St. Petersburg, Lake Wales Ridge State Forest, Bok Sanctuary, Lake Kissimmee State Park, Withlacoochee State Forest (Hog Island)

(posted from the East Hernando Library at Brooksville, FL)

(this post covers 16-22 March, 2007)

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Thursday, 22 March –

After a quiet night at Lake Kissimmee we departed to the northwest to go see the Withlacoochee State Forest. We followed FL60 west and then 39 North through Plant City and Dade City to Brooksville. There we stopped at the Forest office for a basic orientation. We then drove to Hog Island campground in the Croom tract, largely because it sits astride the Florida Trail. We picked a campsite ($12) and parked the van for the day at about 1500. Labashi took a break but I wanted a bit of a walk so I strolled the Hog Island Nature Trail. It’s interesting to see the difference in the woods here. Now we have no palms and only a palmetto or two under a high canopy of live oaks for the most part. After supper Labashi and I hiked four miles on the Florida Trail, heading south from the FT trailhead near our campsite toward River Junction. This section had a nice, wide trail of sand covered by innumerable brown live-oak leaves. It changed from an open large-tree woods to a scrub woods to a palmetto-scrub mix and then back again several times in our walk but alas, no wildlife. We returned to the van just before dark and had a Bailey’s to celebrate our walk then blogged and read the evening away. I can read my digital watch face clearly until 2000 but by 2005 it’s impossible. But what a wonderful thing Daylight Savings Time is--- it’s so great to have these longer evenings.

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Wednesday, 21 March –

After heading north up FL17 from our campsite in the State Forest, we spent the main part of the day at the Bok Sanctuary, the grand estate and summer home of Edward Bok, former editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The estate sits on the highest point in peninsular Florida, the Lake Wales Ridge, and has a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. Orange groves fill the county and we had the heady perfume of orange blossoms to accompany us all day. The chief tourist attraction at the Bok is the bell-tower—a carillion—but the highlight for us was the surrounding garden. These gardens are understated; less showy than many but very relaxing. Our favorite flower here was the Nun’s Orchid.
After Bok we drove northeasterly to Lake Kissimmee State Park and parked the van in a campsite ($20). We set up the bikes and pedaled to the marina to see the boat launch and then to the Observation Tower to see Lake Kissimmee off in the distance. We also saw ten wild turkeys in the middle distance displaying the most amazing colors as the light changed. We biked back to Mocha Joe for supper but wanted more so we biked to the Cow Camp. The park has a weekend ‘Cow Camp’ where a re-enactor plays the part of an 1876 Florida cracker cowboy. The camp is closed today but we still enjoyed touring the area and imagining the cowboy at work. He lives in a thatch-roofed open-sided hut where he has a ten-by-ten-foot rough-hewn wooden platform on which there are two rope beds and rudimentary table. A hand-pump serves the corral and the cowboy’s drinking and washing-up needs.
As we went on through the camp following the two-track road, we came upon an armadillo and watched him at work for some time. Then we re-mounted the bikes and continued to an open field where we came upon a dozen wild turkeys, including a large gobbler strutting and fanning out his feathers to impress the ladies. A little further on we saw eight deer and three turkeys in the cattle field.
With less than a half-hour to go before sunset we rode back to the hard road and on to the Observation Tower. The afternoon’s turkeys were gone and we saw only one deer from there until darkness overtook us and we returned to the van for the night.

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Tuesday, 20 March –

We spent today in the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest. This morning’s walk took us on another section of the Florida Trail, this one departing School Bus Road’s south end in the Arbuckle Tract. After donning hunter-orange in deference to the turkey hunters, we walked north on the Trail to a blue-blazed trail leading into Hidden Hammock and a primitive campsite--- and quite a beauty of a campsite it is. We were a little surprised to find no privy or water source like we expect to find at designated campsites back home and I’m curious to see what the Florida Trail Guide has to say about those two subjects in this area. We noticed the primitive campsites where we stay in Mocha Joe also do not provide a water source though they do provide a very clean and regularly-serviced porta-potty and a dumpster. I’m wondering if the state has decided there’s liability in providing well water at camp sites or perhaps they just gave up after repeated vandalism of the pumps in the drive-in campsites.
After our two-mile warmup walk we had an early lunch and then drove to the wildlife check station. As we drove up we noticed a hunter taking a turkey out of his trunk to report in. This was excellent timing for us. Mac, the check-station monitor, weighed the turkey in (19 and a half pounds), measured his beard (ten inches), and spurs (1 and seven-eighths inches), examined it for indications of disease (none present) and took a picture of hunter and bird. Today is the opener of the season here at Lake Wales Ridge and there were two turkeys killed, the 19-1/2 pounder and a 12-pounder. This is a quota area, meaning that hunters line up (in their cars) at the check station sometime before 0430 to get one of today’s ten permits from Mac. But today it was easy—there were only five hunters requesting permits. The hunters then depart for their selected hunting area and enter the woods in the pre-dawn darkness and set up to await daylight, now between 0630 and 0700. The hunters may hunt until 1300 and then must check out at the same check-station. They are permitted one turkey per day, two per season. The Spring season is in two sessions of three days each.
After Mac finished checking the hunter out, we talked with him for an hour or so. He gave us a tour of the old cabin now used to store some of their gear and walked the property with us pointing out old cow pens and the well pump and watering trough which had been used here prior to the land becoming a state forest. Mac is a good-ol-Southern-boy and told us as he gets older his plannin’ gets longer and his doin’ gets shorter. In fact sometimes his plannin’ is so good, he has figgered out the doin’ doesn’t really need to be done atall.
Behind the cabin lies a mile-long nature trail so Labashi and I took that on. This one introduced us to cut-throat seeps, which are becoming rare in Florida. A cut-throat seep is grassy area of widely-separated pines and palms in a meadow of cut-throat grass. This is possible only in areas where water seeps from a nearby marshy area and provides just the right conditions for this type of area to grow.
The trail then took us on to ‘ecotones’ (edges) of Flatwoods, Flatwood Marsh, and Pine Scrub ecological zones.
We then drove to Lake Godwin, a small, very remote-feeling lake at the end of a sandy two-track trail. After checking out the lake we relaxed in the van, reading and blogging. I finished the excellent ‘West with the Night’ and am looking forward to some Randy Wayne White novels about south Florida given to us by our St. Pete friends.
At 1700 we drove to the trailhead of a blue-blaze trail which would intersect the Florida Trail just before it turns toward Lake Arbuckle. That walk took us through lush palmetto and slash pine to the lake. There we met a young couple enjoying a backwoods picnic at the lake and we chatted for a few minutes about the gators they had seen nearby on earlier walks in this area. We continued north along the trail to the lake’s edge but saw no alligators. The wind had come up and the beautiful lake had small whitecaps, giving the lakeside trail a wild feel. Palmetto crowded the trail close to the water and it was easy to imagine the alligators hiding in wait for us in the deep bush. But they don’t do that. And if they do, they’re very good at not leaving tracks in the sandy trail between the water and the palmettos. I should know—I looked very closely for those tracks!
We returned to the van by 1900 and drove to our campsite at Reedy Creek where we had a late dinner and then read and blogged the evening away.

