The paradox of living on a river in Florida during the summer: It’s ridiculously hot all the time but you can’t jump in the river because you’d probably land on a hungry alligator and the water is too warm to be refreshing anyway. We haven’t been kayaking all that much since we’ve been here either, because of the heat and all the studying Leslie is doing for her boards.
But she’s in Salt Lake City for training, so for the heck of it I dropped the kayak in the water Saturday morning just to see where the river went. I knew that some distance upstream was a place called Linger Lodge, a riverside restaurant and bar that is about five minutes from our house by car and which has both beer and yummy 'gator dip.
Five minutes by car translates into about an hour and 15 minutes each way by boat and seven and a half miles on the water with no current, but it’s a nice paddle. The gators were eerily absent (have they all been made into dip?) but there were turtles and birds everywhere.
It was a good paddle but I probably should have planned it out a little better. When you paddle to a bar at 10:30 on a Saturday morning, you shouldn’t be surprised if the bar is closed when you get there.
