Here are pictures from the weekend!
Hello, all my faithful readers! As mentioned in the last post, we got to meet some mermaids Sunday afternoon! After church that morning, Michael and I met up with Meredith to embark on a wonderful undersea adventure: Weeki Wachee Springs State Park! This is something to get excited about, folks… Mermaids swim here!
Weeki Wachee Springs is a beautiful, clear, freshwater spring where wildlife such as manatees, sea turtles, otters, sea plants and more live and play. Not only that, it’s the deepest freshwater spring in North America, going far down to depths of over 400 feet!
Weeki Wachee Springs has been a roadside attraction since 1947. A man named Newton Perry, who trained Navy SEALS to swim under water in WWII, invented an underwater breathing apparatus there at Weeki Wachee after his run in the Navy. He did a lot of work with people in Hollywood—so anything you see from the 40s and for many decades after that involves water, Newton Perry had a hand in!—but he also wanted to bring people to Weekie Wachee. He began hiring girls to perform underwater shows as mermaids!
Back in the day before Facebook, Twitter and other forms of mass communication, mermaid girls did their own marketing! They would stand on the side of the road in their bathing suits and wave to people so they’d come watch the show. Even if they just had one audience member, the girls would give it their all and perform their very best show! Bear in mind that the water is 74.2 degrees year round. That sounds pretty nice, but that’s more than 20 degrees below body temperature! Too much time there in the water, and you’ll get pretty chilly! The mermaids only do shows for 30 minutes at a time. The three of us saw two shows that afternoon: one about the history of the park and showcase of what all the mermaids can do, and the other was Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid!
In the first show, we saw what the mermaids can do and how they do it. The girls have be able to swim of course, and then they have to go through a year of training and be able to hold their breath for a very long time. The breathing apparatuses are the same design that Newton Perry came up with in the 1940s. The whole show takes place under water, so of course the girls need to be able to breathe sometime within that 30 minutes. They can hold their breath for a while, but certainly not half an hour! Anyway, the things look like microphones, so it’s a pretty clever little device. They’d take a breath, but it looked more like they were singing or speaking into a microphone.
In addition to just being in the water for 30 minutes at minimum, they have to be able to swim down, down, down to at least 117 feet (12 stories) using the breathing tool, and then come up without taking in any air! The girl we saw made it up in around 2 minutes, maybe less, but then she started doing flips and swimming around until she absolutely needed air--2 minutes and 38 seconds later! It was quite impressive!
And then it was time for a break between shows! We wandered around the park for a bit, and we took a little boat tour around the Springs. The tour guide was a HOOT! He had a fabulous Southern accent and just cracked everyone up with his laid-back humor. He pointed out all kinds of wildlife and plants and told us interesting facts about them. They said manatees and larger animals like them make their way into Weeki Wachee from the Gulf of Mexico--several miles away!
After the boat ride, we made sure to hit up all the photo ops, including this one!
And this one!
Yes, we had FAR too much fun! =) But is anyone surprised?
And then came the main event... Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid! The show was such fun. Of course it was only 30 minutes and didn't go along with the version by Disney, but it was even better because, well, there were real mermaids playing the parts!
There's the mermaid princess doing her thing! And yes, those fish swimming around are real! Such fun! The princess went up to the surface to see what it's like, and there was a terrible storm! A handsom prince fell into the water, and the princess, of course, gave him the breath of life so he could swim and breathe underwater as well! He had to go back to his world, however, and the princess was very sad. She heard that the sea witch could help her get legs and go up to the surface to find her prince!
Sure enough, the sea witch did as the princess asked... but she took the princess' beautiful voice in exchange! The princess found her prince, but she also needed to go back to her own world as well. The prince and the sea witch fought because he wanted to be with the princess forever, and the prince won! He and the princess lived happily ever after, with legs, above the water. Hooray!
And that was that! Afterward, we went to a place called Neon Leon's for supper. I got to have gator AND frog's legs for the first time! It was all kinds of delicious. =)
The next morning, Meredith and I went kayaking out on Crystal River to see some more wildlife before I needed to leave for the airport. I'm so thankful for my newfound friend! I didn't have to bother Michael the whole morning, and he didn't have to take off work to take me to the airport! I made it to my flight just in time and jetted back to DC. I had so much fun in Florida! If any of you would like to go for a manatee swim, let me know and we'll go visit my friend Mike!
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