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Monday, 19 March –

In yesterday’s email we learned from our neighbor back home that our mailbox had been hit and knocked off its mount sometime Saturday. Everything had been normal when the neighbor departed for work Saturday morning (after the previous day’s 8-1/2 inches of snow) but when he returned that evening our mailbox lay in the snow and large truck-size tire marks ran close to the pole. I thought it might have been the snowplow but the neighbor doesn’t think so because of the curve of the track—it appeared to be a turn-in right at the box.
Whoever it was must have departed with significant damage to his front end if it wasn’t the snow plow. The 3 x 3 steel arm he broke off surely would have left a mark. Anyway, this morning I called home to our post office, to our township police department and to our neighbor to get it reported and to thank the neighbor for taking the mailbox to his house until we get home.
We said a reluctant goodbye to St Petersburg and headed back inland away from the city and back to the forest. We drove east for a few hours to the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest near Frostproof. We checked at the local State Forest office and found we can indeed stay in the primitive campgrounds and there are several hiking trails to choose from, including a section of the Florida Trail. We do have to be careful in the south tract where turkey hunting season starts again tomorrow but hunting is not allowed in the north tract and it has several hiking trails. And if we really want to do a trail in the south tract we need only wait until the turkey hunters quit hunting by the 1300 deadline.
We drove to the south tract (the Arbuckle) and picked a spot in the Reedy Campground and took it easy for a few hours on this perfect 75-degree day. There’s only one other camper here so it appears to be another great deal—a $5 campsite in a beautiful area and hardly anybody around.
We had supper around 1700 and then walked a three-mile section of the Florida Trail from the trailhead right by the campground. We walked south on the trail and very soon started following Reedy Creek on its eastern bank. This is something new for us in Florida. The other trails have all been flat. But on this one, Reedy Creek follows a nice ravine and the trail follows along on the edge of that ravine, giving us views from above. The trail is mostly lined by palmettos and smaller live-oaks and overlooks the tannin-tinted creek winding back and forth and festooned with many different types of growth. There are cattails and arrowhead and tall grasses and palmetto and many different types of trees. The foliage is a little different here. Where further south it was all green, here we see a mix of luxuriant green mixed with some dead-brown—very much a look of a new Spring. That’s appropriate. The ranger told us today is the first day of Spring.
We came upon the cutest little armadillo we’ve ever seen. He (or she) didn’t know we were there at first so we had a chance to watch him work, plowing away with his nose. Once he noticed us he scampered off the trail yet still stayed close so we watched him for another twenty minutes before we moved on.
After two miles we came to a blue-trail intersection which we knew would take us back to our departure point. This trail made a bee-line across a fairly recent burn but we had a wonderful golden-hour sun just setting as we walked back. We then spent the evening blogging and reading.

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Sunday, 18 March –

This morning our friends introduced us to a local breakfast landmark, The Dome. It’s a friendly little neighborhood spot which feels just right on a Sunday morning—a great place to read the Sunday paper and sip a coffee after a hearty breakfast.
We then drove to an upscale sporting goods store called “Bill Jackson” to shoot. I wish we had ranges like this back home. It was like going to a small version of a Cabelas or Bass Pro but behind the gun section was a six-lane handgun range. We spent an hour or so punching holes in paper and I was very happy to give both guns a good workout and also to get a chance to shoot some guns I’ve not tried before. I had an immediate jamming problem with my target pistol at first but traced that to the ammo—it apparently doesn’t like the cheapie stuff.
Later that afternoon we drove downtown to the waterfront and took the Looper ride with our friends. The Looper is a tourist trolley which circles downtown and gives a half-hour narrated tour, all for a quarter.
As we headed home we shopped at a local Publix in preparation for grilling tonight. We had a Portuguese beef and sausage plus home-made Sangria—yeah, baby!
After dinner we sat around working down the giant Sangria tub but finally had to give up on it and retire to our reading for the night.

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Saturday, 17 March –

Today our friends took us to pretty little Weedon Park for breakfast. We had stopped at Starbucks and the St Pete Bagel Company along the way and had our feast at one of Weedon’s picnic pavilions.
We then drove into Tampa to the Tampa Art Museum to see an exhibit on Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and Frederick Church. This exhibit had a little of everything. It featured landscape painters and their role in establishing interest in tourism in the areas they painted. We had sections devoted 19th Century paintings and studies of the American West (particularly the Grand Canyon and Yosemite), the Catskills, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, and Maine.
After the museum we went to Ybor City for a late lunch at The Columbia, a Spanish restaurant, where we shared a couple of pitchers of Sangria while enjoying our unique meals (I had a terrific seafood paella). The town was preparing for tonight’s St Patrick’s Day parade and it seemed a little odd to be in a Cuban historic district and passing cigar bars and Latino architecture yet we were seeing the gathering throng of party-goers dressed in their bright-green St Patty’s Day togs.
Back home later that evening we had a traditional corned-beef-and-cabbage meal in celebration of the holiday.

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Friday, 16 March-

Today we left our wonderful little campground in OK Slough to head north. We had spent the night in the Wild Cow Primitive Campground, hoping to either see or hear a panther. We arose early after a perfectly quiet night—we had heard only owls and those off in the distance last night. After last night’s rain we hoped to see fresh panther tracks in the sandy two-track but the sand was too hard.
As we drove toward the entrance gate we saw an oncoming pickup slowly rolling along with six or eight radio-collared hunting hounds around it. The hounds were forging off into the bush here and there but mostly just crossing back and forth, very intently trying to catch a scent along the roadside. We nodded to the two guys in the pickup and noticed they were in some type of uniform and had an insignia on the side of the pickup. That meant they’re not hunters but we didn’t catch the wording on the insignia.
After exiting the forest road we stopped at the nearby state forest office. We told them how much we had enjoyed our visit and asked about the pickup and hounds. We learned those are the panther trackers. They spend their nights ranging the roads with the hounds, tracking panthers. In some cases they are replacing batteries on tracking collars but often they’re just trying to find additional panthers to collar. Once the dogs pick up a scent, they tear in after the panther and eventually tree it. The trackers then shoot the panther with a tranquilizer gun and then weigh and measure it and give it a health checkup and then collar it. The ranger told us there are five to eight panthers back in the area of the primitive camp and new road, i.e., the lower section of the state forest.
We said our goodbyes and headed north, bound for St. Petersburg. But we were in no rush to get on boring old I-75 so we headed directly north through Labelle and on to Arcadia, marveling at the many ranches, then the miles and miles of pine tree farms and then even more impressive orange groves. Florida’s interior is very different from the coasts—very much a working area. The roads are filled with large trucks, many of them hauling oranges and grapefruits to the massive processing plants we’d occasionally see.
At Arcadia we stopped for lunch at a Wendy’s and our first significant rain began there. Today is our 29th day on the road and our first rain of more than ten minutes duration. We drove toward I-75 and eventually joined it but lasted only an exit—traffic was terrible. We had four lanes of stop-and-go traffic and things weren’t improving. Labashi plotted us an alternate route through Bradenton and that turned out to be a great idea. Traffic thinned out and we were soon crossing the I-275 Skyway bridge into St. Petersburg. By 1400 we had arrived at our friend’s house where we were staying the weekend.
We spent the afternoon chatting away and catching up with our friends and then went to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant in the St. Petersburg Baywalk district. After such a wonderful dinner we walked through a John Lennon/Yoko Ono exhibit of drawings in the Baywalk and then returned home and retired early to read before falling asleep early after the busy day.

Collier-Seminole, Rookery Bay, OK Slough adventure in the sugar-sand
(posted from St. Petersburg, FL)

(this post covers 13-15 March)

