Bezabor: Florida Trail Association meeting, St Petersburg visit (posted from Mark and Sue’s home in St. Petesburg, FL)

Tuesday, March 21-
Today we had the same wonderful weather. Labashi and I went to the Dali Museum in the morning (GREAT museum!) then in the afternoon we had lunch at Mazzaro’s Italian Market before touring the St Petersburg Pottery Guild and then Sunken Gardens. Mark had to work for a few hours in the evening so Labashi, Sue, and I called for a pizza and Labashi and Sue played a hot game of Scrabble while I did some web stuff.


Monday, March 20-
Well, Happy Spring, everyone! It was 75 degrees when I got up this morning and checked the weather to see that the high today back home is just above freezing and Washington DC is expected to get an inch of snow today. Mark and Sue took off at lunchtime from their jobs and we went to Fort DeSoto, Pass-a-Grille, more St Petersburg (lunch at Woodies Beach House), Sawgrass Park, and then had supper at the fantastic Habana Café. The high today was 84 which is a little hotter than normal but the 20-25 knot winds keep it very comfortable.

Sunday, March 19-
We packed up and left the FTA meeting today and headed for St. Petersburg to visit long-time friends Mark and Sue. Mark had worked with me years ago and we had similar interests, including some sailing on the Chesapeake with them. In 1995, Mark decided he wanted to move on to greener pastures and moved to the Annapolis, Maryland area where he, Sue, and their two kids lived on a 37-foot sailboat while looking for a bigger vessel and preparing to take off on a cruising tour. But after awhile Mark was offered a job in Tampa/St Petersburg which allowed him and his family to enjoy a life close to the water while still working a job he liked. Labashi and I had not seen Mark and Sue since 1998 (though I had an evening with them while on business travel in 2002) so it was great to get together and renew our friendship and catch up. We took a driving tour of St Petersburg and had supper at the Fourth Street Shrimp Store.

Saturday, March 18-
The FTA meeting continues today. We first attended a seminar on Human-Bear Interactions which at first disappointed us. The presentation seemed more suitable to a local garden club or Rotary Club in that it really was designed to tell you how to not attract bears to your home, i.e., lock up your garbage, don’t leave pet food out, etc. Labashi wanted to ask some questions but it didn’t seem to be an appropriate time. Later on, however, we hit a gold mine. Actually it might more appropriately be called a scat-mine… but more on that later.
After the bear interactions presentation we saw a good presentation on non-native plants and their impact on Florida. We learned about the ‘rule of tens’. About ten percent of non-native plants will survive and about ten percent of those survivors will become invasive. That doesn’t sound like a lot until you consider that Florida has some 1200 surviving non-native plants and therefore approximately 120 invasive plant species. The presenter had good slides of the plants as well as samples of the leaves and seeds to pass around.
The last seminar of the morning was “Hiker Security” and was presented by Bob Gray, chief ranger of the Appalachian Trail. The Florida Trail Association is considering how to improve hiker security and invited Bob to speak about the AT’s efforts in this area. Bob reviewed the circumstances of the nine homicides that have happened on or close to the AT in its history and discussed how the perpetrators were caught. In general, other hikers assisted law enforcement by identifying hikers who didn’t look like hikers or acted oddly in some manner. The AT has established a 24-hour 800 number for hikers as well as other law enforcement agencies to call. Hikers would be reporting an incident while other law enforcement agencies may need assistance in locating shortcuts to specific areas of the trail or in making contact with people with key information or skills. However, it also became clear that the first-response responsibility still lies with the local law enforcement agency and local trail clubs are advised to make contact with the local 911 agency and work with them to improve their ability to respond. I have to say I was kind of underwhelmed by the AT’s program. There’s still WAY too much left to chance should an emergency arise and too much left to the local maintenance clubs to figure out and then pass on to local 911 dispatchers. My guess is the Florida Trail folks will out-do the Appalachian Trail Conference (now Conservancy) folks by coming up with a better, more comprehensive hiker security program in fairly short order.
As we broke for lunch we decided to stop by the black-bear display being manned by the same naturalist who had made the morning’s presentation. It wasn’t long until Labashi blurted out that we wanted to know everything we could about bear scat. And, as I said, we hit the jackpot. The naturalist has a collection of bear scat samples in her supplies trailer. Fantastic! So we spent the next hour poring through the samples. First was one typical of what we had seen in Maine— a berry-filled, flattened dome, purple in color, typical of berry season. Another was human-like, greenish and filled with left-over corn kernals. Another was very fibrous, filled with palmetto fibers. Another was exceptionally smelly, apparently because the bear had been eating meet (probably carrion). Now we have a lot more confidence in properly identifying bear scat in the woods.
In the afternoon we attended an End-to-Enders Reunion wherein six thru-hikers who have completed the Florida Trail spoke about their hikes. This was one of the key reasons we came and it was worthwhile, though way too short. Perhaps the key factor we learned is that a Florida Trail hike is very much unlike an AT hike. The AT hike is now pretty highly social… there’s a fairly large group of people moving up (or down) the AT and you are seldom alone in camp. On the FT, however, you have more of a wilderness experience and will probably only see a handful of other hikers the entire 1400 miles of trail.
Later we attended an awards ceremony followed by a (boring) keynote speech by the president of the American Hiking Society and then reminiscences of the first trail work session in 1966 by three of the participants. We were a little bored by the awards but we did learn how important it is for a volunteer organization like the FTA to give out many awards and we were amazed at the amount of work volunteers have done in the name of the FTA. We attended the fortieth-year celebration that evening but cut out a little early—it had been a long day.

