My partner and I had a recent vacation in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The weather was beautiful (high 80's although that's unusually warm for late February) and we had a great time.

The climate is apparently conducive to growing truly tropical palms, and coconut palms are planted everywhere. Here are some photos I took on a boat tour of the Intracoastal Waterway--many of the houses along the waterway are fabulously expensive so most of us will never see them any other way! What really impressed me was how dominantly palms of all kinds are used in landscaping there. Click on the link below for a slide show; to see a photo full size, click on the photo to get to the album, then on "full size". Or you can go directly to the album at:

http://s18.photobucket.com/albums/b149/dctropics/Feb%202008/?start=all

Sorry about the funny angles, but it's surprisingly difficult to take photos from a moving boat! My apologies if anybody gets seasick...

(BTW the last two photos in the slideshow are not from Ft. Lauderdale, they are from Goodland, a tiny town on Marco Island on the Gulf coast of Florida a few miles south of Naples.)

Here is a link that might be useful: Intracoastal waterway slide show