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Thursday, 15 March –

Last night was fantastic. We slept all alone in our little campsite and the night was backcountry-quiet. No trucks, no alarms, not one car passing within miles of us.
This morning we dressed quickly after awakening in order to cruise the roads looking for wildlife. We had a fine fog hanging over the glades, in some places it lay against the ground, in others it hung in a layer a dozen feet above the marsh.
We of course saw deer and we also saw the turkey again, apparently the same one for it was in exactly the same place as last night. We idled down the Sic Island road, then we decided to try the North Loop. There we had a memorable lesson in sugar-sand. The North Loop road started out well but the prepared roadway soon ended and we were on sandy two-track. The sand would get a little deeper here and there but we muddled through. And we even saw another vehicle—a white pickup on an intersecting road. We continued down the North Loop road and noticed the pickup had turned our direction and was following but I soon lost sight of him and figured he must have turned back. Smart man. Then we got into trouble. We came upon a long stretch of deep sand – the so-called ‘sugar sand’—where I should have stopped at that point. But we were in deepening sand and there ahead of us lay a recent set of tracks through it so I plunged ahead. We slowly bogged down as I gunned the engine, trying to stay afloat. We could feel the van sinking and soon were just barely making headway with the engine racing and both of us saying ‘uh-oh’ over and over again. Once we stopped, we were done for it. The edge of the track had a bit of vegetation and I pointed that way but it was surely over—I began wondering whether we had cell phone coverage out here and remembered talking to a ranger earlier today who warned us about sugar-sand on the Sic Island Loop and told us the rangers don’t pull you out— it’s a liability thing. Anyway, it was all but over when the sinking wheels got just a little traction, enough to get us close to the edge vegetation. As we got to the vegetation we felt the van start to rise—to ‘float’ again so long as we kept forward momentum. Thus began one of the longest hours of our young lives. This was just the first stretch of sugar-sand. So what do you do in such a situation? There’s no way to turn around and slowing down will surely sink you to the axle. So I did the only thing I could-- I accelerated. I kept one wheel in the vegetation on the edge where I could and drove like a maniac. We did whack two small palm tree stumps I couldn’t see in the low growth but our momentum carried us past them. After a few minutes of this we knew we were in trouble. All it would take is the right combination of large pot-hole and sugar-sand and we’d be in for a long day trying to figure out how to get towed out of here. Labashi would check the map and try to estimate how far to the next road (in the hopes that the other road would be better) but the map was unclear. We finally came to a turnoff to an environmental sensor where the ground was more stable. We paused there and the white pickup we thought had turned back zoomed by—it was a ranger vehicle. We followed and somehow kept afloat for several miles of this excitement when we came to a three-way intersection not on the map and with no signs or trail marks. The ranger truck turned left but we didn’t follow since he had gone through a fence line there and it might be restricted (there were no signs saying so but there were no signs, period). As we scratched our heads over the map, I saw the ranger put the pickup in reverse. As he approached, I got out and walked up to his truck (and noticed that he had four-wheel drive). He said “The trail is this way. If you go back either of those roads, they get bad quick and I’d just have to come get you. We’re going to have to mark this turn better.” And then he was off.
The trail was a little better for a short while but we soon came upon long stretches of sugar-sand and once again we did our best to roar through them, dodging and weaving to find the teensiest bit of traction to eek us through. We noticed out ahead that the ranger would slow down once in awhile, apparently to keep us in view. And thank goodness he was there. We passed several intersections where the trail looked the same all directions and all were unsigned. Eventually, the two-track got better. It turned into a roadway with vegetation either the whole way across or in the middle and we could ride one wheel down the middle and the other in the edge where the sand deepened to eight or more inches. After another twenty minutes, we came to a proper roadway—dusty and dirty but at least solid. The ranger stopped there and ambled back to us. He said he had been out checking the seed-grass plot when he had seen us go by and thought he might take the long way back to the office in case we had trouble. His name was Rick Denton and he’s the chief Forestry Ranger for the OK Slough Forest. He was great. We talked for twenty minutes or so as he answered our questions about everything we could think of (What is it that churns up the ground so well? Feral pigs. How big are they? Up to 300 pounds. How many does it take to chew up the ground like that? Only three or four. Are they hunted? Yes, on a limited basis for now but restrictions will probably be removed in two years—they are doing terrible damage to the new seedlings., etc). He said one of his main duties is fire management, including prescribed burns to control the amount of fuel available for wildfires. A second area of concentration is planting trees. They contract with a crew of Guatemalans who plant hundreds of thousands of trees, all by hand. They each carry a bag with up to 300 seedlings and use a specialized type of large hoe. In one swing of the hoe they open a hole into which they insert the seedling, then with a flip of the hoe cover the hole with the displaced ground. A crew can plant hundreds of thousands in a few days. They are planted in a ‘seven by ten’ pattern, i.e., every seven feet in rows ten feet apart and the Guatemalans need . The third area of concentration is eradication of exotic plants. Two rangers are out today spraying exotics. As we prepared to separate, Rick suggested we try a new stone road which has just been completed. He says there are several bears in that area. When Labashi said we had seen the panther track, he said a female panther is in that area planning to den up so we should be extra-careful. Though there has never been a reported attack of a human by a Florida panther, we should slowly back away from any encounter with one, particularly a female looking to establish a den. He said we should also be careful of rattlers (Eastern Diamonbacks). He had seen a very large one yesterday, one which stretched the entire width of the (two-track) road. We thanked Rick for keeping an eye on us and for all the information and then let him go back to work.
After lunch we buzzed up to Labelle to gas up and to get ice. We then returned to the campsite where we spent the afternoon reading and blogging.


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Wednesday, 14 March –

This morning we decided to try to see a bobcat or panther by returning to the Fakahatchee/Picayune border area where we had seen the bobcat last week. Our hopes were quickly dashed, though, when we saw (and heard) heavy construction equipment. We had forgotten we had seen the bobcat on a Saturday when the nearby equipment had been silent. We attempted to find another suitable area and had breakfast while watching for cats in the south end of the forest but saw only deer—five of them traveling together. We then decided to tour the west side of the forest and slowly cruised the roads which are soon to become history as the re-hab project continues. Timber crews are taking out the big pines and palms along the roads to soon be dug up. We stopped at the ranger station in the north end of the forest and there learned more about the re-hab project. It will include three pumping stations in the north end of the forest to direct water southward to restore the sloughs and prevent if from flooding homes north of the forest. After finishing our visit to the Picayune, our goal today became the Okaloacoochee Slough State Forest (“OCALA-coo-chee” is how the locals pronounce it though the ranger at Picayune Strand called it “Ock-la-wa-COO-chee”) east of Fort Myers and south of the little town of LaBelle. We had learned of the “OK Slough” at the Picayune ranger station from a ranger who recommended it. It’s not on the Florida book-map page and it’s not on the AAA road map. The only way to find it on those maps was to notice from the OK Slough brochure that it lies just a few miles northeast of the Collier-Hendry county line intersection at an ‘s’ turn in the road.
This slough is critical for collecting and draining water south to the Everglades, more specifically into the sloughs of the Fakahatchee Strand and Big Cypress Preserves.
Upon driving into the state forest we first wanted to check out the camp sites so drove the length of the Wild Cow Grade road. The first campground is a beautiful little campground of a dozen sites under spreading live-oaks and sabal palms and beside Panther Pond. At the pond we watched a swallow-tailed snail kite seem to buzz the resident alligator but later realized it’s picking something out of the water. Incredibly, it’s a $5 per night campground in a 32,000-acre reserve and it’s deserted. Spring turkey season ended Sunday so perhaps that’s why. Or maybe it’s because this state forest was only established six years ago and just isn’t generally well-known.
The Wild Cow Grade road is good at first but then deteriorates to sandy two-track with a fair number of pot-holes. The Primitive Campground was little more than two picnic tables, two tent platforms, and a hand-pump which is currently dry. We turned back to the prettier campground and then we hit our Find of the Day. As I eased around a large sandy pothole, I noticed tracks. I could tell from the van they were panther tracks. We spent a half-hour there and Labashi said she could smell a cat smell in that area. I wanted a little exercise so I walked the road looking for panther sign while Labashi drove Mocha Joe. We found another area of tracks and I noticed a whiff of cat smell as I entered that area but the tracks were in harder sand and weren’t as clear.
After taking a break at the campground for a few hours in the heat of the day we left at 1730 for a drive through the forest at dusk. We took the Mustang Loop road which soon turned to two-track and we came upon an armadillo, our first in Florida. Labashi jumped out to get a picture but didn’t have a chance to get a good one; Mr. Armadillo was shy.
We then drove the Patterson Cross-over Road and along the way saw two young bucks in velvet (with two-inch spikes) and a turkey. We noticed the grass along the roadway was torn up and speculated that it must be feral pigs but never saw them.
By this time it was dark and we turned back toward the campground. Along the way an owl swept into view, swooped down to pick up a snake and then perched just ahead of us on a fencepost to eat the little snake. It soon swooped down again and arose with another little snake—apparently the owl was having great luck tonight.
Back in our campsite we went to bed early and read about the wonders of the Florida backcountry. Actually, I read about Florida for awhile but then switched to my current book, “West with the Night” by Beryl Markham. It’s a 1942 book about the life of Miss Markham as she grew up in British East Africa and became a bush pilot in the Gipsy Moth era, a very remarkable story. Here’s an interesting quote from a letter written to Maxwell Perkins:
“Did you read Beryl Markham’s book, ‘West with the Night?’ I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except in her flyer’s log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard other people’s stories, are absolutely true…. I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book.” –(Ernest Hemingway).


