So I’m finally back in Illinois, and I have to be honest, I’m not exactly glad to be here. The first day of being back home was pretty cool, throw the suitcase on the floor, grab some stale chips and relax on the couch. But around the third or fourth stale chip it hit me, there is absolutely nothing to do here in Illinois, unless you enjoy watching corn or grass grow. After traveling through Florida and California, I have realized that living in Carbondale isn’t exactly the hippest place in the country to be living. So in order to pry myself away from the boring mundanity of Midwest life and hopefully offer myself some self-therapy, I will try to relive a little bit of my marathon vacation that I embarked upon.

As many of you know, I left Carbondale a day after my first year review in grad school. After many prayers and sleepless nights before the big day, the actual review wasn’t too bad, and I ended up passing. It was a great relief, and I pulled off the campus of SIU with many other things on my mind, the least of which was returning to my home state for a little fun and sun. I drove down to Pensacola, FL first and met up with two best friends from FSU. One of my friends is leaving the country for 3 years to be a missionary, so we were getting together to spend some time before he had to leave. My buddies parents own a condo in Destin, so we spent 4 days there. It was amazing, we did absolutely nothing and it was incredible. Our day went like this: Get up around 10, head onto the beach for a couple hours, come inside, eat lunch, then head back on the beach. The most stressful part of every day was determining what to eat for dinner. The last night we were there we grilled about 30 dollars worth of New York Strips and chicken. We couldn’t have asked for a better way to say goodbye for 3 years. After Destin, I did some work in Ocala photographing high school graduations with my old company I used to work for. Then I headed down to Tampa to spend some more time with Sean, my other buddy from FSU. We spent the weekend just chillin and hanging with some of his old Tampa friends.

I then headed down to Miami for a week to photograph graduations in South Florida. I had three full days of graduations to photograph, and I was pretty exhausted already. I shot 3 ceremonies a day for 3 days, and got finished on Friday morning. My parents and sister had flown in from Georgia and D.C., and were staying with my uncle who lived in Miami. My uncle and his family have lived in Miami their whole lives, and have always owned a boat as long as I can remember. They recently bought a condo in Bimini and invited our family to go over for the weekend. So, we boarded the boat on Friday and headed out of Biscayne Bay on our way to the Bahamas. This was my third trip to the Bahamas, but my first to Bimini. It was very beautiful, and we spent the weekend fishing, diving, and eating a lot of fresh fish.

I had a pretty scary experience one day while diving about 20 miles north of Bimini. We were diving using a hooker rig, which is basically an air compressor on the boat and a long hose that gives you air on the bottom without having to carry tanks or have dive training. So my uncle and I were diving in about 40 ft. of water on a beautiful reef. He was swimming around spearing fish, and I was just trying to take everything in and not get bitten by a shark. I was minding my own business, watching him spear fish when I felt something brush against my side. I thought it was just the hose line running into me, but I spun around and freaked out as I saw a 6 ft. reef shark swimming away from me. I’m thinking, “ok, that shark just bumped me, and I didn’t even see it…he could have bitten me, and I wouldn’t even have known it.” I stay calm and watch him swim around. He swims down to my uncle who had already speared 2 fish and had the spear resting on the bottom while looking for more fish. The shark starts following my uncle, and he hasn’t even seen the shark yet. I’m still about 10 ft. above him. Finally he sees the shark and grabs his spear to head back to the boat. As we start to head back to the boat, im about 5 ft. above him as we swim towards the surface. I look down between my legs and the shark is attacking the fish on the end of my uncle’s spear. I’m in shock, this shark was just ripping into the thing, blood is going everywhere, and the shark is just thrashing his head all around as he eats the fish. Meanwhile, my uncle is holding onto the spear and fighting the shark for the fish! I couldn’t believe it, I would have been like, “yeh, you can have it buddy, just don’t eat me.” He keeps fighting with the shark and finally jabs his other spear into the side of the shark. This stuns the shark and he swims off bleeding. I get to the surface and jump in the boat. It was pretty incredible to see a shark attacking something right in front of you, especially when you are in the water with him. We had a great time the rest of the trip. I’m gonna end this post now because its already too long. I’ll write about the second half of my vacation soon. Not sure if any of you actually care, but its good for me to be able to get it all out and relive the experiences.