Friday, March 17-
Today we left the national forest for one of our major trip goals— attending the Florida Trail Association conference near Umatilla. We had attended an Appalachian Trail ‘Ruck’ or meeting back in January and had enjoyed that. When we saw the FTA conference was to be held fairly close to Daytona, we signed up.
Registration wasn’t supposed to start until 1400 so we drove a few extra miles to Eustis to find a car wash to clean off the thick layer of dust on Mocha Joe—and that turned out to be a good idea. The facility where the event was being held was the Florida Elks Youth Camp. We had expected a rustic facility, something like the girl-scout camps we are familiar with back home, but this camp has a long, winding, tree-lined driveway, two beautiful lakes, large modern buildings, several ballfields, a putt-putt course, an adventure course, and a very large camping area under sky-scraping pines—very, very nice. And with the sunny skies and temperatures in the low eighties with a nice breeze, we had it made.
That afternoon we attended three seminars. The first was ‘Archeology and Heritage Resource Management of the Ocala National Forest’. This was done by the chief archeologist of the OCN, who had a table-full of artifacts which he used to illustrate human uses of the Ocala. Then we had an intriguing presentation about how to become a Florida Master Naturalist. Now that’s an interesting one. Florida has a developed a public-involvement program where anyone can earn a ‘Master Naturalist’ certificate by completing three 40-hour courses (costing $200 each) and making an original presentation. The courses cover the three major ecology types of Florida and has quite a lot of interesting information and has received very good feedback from attendees. We want to check whether Pennsylvania has something like that but it also occurs to me that this would be a GREAT excuse to come back to Florida for the next three winters to complete.
The third seminar of the afternoon was “A Good Dog is Worth Three Men: Home on the Swamp with the Florida Cracker Cow Dog”. This presentation was done by a folklorist who had researched the dogs used for herding cows in Florida’s beef-calf industry. We learned that Florida is second only to Texas in the beef-cattle industry. Horses are still used for herding the cattle and the bred-to-the-task dogs assist in this by going into the scrub to chase out the strays and by keeping the cattle grouped together. The cow-dog’s career is often a short one and is indeed a rough one, lasting only three or four years on average.
After supper we attended the ‘past presidents forum’ where we learned about the history of the Florida Trail organization. Interestingly, the original founder of the trail was there. He was Jim Kern, who had had the original vision of a long-distance trail across the state of Florida in 1964. Jim organized the first work party to build trail in 1966 and three of the five original trail workers were in attendance. With this forum and the rest of the weekend we learned that the Florida Trail Association is indeed a first-class organization. They have done a marvelous job with the trail and have built a 5000-member organization which has both political clout and quite a lot of common sense. The Florida Trail currently has 1400 miles of end-to-end blazed trail but there are still significant portions on roads. The Florida Trail has been certified as and is also known as, the Florida National Scenic Trail, one of only eight such trails in the country to have this status. The Florida Trail is also the southern-most section of what is now to be called the Eastern Continental Trail, a continuously-blazed foottrail-of-foottrails running from Key West to the tip of Cape Gaspe, Quebec.

Thursday, March 16-
We drove to Ocala today to visit the Appleton Museum of Art. It turned out to be a gem, surprising us with its very nice collection of 19th Century European paintings. We were also very happy to find a Jean-Leon Gerome painting. Gerome was a mentor and strong influence on Thomas Eakins, whose work we’ve long admired. The Appleton also had outstanding Pre-Columbian art, particularly Mayan work. It was difficult to believe that we were looking at pieces which had been created in the 1300’s and 1400’s. And it only took a brief look at the intricate gold adornments to understand how the search for gold fueled the European voyages of exploration and exploitation. It was a little odd for us to come out of our primitive National Forest dirt roads and drive only a half-hour or so to this beautiful, modern and comprehensive museum. On the other hand, if we had come from the Ocala side, we would only have been a few miles from Interstate 75 and the very nice city of Ocala.
After our visit to the Appleton, we had lunch at the local Panera so we could connect to the internet and take care of our email and blog. Then Labashi spent an hour or so googling for info on the pressing questions of the last few days while I read the Ocala newspaper. The ‘pressing questions’ are questions or topics that Labashi writes down in her notebook as we learn new things in talking with people or visiting new sites. After talking with the hunter who we saw tracking his dogs with a large hand-held antenna, she learned that the radio collars are expensive-- around $450 each. So the hunter we talked to on the forest road (who had five or six dogs in his box and was looking for another nine dogs) had quite an investment out there running the woods.
After our afternoon in the ‘burbs, we headed back to Farle’s Lake campground and that evening were again entertained by the very excellent Murph-the-60s-folk-singer. Murph’s guitar seems to have taken on a life of its own now. Murph had some trouble keeping it in tune the first night but tonight it was right on. We also learned that Murph has spent the intervening years in casinos as a dealer and, at times, a gambler. He noted that he likes being able to go anywhere there’s a casino and easily pick up work. We suspect some life crisis generated his current desire to get away to the woods and just hang out and sing some songs.