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Tuesday, 13 March –

Last night at Collier-Seminole State Park was very noisy — our worst night for sleep since the Kendall Wal-mart. The park itself is nice enough (and fairly reasonable at $20 per night since we get showers and use of the dump station) but the campground is too crowded and we apparently had some inexperienced campers for neighbors. The biggest problem was slamming car doors. I know I heard over 200 car-door slams after quiet hours started at 2200 and the slams lasted as late as 0230. I would have much preferred to have been in the free campground at Bear Island. For some reason our neighbors have no idea how jarring the slamming doors can be to sleepers. Anyway— we didn’t sleep well until after 0300.
After arising we drove north through the resort town of Marco Island. Labashi really liked this town. We crossed a high bridge with a magnificent view on the way in and crossed its sister bridge with an even better view on the way out of town. The town seemed very clean and uncrowded yet there were more walkers, joggers, and bicyclists than we’ve seen elsewhere. Our only stop in town was at the local Publix supermarket for essentials for the next several days and a quick stop at a West Marine for a replacement inverter to power my laptop but Marco Island just seemed to have the right mix—at least in our drive-by visit today.
We continued up the coast to the Rookery Bay Estuarine Research Center. We didn’t have much information about this facility so didn’t expect much--- perhaps a small visitor’s center describing their mission and maybe a walking trail. But this turned out to be a very nice and modern research center with excellent displays and explanations. We overloaded with info using their audio wand system but that was partially our fault—we kept pressing the button for additional details about each display we visited. The aquarium displays were smaller ones but interesting. The most fascinating for us was watching a horse conch chase down a fighting conch. The horse conch could only plod along steadily while the fighting conch could use its very strong ‘foot’ to launch itself a few inches ahead of the always-pursuing horse conch. But one of the volunteers explained to us that this was going to end badly for the fighting conch. The horse conch just keeps pursuing until it eventually backs the more-and-more-exhausted fighting conch into a corner or against the center rock in the display and then kills and eats it. And over the course of the next twenty minutes that’s what we witnessed. The fighting conch seemed to tire and be unable to push away from the horse conch soon enough one time and the horse conch managed to drag its bulk atop the smaller fighting conch. It then seemed to take a long break, then began tilting the fighting conch onto its back. The last we saw, the entire opening of the fighting conch had been enveloped by the bright-orange flesh of the horse conch which will devour it over the next two days. I think I’m going to have nightmares about that one.
After almost three hours at the research center we drove north into Naples and to the central Library. While I connected up for email, blogging, and podcast updates Labashi combed the library for books about Florida orchids and mangroves. She has become fascinated by mangroves and saltwater. The red mangrove copes with salt water by blocking the salt, i.e., not allowing it to pass through its root system and into the plant. But the black and white mangroves allow salt to pass in but then excrete salt crystals onto the leaves. The white has special glands at the base of its leaves which excrete both sugar and salt while the black mangrove has no glands. Fascinating, no?
After the library we drove out of Naples to our old standby $5-per-night campsite at the Belle Meade horse camp in the Picayune Strand State Forest. There we met a local horse-training couple who were using the camp as day-users to exercise their horse behind a sulky. They had recently bought the sulky racer and just last week had entered it in its first race, where it came in second. They are life-long Florida residents and talked to us at some length about living in the area and the beauty of the Florida backcountry. It was truly a pleasure talking with them.
After supper we blogged and read then went to bed early to catch up on our sleep.

Picayune State Forest, Naples art galleries, Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, Fakahatchee Strand slog, Fire Prairie Trail, Bear Island Grade Road, Ten Thousand Islands (again), Collier-Seminole State Park (posted from Naples Central Library, Naples, FL)

(this post covers 7 – 12 March, 2007)

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Monday, 12 March –

We’ve been reading a good book about the Everglades called ‘Liquid Land’ by Ted Levin. This morning Labashi told me about the chapter on a trip down the Wilderness Waterway from Everglades City to Flamingo. We decided we should go back to the park office at Everglades City and talk to the rangers about it. And while we were there we could pick up some needed supplies.
After a short re-supply stop at Everglades City we lunched in the parking lot and then spent the next two hours talking to rangers, poring over maps and checking out day-paddling guides to the Ten Thousand Islands. We also were very fortunate to have a long conversation with park volunteer Tommy Newell who is a fishing guide in Yellowstone in the summer and spends his winters in Florida as a volunteer at Everglades National Park. He has spent a lot of boat time in the Ten Thousand Islands (and just returned from a week out there) and even gave us his card to call him with any more questions we might have. We now believe we know what it would take and what we could expect to see out there. This would be a perfect trip for the new jonboat Maypo and I bought early last month. It would be a great trip to dream about and prepare for next winter.
After Everglades City we drove west across the Tamiami Trail to Collier-Seminole State Park. We were able to get a campsite this time and enjoyed the showers and riding our bikes through the park roads and down to the boat launch. On one of my rides through the campground I ran into Bob Bishop, the guy from Utah who built his own fiberglass truck camper. We had first met him at Monument Lake and later saw him at Bear Island. Bob has just returned from two nights in the Ten Thousand Islands by kayak and is taking a re-supply day before heading to the Keys for a couple of days.
We continue to have remarkably fine weather. Daytime temperatures are in the high Seventies to mid-Eighties, nights mid-Fifties to mid-Sixties. It’s quite hot in the sun but any little bit of shade brings instant relief and there’s nearly always a breeze. Good ol’ Mocha Joe gets way too hot if we park him in the sun with the windows and doors closed but we generally try to park away from everyone else (in the shade if possible) and open the doors when we return to let the breeze carry away the accumulated heat. If we can have the doors open and have a bit of a breeze, we’re very comfortable in Mocha Joe even in full sun on a Wal-mart parking lot. We’ve had only one day with rain so far and that one was the one we spent in Miami waiting for the van to be fixed. We’ve had very few bugs. In Flamingo we’d have an hour or so of no-see-ums at dusk and if we hung around outside too long in shorts, we’d pick up a bite or two around the ankles. I think I’ve seen a grand total of a dozen mosquitoes so far. Mosquitoes need water pools to breed and our weather has been very dry. The ranger-lady at Everglades City told us the mosquito population has been very low since Hurricane Wilma passed through in October 2005. She said she had only worn insect repellent twice through all of last summer—and she’s working in prime mosquito habitat.

