/23 23/23 < >

Well, that was this year's parade. After the parade, there is an Irish Festival that goes on in Bubier Park at Andrews and Las Olas. It would be smaller this year, as some of the park had been taken over by vehicles and equipment being used for the new 100 Las Olas building, and so we decided that since we'd been to it numerous times before, that we would skip it this time and just return to the condo.

Some Miscellaneous Pictures

On the Friday before the St. Patrick's Day Parade, we finally got a chance to take Jay out for a belated Birthday dinner, which we did at the Cheesecake Factory right near the condo, and of course I had to record the occasion. Also, the day after the Parade we happened to be walking along the Riverwalk, and we returned along Las Olas by the Art Museum. The had some huge posters down the front side of the building, and Fred thought he would photograph a couple of portions of them:

The Trip Home

The drive home was very, very routine. We left about 9AM from Fort Lauderdale, and the sun set on us about seventy miles east of Mobile, Alabama. It was getting dark as we approached the tunnel under Mobile Bay, but Fred got a good movie anyway.

Sunset in the Florida Panhandle

Going Through the Mobile Bay Tunnel (Mouseover Image Above for Video Controls)

We had dinner in Gulfport, Mississippi, and by about eleven-thirty we were arriving in Lafayette, Louisiana, and our hotel for the night. We were arriving back in Dallas at three the next afternoon, and Fred, as he sometimes does, got a couple of pictures of the Dallas skyline as we came around the east side of downtown.

That brought yet another of our many, many trips to Fort Lauderdale to a close. Back to reality.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	April 6-11, 2019: Houston- Van Gogh and the Space Center
	February 26, 2019: A Day at Enchanted Rock
	Return to the Index for 2019