I'm Pretty Sure It's Not Poison Ivy (cont'd)
Cabbage Key, Florida - February 2005

They say Jimmy Buffett wrote his song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” at Cabbage Key. There’s a nice photo of him in the bar here. In fact the the bar and the entire main building walls are lines with dollar bills stapled and taped up. There are thousands of them and Mr. Buffet's is framed along with his photo. Today is the day we’re going to go for Cheeseburgers. In fact, that’s the big plan for today, but we’ll see. It is cloudy today, so we don’t expect the parade of boats. At dawn there was a parade of birds at our boatdock however. It might indicate the front they predicted is really going to arrive. Each day I watch the osprey dive for fish at around 4 PM. Today is the first day they’ve been at it this early.

Taking the learning on the road is one of the great things about homeschooing. It can be done rather inexpensively if you choose do it that way, or you can spend a royal fortune; fun, but not really necessary. There isn‘t a tuition paid anywhere that can bring your student what they can learn traveling. We generally travel to a place for a specific reason. In the case of Cabbage Key we wanted to study plants. We took the books: Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification by Thomas J. Elpel, Guide to the Vascular Plants of Florida by Richard P. Wunderlin, Bruce Hansen, Bruce F. Hansen, Florida Wild Flowers and Roadside Plants by Ritchie C. Bell, Bryan J. Taylor and several rolls of film to photograph plant life so we could assemble a presentation of our study and identify the plants later at home. We always come away from a place with more experience and knowledge than we expect. For example, on this trip my student learned how to navigate a small water craft through oyster beds and mangrove keys.

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