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Sunday, 11 March –

Today we decided we’d take a morning walk up the Bear Island Grade, a nice little two-track hiking and biking trail into the backcountry. We first spoke with the wildlife check-station ranger and learned the local hunters here have scored five turkeys, about normal for the first week of the season.
We walked north up the two-track and it quickly opened to beautiful Florida savannah of sawgrass, palm trees (royal and sabal palms) and a few tall pines. Then our surroundings closed in to very thick palmetto, slash pine, cypress, and live oaks. The two-track is a raised road with culverts which allow water to flow between the glades on each side. Around these culverts we tended to see the most wildlife since they generally have tiny fish in the pools on each side. Some hosted egrets and ibises, some an alligator. About an hour into the walk we saw a family of raccoons nearby, about five yards away. We first saw one of the little ones in a grassy area and thought it might be a marsh bunny (we could only see its side at first) but we soon saw the others emerge. We thoroughly enjoyed watching them investigate every little thing in front of them.
We soon came to ‘the gator hole’ which consists of two sizable ponds, one on each side of the road. The west side one is muddy-looking, the east-side one an emerald green. Each held three or four gators, one about a twelve-footer, the others six or seven-footers. The emerald pond was hopping with feeding fish and it was comical to watch the water surface erupt in multiple places at once, often very close to a gator but with no effect on them. They were just there for some sun this morning.
After another twenty minutes of walking we decided we’d better turn back- the day was getting hot. As we neared the gator hole, we saw a deer emerge from the underbrush and pause on the road, looking our direction. Soon another joined it. Our binoculars revealed them to be button-bucks—very sleek and very healthy looking, each with two small lumps where their antlers were starting to grow. We watched them ease into the bushes and evaporate from view as if they were ghosts.
Five minutes later we saw a doe come onto the road from the east side. Soon two more joined it. They saw us but didn’t ‘throw the flag’ (their white tails) until the wind changed and carried our scent their direction. Even then they only went off the road ten yards and watched us slowly pass by.
Once back at Mocha Joe it was time for lunch and a well-deserved break. We drove back to our campsite and found it had the most wonderful breeze. We elected to spend the afternoon reading and listening to podcasts (‘Florida Stories’, a few ‘Explore Pennsylvania’ episodes, a ‘This American Life’ episode’, a ‘PopSci’ (Popular Science) episode, and two Minnesota Public Radio ‘Loopcasts’. The day was absolutely perfect. The thermometer said 83.4 degrees, the sky was blue, we were parked in a nice little slash-pine grove, and we had a gentle breeze blowing through the van…. just perfect for a lazy day of recovering from our walk.
By early evening we were ready to go out again. Today was the Spring Ahead time change so we knew we had an extra hour to play. We drove down Turner River Road to the Fire Prairie Trail we had walked a few days ago. We knew we’d at least see the large and noisy black-vulture and white-ibis roosts at the trailhead there and we could walk back the trail and perhaps see the otter we know is frequenting the area (from having seen his/her scat on our last walk there). The Fire Prairie Trail is a little spooky even in daylight since it’s very narrow, has heavy cypress swamp on both sides, and is overgrown. Going in we were very aware of the new sounds of the evening. We walked until the trail opened up to sawgrass prairie which was rapidly disappearing before our eyes as darkness fell. We then turned back and walked at what I’d call a ‘purposeful’ pace back toward the van. The purpose was to get back to the van before something ate us.
After the adrenalin rush of the trail back to the van we walked a bit down the Turner River Road to the larger part of the ibis roost to listen to the din of the birds settling in for the night. Then we retreated to the van and drove back to our roost—er, campsite -- for the night.

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Saturday, 10 March –

Today was an extra-GREAT day. We started off the morning by heading east in the Picayune State Forest to reach the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve and the pot-holed Jane’s Scenic Drive. As we passed a sign telling us to slow down because this is panther habitat, Labashi said she’d like to have a picture of the sign. I stopped in the roadway and shifted into reverse. At that moment we both saw a large bobcat cross the forest road from left to right out ahead of us. The bobcat was a large one, dark and loping very purposefully across the open area to reach the treeline. FAN-TAS-TIC!!!! We’ve seen our first bobcat! And it’s only nine o’clock in the morning!
We strained to see the bobcat in the woods but it was much too thick. We then drove on into the Fakahatchee Strand, first stopping at a geocache. As we stepped out of the van we heard very distinctive splashing in a small canal-like area along the road. The splashing turned out to be fish feeding on smaller fish. As we watched, Labashi noticed a snake lazing on the tree branch and partially in the water. We believe it was a harmless black watersnake. Labashi took some pictures and told me she could see that the snake had tied itself into a loop—a loose knot-- on the branch and had stuck its head through the loop in order to support itself hanging from the branch.
We drove on to our goal for today—a trail known as ‘K2’. This one sits behind a small campsite where we met an older Florida couple preparing to have a picnic. The gentleman told us he has been living in the Everglades for some 60 years and bicycles this dirt road a couple of times a month and as far as he knows there is no trail behind the campground. But of course there was—and it was a doozy. To reach it, you first take the trail to the outhouse behind the campground but pass the outhouse and continue on a grassy path. This was apparently why the gentleman thought there’s no path—it just looks like an open area leading nowhere. But once you reach the edge of the woods, a small, single-board-width boardwalk begins. It crosses very swampy area and the weeds along the trail soon close in on the boardwalk. After a hundred yards, the boardwalk ends and you walk through heavily-overgrown trail with swampy-looking area on both sides, often brushing aside ferns to make your way. Another several hundred yards and the trail split multiple directions, all into cypress swamp. We went as far as we thought we could without getting forever lost but as we prepared to turn back, we heard voices ahead of us. It was a bromeliad and orchids club out on a slog through the cypress swamp. They had seen orchids north of where we were and showed us a rare bromeliad where we met. As we talked, I noticed in the distance a long measuring tape strung from the trees and leading the direction they had come. They had no idea why it’s there (and neither do we) but it allowed us to proceed with some hope of finding our way back. After leaving the club group we followed the tapeline for another few hundred feet before it ended and another started and then that one too ended and that’s where I took a GPS waypoint. We continued on and soon were up over our calves in water and occasionally losing a shoe in the muck. This was the slog we had been looking for. But we soon realized we could very easily become lost--- because now we WERE lost. We had a general idea of the direction we had come (only because we had nothing but water ahead of us and a little less water behind us) but we decided it would be a good time to figure out where the tape line end was. But because we were under a heavy canopy of trees, the GPS had lost its signal. We headed back the general way we had come and finally found an open enough spot for the GPS to pick up a signal and thus backtracked our way back to the end of the tape line and therefore back to the trail out to the campsite. We had only spent two hours slogging, but that was plenty for today. But I must say we enjoyed the slog immensely. The area looked like the swampiest swamp you’ve ever seen but the water was cool and clear. The mud was a very slippery and slimy mud and you had to be careful not to lose a shoe to it but it also somehow seemed clean or fresh. We saw many ibises and a few egrets and many anoles but no snakes. All in all our first slog was a great success.
Back at the van we took a break and then drove on out Jane’s Scenic Drive to the hard road. We drove down 29 to the Tamiami Trail and drove west to the Collier-Seminole State Park where we hoped to find a campsite for the night. The park turned out to be full but we knew it wasn’t far to Bear Island and a free campsite among this weekend’s turkey hunters. We therefore drove on down 29 to Everglades City and Chokoloskee again, this time looking for a nice restaurant. We finally settled on the ‘Seafood Depot’ where Labashi had a couple of margaritas and a gator-tail and crabcakes dinner while I had a couple of good ol’ Florida-style hi-test bushwhackers and a meal of broiled scallops. This was our first fancy dinner out of this trip and we did it up right.
After dinner we drove back up 29 to Bear Island and selected a different campsite, this one well away from the good-ol’-boys and their noisy generators (actually, they’re very good about shutting down the generators by 2100). We took a walk as the sun set and saw two barred owls in the open field across from us, one very close. We walked to the campsite where we had stayed last week and saw Bill and Sandy there so caught them up on our adventures since last seeing them.
We spent the evening blogging and reading.

