Jessamyn Goes Places

This post is going to be a long one... After competing at the Cheerleading Worlds in Orlando, I wanted to take advantage of being in Florida and see all their National Parks. The Monday after worlds, Felix and I drove down to Miami to visit our first park: Everglades. The park is decently big and has a few distinct sections. Upon our arrival in the afternoon, we visited the northern section of the park, called Shark Valley, though (disappointingly) there are no sharks--it's all grassy wetlands. Shark Valley features a 15-mile-long paved loop path which you can walk, bike, or take a tram tour on--we opted to bike.  The path runs next to a channel that's teaming with wildlife. At first, we thought the bike ride would be pretty boring because the scenery doesn't change much along the path, but we quickly started spotting alligators and that made a fun activity out of it. The first gator we spotted was so exciting and we stopped to take a picture of it. I told myself I'd ke...

 The culmination of my cheerleading season is the Cheerleading Worlds, which is held annually in Disney World in Orlando. I've only been to Disney once before, for high school cheerleading nationals, and I was excited to go back. I also used the trip as an opportunity to see the national parks in Florida. On Thursday morning I boarded an early flight to Orlando with Felix and two of my cheerleading teammates, Elise and Marquet. We weren't competing until Friday so after stopping at the hotel we headed to the parks (minus Elise, who met up with a different friend).  I’m not a huge Star Wars fan but I really wanted to see Disney’s Star Wars themed world so our first outing was to Hollywood studios, which is the park that contains Star Wars land (real name: Galaxy’s edge). As we walked in we saw there was only a 15 minute wait for the Star Tours ride so we immediately got on that. It had a forest of Endor and an AT-AT (Felix informed me of its name). The trees in the forest were ...