the beanie boat

When we were kids we went on a lot of vacations. Anytime we were in Florida we had a friend with a place in Kissimmee which is near Disney World. The trailer was on a canal near a lake and one day while we were out playing we discovered the "beanie boat".

The beanie boat was little more than a raft. It was in the canal a short way from our house and me and Billy and Rhonda spent endless hours on that boat. (no, I don't have any idea who owned it and from the state it was in I would say it was abandoned. We were lucky that it even would float!) Nevertheless we floated up and down that canal like we were Tom Sawyer or somebody.

Our fun on the beanie boat came to an abrupt halt one day when Rhonda (she is the youngest by the way) was giving us a push into the canal because we were stuck in some reeds. She went from being knee deep in the water to straining to hold her head above water in one step! It was everything me and Billy could do to drag her onto the boat. Thank God she didn't let loose of the boat before we grabbed her. We would have NEVER found her in that brackish water and as stupid as we were we would have probably been diving in to find her and drowned ourselves. Our many hours of fun ended in one quick second and once we paddled to shore we never got on the beanie boat again!

After having lived in Florida for a few years I know now that we were lucky not to have been eaten by alligators too! Thankfully we always looked out for each other (when we weren't trying to kill each other in a brotherly and sisterly fashion! hehe).

This is just one of the many things which we did that I look back on and wonder why we weren't killed when we were kids.

note: I am wrong about alligators killing us back then. Even though they are plentiful now, back in the 70's they were on the endangered species list. Happily they have made a tremendous comeback.