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Friday, 9 March –

Today we drove into Naples for a ‘city day’. Labashi wanted to see some art so we drove into the city center, near upscale Fifth Avenue. On the way we stopped along the ocean for a short walk on their wonderful ‘sugar sand’ beach--- perfectly white as far as we could see.
After parking we each had an early lunch. We splurged on mimosas and then Labashi had the shrimp and spinach in phyllo and I had an excellent-plus crabcake sandwich. Naples would be easy to get used to.
We then walked the Fifth Avenue art galleries and then up to the Harmon-Meeker Gallery on Ninth Street to see the egg-tempura works by Robert Vickery (we had read about them on the web). Afterwards we passed the Naples Library on the way back to the van and stopped in to ask if they have free wi-fi (they do). Once we reached the van we then drove the few blocks to the library and parked outside where we picked up the wi-fi signal for our email and blogging connection. We then went into the library and spent a few hours reading in the newpapers and periodicals section. I happened upon an article about ‘the blocks’ of the Picayune State Forest in the local public television magazine. There I learned more about the plan to re-hab the South Blocks. The state spent $125 million buying up all the land in the South Blocks and has begun tearing up the roads and canals in order to restore the hydrology of the area. I was surprised to learn the project may take 30-50 years to restore an adequate water flow so the area can return to the Everglades ecology which was destroyed by the roads and canals of the Golden Gate housing project.
After a few hours at the library we departed for our campground in the Picayune State Forest and soon had Mocha Joe sitting in the slash-pines near the horse paddocks. That evening we listened to more Old Time Radio podcasts including two more special-edition programs telling the story of Joan of Arc plus a 1942 Motion Picture Industry promotional program for War Bonds.

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Thursday, 8 March –

Today we drove to the north side of Naples to the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. This is an Audubon facility which has been voted best nature center in Florida but perhaps more importantly, it’s the home of the last remaining stand of old-growth cypress trees. It has a 2.25 mile boardwalk through the cypress.
When we learned we could walk the boardwalk for $20 or join the Audubon Society for $25 and be admitted to the facility for free, that was an easy decision—we joined the Society.
The walk was wonderful. We spent two and a half hours dawdling along the boardwalk and we were busy the whole time. We saw red-shouldered hawks, yellow-rumped warblers, catbirds, woodpeckers, ibises, egrets, swallow-tailed kites, grackles, a cardinal, a raccoon, yellow-crowned night herons, cooters, box turtles, common moorhens, black and red vultures, bitterns, and a Carolina wren. And the old cypress trees are huge—600 years old and eight feet thick.
After our Corkscrew Sanctuary walk we headed back to our horse-trail campsite in the state forest ($5 a night!) and spent an hour chatting with ‘Indiana’ and ‘Florida’, the two turkey hunters (they call us “Pennsylvania”) sharing our campground. They are two very interesting good ol’ boys. We learned how best to cook an Osceola wild turkey (throw away everything but the breast, cut the breast into small strips, soak them overnight in buttermilk, roll them in breading, deep-fry them in peanut oil until they just start to float and then have a “two-fork” meal, i.e., use one fork to eat the best turkey you’ve ever had and the other to keep the other guys away--- and if you are eating a ‘jenny’ turkey, you’re going to need three forks, it’s THAT good). We also learned about flintlock and cap-and-ball percussion gun Rendezvous get-togethers these guys attend (a pre-1830 rendezvous means flintlock only, the pre-1840 rendezvous will include percussion guns), about the snake-proof boots and/or gaiters worn by (some) turkey hunters, when to shoot a cottonmouth (“if the cottonmouth is as thick as your forearm and it’s head is as big as your fist, don’t hesitate to shoot it; those will attack you”) and lots and lots of stories. It’s amazing what you can learn just by asking a turkey hunter how it went today.
After a supper of baby-back ribs from the local country store and some Idahoan Four-Cheese mashed potatoes (WOW, those are good!) we listened to ‘This Week in Newfoundland and Labrador’ podcasts from CBC Radio One and then did some blogging and reading about these ever-fascinating Everglades.

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Wednesday, 7 March –

Today we drove into Naples to re-supply and to connect to the web for our email and blog update. We noticed there was a nearby Wal-Mart according to our Wal-Mart Atlas (the Wal-mart Atlas is a special version of the Rand-McNally Road Atlas we bought at a Wal-mart for $5. It has tables listing the Wal-Marts in the US and Canada. For many it provides basic directions, such as ‘Near I-75 and Collier Blvd’ and provides a phone number as well as an indication of whether the Wal-mart is a 24-hour Wal-mart or not. It has proven easier to use and more helpful than looking them up on the Delorme Street Atlas software on the laptop.)
We spent the better part of two hours shopping there and then went in search of a free wi-fi hotspot. I brought along the Florida portion of the listings at wifi-freespot.com and selected a Calistoga Bakery Café. That turned out to be very much like the Paneras we like to frequent for this—a nice little upscale bakery and coffee shop which doesn’t mind if you plug in your laptop’s power brick while sipping a coffee and surfing the web.
We were thankful to learn that our problems connecting up at Chokoloskee were apparently a problem at the coffee shop rather than with our laptop since the connection here came up quickly and at full available bandwidth. We needed only a few minutes to pick up and respond to emails and ten minutes or so to upload the blog entry. But I am going to have to figure out what to do about podcast downloads from iTunes. There were 25 of them waiting and we now have 535 podcasts on the iPod, some two-thirds of the iPod’s capacity at this point. Sometime soon I’m going to have to start deleting--- we’re getting many more in than we’re listening to at this point. But I can’t bear to delete any I’ve not heard yet!
After the coffee shop we headed back out to the Picayune State Forest campground. We’ve stayed the last two days at Belle Meade Horse Trails, a very pretty little campground with paddocks for horses and a series of horse trails. We’re in the campground with two turkey hunters camping by tent and an RV parked way off in a corner plus some day-riders, i.e., some local folks who bring their horses in to ride for a few hours but leave before dark.
Tonight we listened to several Old Time Radio podcasts. We first listened to a 1934 drama with Don Ameche but abandoned it out of boredom after a while. Then we listened to two 1948 radio shows paired up by their common subject, Joan of Arc. The first was a CBS radio show called “You Were There” and the second an NBC program called “We Came This Way”. The former pretended to have radio announcers following the unfolding events of May 31, 1431 when Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. The latter was an NBC University of the Air program (good for college credit at the time) which began the story as two WW I doughboys approached Rouen, France. The characters told some of the story and some parts of it were re-enacted. We loved hearing the story in the two very different styles. The program reminds us of television in the 50’s and 60’s when we were growing up and its occasional attempts at serious programming.

Back on the Road, Noisy Kendall Wal-mart, Fairchild Tropical Garden, Big Cypress Preserve, Monument Lake, Moonlight bike ride, Airboat ride, Florida Panther Preserve, Bear Island campground with the turkey hunters, Fakahatchee Strand, ‘The Blocks’ in Picayune State Forest (whew!) (posted from Calistoga Bakery Café, Naples, FL)

(this post covers 28 February – 6 March)


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Tuesday, 6 March- (written in Picayune State Forest south campground)

