Chucky the Alligator is our neighbor...

We made it Florida on Friday. It's hot. We left Maryland on Thursday and began our 2 day excursion. I've spent more time in that van than i ever want to...and it's only the second round. We spent a night in S.Carolina in the middle of nowhere only to show up to our new housing..which just so happens to be...in the middle of nowhere. For our directors brief(part of pre-round prep) we showed a really nice picture of what was THOUGHT to be our house...come to find out its the offices of the Nature Conservancy. Silly us...for the next 6weeks we will living in a double wide...which is actually bigger than our last house. Hearing the reaction of the team when we drove up was priceless though. We met Dan..who works for the Nature Conservancy (who we now work for) and he showed us around and let us know that the only things we needed to watch out for were...ahem..: every single type of poisonous snake in the USofA, poisonous spiders, bobcats, ticks, scorpions, the two gators that live in lake in our front yard (Chucky and Chica...they are only 10ft & 12ft - no biggie), ferrel hogs (there is a hog catcher living in a FEMA trailer)...and well i'm pretty sure the list went on but i my attention span is pretty minimal these days. I don't know what i feel more comfortable with, that speech or the "if you hear gun shots..hit the deck" speech by our last sponsor. Oh AmeriCorps. 

We live and will be working on the Nature Conservancy's Disney Wilderness Preserve. No, we aren't working for Disney... The preserve was established in 1992 as an offsite mitigation project to basically make up for all of the damage that occurred to the wetlands when the Walt Disney Resorts and various other sites were developed. There is a law in florida that when someone wants to develop over wetlands they either have to find another location to move the wetlands or find and preserve existing wetlands. Our orientation is on Monday but when talking with the sponsor during transition we found out that we will be doing a lot of herbicide treatment to invasive species, different species removal and relocation (in terms of plants such as maidencane, saltbush, cordgrass...yea i don't know what those are yet) and trail widening/restoring. No one on the team has really done this type of environmental work before so it should be a pretty educational experience for all of us. One of the coolest things about this round is that we only work four days a week...3day weekends will be glorious (Cocoa Beach is only an hour) 

We have only been here for a couple of days and have already come to realize that our entertainment is minimal....Yesterday we took a walk to the office which only took us two hours (from our house)..but we saw a turtle and some wild turkeys!  The walk also allowed us to refill our water bottles because well..drinking sulfur water isn't very legit..which is what is spit out to us from the showers and the faucets. We have a volleyball net. And a frisbee. And while we thought there was wireless in the office...it proved to not work yesterday so i am sitting at a Panera about 20 minutes away from home typing this. This round will definitely be interesting. We have a chance to actually spend some time with each other since we had a difficult time doing that in New Orleans. SPF70 will most likely become my new best friend since i already got fried. I am definitely excited to get started and am hoping to really make the most of my experience here and am looking forward to maintaining a positive attitude. constantly. hah. PEACE&LOVE!