Dallas to The Florida Keys

I was born in Dallas, though normally do not admit it as it is way cooler to say you are from The Florida Keys.  I also was simply born there, no ties and my parents moved while I was still a baby.  A year later my brother was born somewhere in Oklahoma.  Dallas is way cooler.  We then moved to Colorado Springs.  Great memories.  I loved camping in the mountains, fishing for trout, sledding and watching the dog play with porcupines.  We lived in a barn that was converted into a house.  We had chickens and ducks.  The mean old lady (she hated kids) that owned the property lived in a mansion which she allowed to be over run by raccoons.  She actually had a room in the house dedicated to them called the Raccoon Room.  There was a pasture with a not so nice horse named Abe and a nice mule named Molly.  Why this is important I do not know.  Abe did break my arm.  I was trying to catch a rabbit.  I was running after it in the pasture when I heard Abe's hooves.  I kept thinking, "Don't fall."  I fell.  The farm also had goats, more chickens and ducks, geese and a blind bassett hound.  My mom used to try and get us to drink goats milk.  I think because we were poor?  Goat's milk is gross.  My parents used to have this little machine they would put duck eggs in.  For some reason I thought they were trying to make yogurt, apparently it was an incubator.  There was tippee on the property my brother and I used to play in and an apple tree in the back yard.  Sometimes Abe would get out of the pasture to come eat apples and scare the jeepers out of us.  We learned when going through the pasture to run as fast as we could to the fallen tree in the middle of it.  Abe would run after us and sniff around the fallen tree trying to eat us.  He'd get tired, leave and we would run the rest of the way.  There was a horse skeleton off one of the paths, that gave me nightmares.  I still remember my dream of the pasture full of enormous buttermilk pancakes with pools of strawberry syrup.  I was in heaven.  The horse skeleton came alive and it and the mean old lady (who hated kids) chased us.  I think that was my first nightmare.  There was an old hayloft in the pasture we used to play in.  I remember us jumping off the top and finding a Victory Dime from the 1800's in the dirt.  That started my obsession with collecting coins which was later stolen including my precious dime, but that is a later story.  Asparagus grew wild where we lived so of course my parents fed us that as well.  My dad used to catch garden snakes and put them in the aquarium.  Thus I think my fascination with reptiles.  He also at one point had a black widow in a jar, which I think the cat knocked over and killed.  Then, one day, my dad had a dream to buy a sailboat and travel around the world.  We packed everything into a rental truck including my dad's old convertible Jaguar.  I'm not sure if my parents had any idea where we were going.