This morning we drove to Everglades City and Chokoloskee. We checked out the Gulf Coast Visitor’s Center at the former and lunched there in the parking lot, then drove on the Chokoloskee to the Big House Coffee Shop for a mocha and to hook up to their wi-fi hotspot. For some reason I couldn’t get a reliable connection at the coffee shop. I finally gave up and we went to the library at Everglades City hoping for wi-fi but that was just another frustration. We had planned to spend the day in town but weren’t doing well at all with our plan to pick up email, send in the blog update, then tour the towns and get a nice meal at the end of the day.
We fled to the Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park. The visitor’s center was closed but we ran into a nice couple of volunteers who had some recommendations for hikes. We had learned from our buddy Tie-Dye at Lake Okochobee that the road into the Fakahatchee Strand (Jane’s Scenic Drive) continues on into the Picayune State Forest and ‘the Blocks’, the failed development where we could find cheap camping. But the Big Cypress map has an ominous notice: “Travel not recommended beyond this point. Get a local map from Oasis Visitor’s Center in Big Cypress Preserve”. And everyone we asked about it (other than Tie-Dye) said the roads were too bad in there and it was too easy to get lost. That of course made us curious. So we did Jane’s Scenic Drive and it was terrible—pot holes in the pot holes and then there are the pot holes beside each pot hole and a few on top of the pot holes (did I mention that there are pot holes?). We crept through at less than ten miles per hour—a LOT less. The good news is there’s nobody else back in there. We saw a pretty yellow rat-snake along the way and came upon a snake skeleton in the middle of the road and found it had been a poisonous one— we found a fang.
We waddled on through the potholes and finally came to the Picayune State Forest—where the roads don’t have ANY pot holes. In fact some of them are paved. This area is being re-habbed by the state. Historically it was a failed development of gigantic proportions. It was called ‘Golden Gate’ and is reported to have been a ripoff where banks of telemarketers sold Florida lots sight-unseen to suckers across the country. But their lots turned out to be underwater much of the year. Well, after seeing the area, I’ll be very curious to look into that. I don’t doubt it was a rip-off but there’s more to the story… this area is beautiful.
We were a bit nervous to drive out into this area of roads without road-signs. The roads are arrow-straight and laid off in very large blocks—but there aren’t any houses. The major blocks have paved roads and the roadway is in good condition (super-highway-like condition to one who just spent the afternoon easing through pot hole after pot hole). But when you come to an intersection there’s a stop sign but no road sign. So it feels like you are getting lost. But we counted the roads and canals and when we came to what we believed to be ‘Everglades Boulevard’, we saw our first and only sign—the word ‘Everglades’ painted on the road. I set that as a waypoint on the GPS and then each time we’d make a turn I’d take another waypoint. We realized that our map showed a campground only a few gi-huge-ic blocks away and the GPS also showed there were some geocaches in that area so we went for it. And sure enough we came to an intersection which indicated a geocache should be nearby and we found it—a film can wrapped in camo tape and placed at the base of a dead-end sign along the canal. We then set the GPS to the coordinates of a geocache which had a description indicating a campground was nearby and in that way found the campground which was closer than the map showed. And there we found there’s not only a campground and a boat-ramp but even a campground host. This one is part of the Picayune State Forest and costs $5 per night. We met hosts Ken and Norma from Ontario and checked in for the night by putting our $5 in an ‘iron ranger’ (a metal receptacle for our payment envelope). (Oh, yeah—and guess who they know—Tie-Dye. He was kicked out of this campground for failure to pay). Once settled in for the evening, we tracked down two more nearby geocaches—one a match-container painted green and hanging in a live-oak tree and the other a Rubbermaid sandwich-container wrapped in camo tape and sitting under palm fronds near the canal.
We spent the evening reading and blogging.

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Monday, 5 March –

Last night a cold front came in and we had a low of 42 degrees. That’s quite a change from lows in the Seventies but it felt great and we slept quite well. After breakfast we loaded up and drove the 20 miles of dirt road back to Route 29 and headed north for the Florida Panther Preserve. Along the way I turned on the GPS and noticed a nearby geocache called “© The Power” not far from I-75. We pulled into a small dirt road leading back to three or crystal-clear lakes and the GPS pointed to a power pole where we found a small canister with coordinates to the second stage of the cache a half-mile away. We followed the GPS to a palm tree along the I-75 fence where we found the ammo box. Success!
After lunch next to the lake, we drove north to the Florida Panther Preserve only to find the large gate only open a few feet—much too small to drive through. We had a cell-phone signal so called the info number on the gate and learned they’ve been having problems with the gate and it’s apparently stuck but we were welcome to park outside and walk in to the preserve. Good deal! We had the place to ourselves. The Preserve trails consisted of a 1.3 mile loop trail but it was a beauty. About a third of the way in we saw five wild turkeys. Last night Bill had told us Osceola strain of turkeys in Florida are the wiliest of all turkeys but these five seemed relatively calm.
After the Preserve trail walk we decided we had to have ice and drinking water. We knew we could get it by driving 30 miles south and things didn’t look good to the north according to the map—just two tiny little cross-roads settlements which might or might not have a store. But we headed north anyway and got lucky at Sunniland; there were only two or three houses but there was a gas station with the supplies we needed and we avoided the long round-trip south.
As we drove the 20-mile dirt road back to Bear Island we came upon our first water moccasin ever—this one coiled in the middle of the wide, dusty road. We stopped and jumped out to look him over and he immediately displayed his (or her) cotton-mouth. I approached him with a stick (to move him off the road) and he began nervously twitching his tail like a rattler as the stick touched him. Poor little guy—he was scared to death. Once we moved him into the bushes, we drove on and came upon the Fire Prairie Trail and decided to give it a try. The trailhead area had large rookeries of white ibis black vultures—almost spookily-large numbers of them--- like something out of the Hitchcock movie ‘The Birds’. The trail led us through dense woods then opened up to a savannah with palms and cypress domes, a beautiful five mile round-trip on an old oil-well road. Along the way we saw what we believe was fresh otter scat—very fishy-smelling. As we approached the end of the walk we noticed three young guys with backpacks lounging at the trailhead, not far from our van. They had spent the last two days more or less lost in the backcountry as they followed various looping ATV trails after losing their way on the Florida Trail. But they seemed in good spirits—they had blundered upon the Fire Prairie trailhead and it gave them a waypoint on their map. This also had been close enough to I-75’s cell phone tower for them to call for someone to come pick them up so they were just lounging now until their ride came.
That evening we fired up the laptop and watched the movie ‘Cube’ from part of my nephew’s collection of DVDs he lent me for our trip. That one reminds us of ‘Lost’—a ‘what-if’ study with many plot twists and turns. Perhaps it’s more reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode— somewhat unbelievable but interesting to see where the writers are going with the storyline.

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Sunday, 4 March-

This morning we did some chores at the campsite while we waited for 1300. Today is the second day of turkey season and the campground has twenty or so hunters who fire up their ATVs around 0500 and head off the ATV trails to their blinds. But since they have to quit hunting by 1300, there’s still plenty of time for us to hike in the area without disturbing them or being mistaken for game. We talked with Sandy, one of our camp-mates, and she advised walking the ‘yellow trail’ (one of the ATV trails) which had re-opened this year after being closed for several years. When her husband, Bill, returned from hunting, he came over and advised the same. Our walk was a pretty one for the scenery around us but the further back in we got, the muddier the track became. Our path was good through the palmetto and most of the grassy field areas but became wet in the cypress. It was an interesting mud—a very slick, almost greasy, marl covering a whitish sand. Where the marl was thick and wet, that was it for walking; you were either about to slip and fall if there were any slope to it, or you had to battle to keep the marl from sucking your shoes off. The key in these areas was to find any little bit of vegetation to keep your feet afloat. Where the marl was just a thin layer over sand, the underlying sand provided good traction. The mud was just fine with Labashi who wanted to look for tracks. We saw bobcat tracks and kicked up the first deer we’ve seen in Florida. This one was a large doe and bounded through the jungle-thick foliage of the palmettos with no apparent problem. We walked in for an hour-and-a-half and would have gone further except we came to a large cypress pool we could not get around. This one was about four school-buses long and not only covered the road but extended into the foliage around it. But that was fine—we were ready to go back anyway.
Back at camp we were invited over to Sandy and Bill’s for campfire. Bill is a former painter and sandblaster who has been retired for many years and has traveled extensively. We particularly enjoyed Bill’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Florida turkey, panther, and bobcat as well as his tales of traveling through Alaska in his Airstream travel trailer in 1989.
The campfire was an interesting one. Bill burns fatwood which he gathers from the surrounding forest on his ATV. This fatwood has a turpentine-like pitch which burns easily and throws off both a lot of heat and a lot of black smoke but neither sparks nor crackles as it burns. This wood lights very easily and burns evenly and strongly until the pitch is gone, then there’s only a shell of the log shape remaining.

