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[|Our air boat tour] During our vacation, we went on an airboat tour of the everglades. On the tour, we saw alligators, birds, and other cool animals and plants. We learned the difference between an alligator and a crocodile, which is that alligators have top jaws that are wider than their bottom jaws, while crocodiles have jaws that are the same width. They are both around the same size. We rode in an airboat, which is a boat with a huge fan on the back that blows it through the water. During the tour, we saw tons of alligators! Our tour guide told us that there was a drought in the Everglades, so the area where we took the tour was one of the only places that had water, which meant that all the animals that needed water were near there. This meant that we saw alligators, turtles, and birds everywhere we looked! It was really cool and we took tons of pictures. The alligators were a little scary at first, but after a while they didn't seem so bad. Our tour guide told us that an alligators gender is determined by the temperature when they hatch. If the temperature is 92 degrees or above, the alligator will be male, and if the temperature is 91 degrees or below, the alligator will be female. We also learned that the Everglades is a huge river, which moves only about one mile per day! It used to stretch all the way to Miami, but humans have built over it and filled it in. We also saw lots of birds, including a baby Anhinga, which is a bird with a really long neck. They dive and swim for their food, and they often swim with just their heads and necks out of the water like a snake, so they are sometimes called snake birds.

On one day of our trip, we went to the beach. We were all having a good time until my mom got stung by a portugese man-o-war, which we saw a minute or so later on the sand. A few minutes after that, we had to leave the beach because our mom's foot, which was where she got stung, was hurting so much. We did some quick research on our mom's ipad, and found that you are supposed to put sunburn medicine on a jellyfish sting, so we went to a Wallgreens and got antibiotics.The sunburn medicine actually made the sting hurt worse. We went online again after we figured out that our mom probably got stung by the man-o-war we saw. We searched man-o-wars, and found that they are not actually jellyfish, and that putting any chemical (like the sunburn spray) makes the sting worse.

While we were in Florida we saw the Intracoastal Waterway.It is 3,000 miles long and runs along the atlantic gulf coast of the U.S., all the way from New Jersey, all along Florida, and into Texas. It is used for commercial shipping and recreational boating. Once when we were walking across a drawbridge that spanned the waterway a buzzer sounded to tell everyone to get off the bridge. The drawbridge raised so that a giant yacht could go through. = =