Our pre-Christmas week was spent with my dad’s cousin Elise (from New York), along with her son and his family (from Alaska), in Port St Lucie. They fed us well and took us to the beach where our kids had fun in the sand and in the high waves. The boogie boarding was awesome!
We also took in some wonderful church services, including a concert of Handel’s Messiah and a Christmas Eve communion service.
Before leaving Port St Lucie, we went to the Manatee Observation and Education Center to discover more about this interesting species. These big beasts have a prehensile upper lip which means that they can grab items and wrap around them with their upper lips. They also have solid bones; their ribs were collected as ivory before the manatee was put on the protected list as a threatened species. Although manatees live along the salt-water coasts, they are drawn to areas where they can find fresh water for drinking, like rivers, springs, etc. Manatees are mammals; they breathe air (ie: they can’t breathe under water), they have hair on their bodies, and they produce live-babies who nurse behind their mothers’ front flippers.
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