After touring Pensacola's T.T. Wentworth Museum- the most impressive exhibit being a petrified cat- we decide to land at the Big Lagoon State Park for the evening. The woman on duty in the park office had the leathery skin of a die hard sun worshipper. She exclaimed loudly when she read our NY plates. She had moved to Florida some years ago from New York herself. She was ecstatic to find kindred New York spirits staying within her purview. I ask the requisite, "do you mean New York City, or Upstate?" My new friend was formerly of Long Island and seriously homesick for all night diners. As we are talking she plucks a mosquito out of the air, carefully preserving its structure. She explains that she is teaching a nature workshop for local youth and is collecting specimens. Whack. Mean critters she says as she wipes her mosquito oozed hand on her khaki shorts.
We set up a camp surrounded by high weeds and low trees. As my companion and I begin our nightly ritual of gin rummy and backgammon I hear a rustling. I cast a wary gaze behind me and see a very strange sight. I jump on the picnic table as the creature comes towards us, my companion runs for his camera. The armadillo had been lulled into a sense of secure space by our silent concentration on the game at hand. As my companion stalked him with a photographic lens, our new friend became shy. He hustled back into the undergrowth, my companion-literally-on his tail. I stayed on the table.
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