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Saturday, 3 March – (written at Bear Island campground)

Today we took our time in the campground. Labashi washed her hair at the only shower available, an outdoor cold-water one—but it was fine. “Refreshing”, she says.
We then went in pursuit of an airboat ride. We had seen many airboat businesses along the Tamiami Trail yesterday but the first three we tried were closed this morning. We had a chance at what I call a ‘cattle boat’, i.e., a large airboat that carries 20-or-so people, but we kept going until we found a small one we’d have to ourselves (with the pilot, of course) on the reservation and operated by the Micosukee Indians. We had a great time on our 30-minute ride. Our pilot zoomed us out into the glades at top speed and we were soon side-slipping and heeling around corners and just having a heck of a good time; we felt like kids again. He took us to an ‘Indian village’ where we took a short break to tour the chickees and that’s when we learned why the other airboat services were closed today. There’s a native festival going on. We hoped to see it but the only public one happens between Christmas and New Year’s and the others are private. Our airboat ride back to the dock was again lots of fun and Labashi and I found ourselves ‘flying’, i.e., sticking our arms out like wings and leaning with the turns. That was lots of fun. Cost for our ride was $17 per person. You can get on a cattle boat ride for $10 a person but those rides are for cows.
After our airboat ride we had lunch in the parking lot of the Indian gift shop and then drove back the Loop Road, this time to the Tree Snail Nature Trail. Labashi loves looking for tree snails and we did well here. They are hard to find, even after you realize you should be looking in shady spots in the the wild tamarind trees. We found one or two here and there then hit the jackpot—two different trees with a cluster of six snails close together.
We then continued on the Loop Road to the Gator Hook Strand trail. Labashi wanted to look for panther and bobcat sign in the mud. The trail was an old cypress-log corduroy ‘road’, i.e., cypress logs laid every few inches across the mud to form a road. That must have been a rough one. We met a photographer coming out the trail and he said there were deer, panther, and dog tracks back in there. We saw the deer and dog tracks and some bobcat tracks but we don’t think we saw any panther tracks.
After our little hike in the 90-degree heat we were worn out so headed for civilization and an ice-cream. We drove to the turnoff for Everglades City so we could fill up with gas and have an ice cream before heading back out into the sticks. By that time it was 1600 and the light was really turning nice. We drove up the Birdon Road and Turner River Roads, both nice, wide and smooth (but very dusty) dirt roads with magnificent views across the prairies and palms. We drove some 25 miles back those roads to Bear Island campground, hoping we’d be able to find a spot since we’d been told today was the first day of Florida’s turkey season and the primitive campground was likely to be very busy. We thought we’d chance it and if nothing else, get a nice drive out of it. But there was plenty of room at Bear Lake and it’s a beautiful area. We’re in a grassy, open area with palms all around us. There are lots of campsites here, many filled with hunters with their ATVs for the big hunt tomorrow (hunting is also allowed on Sundays in Florida) but we had no problem finding a nice spot. Among the campers here is a guy we met this morning at Monument Lake. He built his own truck camper, this of lightweight plywood with a fiberglass covering--- like the old boat-construction method.
After a pleasant walk around the camping area, we retired to the van for an evening of blogging and reading.

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Friday, 2 March – (written at Bear Island campground, Big Cypress National Preserve)

After a blissfully-peaceful night at Mitchell Landing campsite in Big Cypress, we drove the Loop Road through the backcountry. This is a dirt road looping 23 miles from Shark Valley around to rejoin the Tamiami Trail near Monument Lake Campground. We did the loop at no more than 15 miles per hour, stopping often to look for wildlife in the canals and sloughs (“slews”). I bet we saw 500 alligators, no more than two or three at a time in any one pool of water but there were lots of pools. Actually, the south side of the road was nearly a continuous canal, heavily overgrown with fairly open sawgrass behind it while the north side had many stands of cypress trees (called ‘strands’), generally in a few inches of water. We also saw many egrets, herons, and ibises and a new one for us, an American swallow-tailed snail kite, a hawk-like bird with a widely-split vee tail, like a swallow. This was one of the more productive wildlife roads we’ve ever driven.
Once back on the Tamiami Trail we turned toward Miami and drove a few miles to the Oasis Visitor’s Center. After talking with the rangers we took a short walk on the Florida Trail. This visitor’s center is often considered the starting point of the 1400-mile Florida Trail but it actually starts seven miles south along the Loop Road in the middle of nowhere. The section between Loop Road and Oasis is notoriously wet. Hikers routinely plot through ankle-to-knee-deep water in this area and keep a sharp lookout for water moccasins.
After the visitor’s center we drove to Monument Lake campground and registered there for the night even though it was only 1400. We read and relaxed in the van and had a wonderful steady breeze across Monument Lake to keep us cool on this 90-degree day. A few hours later we drove to Shark Valley Visitor’s Center to join a full-moon bike ride we had read about yesterday. This ride was a treat. We left the visitor’s center at 1800 and rode the tram road, stopping to watch the sun dip below the horizon and for the ranger to have us get down on our bellies on the tram road to give us a snake’s-eye view of the Everglades. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we realized we could see our moon-shadow. We had no lights in order to preserve our night vision but we’d still see occasional great blue herons or vees of white ibises fly over. At the far end of the tram trail is a tower and that’s where the ranger handed out chemical light sticks. We each put one on our back so the person behind would not run into us. We spent a half hour on the tower platform, looking and intently listening. We could make out a rookery of ibises below and could just make out the gators in the pool below. Afterwards we remounted our bikes and headed for the parking lot with one stop, this one a sit-down on the tram road while the ranger talked to us about our fears in the night here in gator-paradise. The ride had been pretty much bug-free up to that point but they caught up with us during the stop so we were soon ready to roll again. The ride was a 15-miler and both Labashi and I had sore tushes by the end. Our little folding bikes did very well and it was a joy to ride in a group on this perfect night.
The ride ended by 2100 and Labashi and I headed back to our campground but on the way decided we ought to see Loop Road at night. Labashi wants to see a Florida panther or (I should say ‘and’) a bobcat. This is prime habitat for both. But tonight wasn’t our night to see one. We cruised back the Loop Road for a half-hour but then turned around and headed for the campground to end a great evening.

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Thursday, 1 March – (written at Mitchell Landing campground, Big Cypress National Preserve)

We slept in until 0800 this morning at Wal-mart, then drove back across Miami to the Fairchild Tropical Gardens. This is one of the world’s premier tropical gardens and has won many awards for both the garden displays and the work they do in research and conservation of tropical plants with other countries as well as the training of graduate-level students in tropical plant specialties. The special event there now is a Dale Chihuly exhibition. Mr. Chihuly is an artist in blown glass. In this case, his exquisite glass creations are placed among the tropical plants and fountains throughout the Fairchild grounds. We were at first a bit put off by the $20 per person entrance fee but this garden and exhibition turned out to be well worth the price. One of the highlights of the day was our blundering around in a remote area of the garden and happening upon iguanas lounging in the sun. We were astounded by the tropical plants. From baobob and banana trees, to bird-of-paradise flowers to displays of fantastic orchids, a very active butterfly garden, a dense rainforest, a Madagascar desert garden, and surprise after surprise of Chihuly glasswork hidden among the plants, it was wonderful.
We left the Fairchild by 1500 and drove to a nearby Publix and shopped for groceries since last night’s Wal-mart was an old one and didn’t have a grocery section. We then headed west to the Shark Valley Visitor’s Center in the Everglades National Park along the Tamiami Trail. We only stopped there for info on two primitive campsites shown on the map. We drove on to the Mitchell Landing primitive campsite and set up for the night. We camped next to five young guys from Indiana who are passing through on spring break. We had fun chatting with them around the campfire before retiring to the van to blog and read.

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Wednesday, 28 February –

We spent today waiting for the van to be repaired at World Ford in Miami. This is one of those ‘I hope we did the right thing’ situations. I called the service guy from our hotel late this morning and learned the van had not failed any tests or had any repeat episodes of the problem. The only diagnostic codes were for an oxygen sensor and another emissions sensor. The good news is there are no codes for the electronic fuel injection or ignition module. The bad news is it’s a guess as to what caused yesterday’s mysterious problem. The best guess is fuel pump so I elected to have the sensors and fuel pump replaced and while we’re at it, change out the fuel filter again (in case the new one had gotten clogged). While the technician was doing that I spent the afternoon on the web on my laptop using the wi-fi connection in the customer waiting area. I found two web sites with forums about Ford trucks. The best one is Ford-trucks.com, which has a section dedicated to 1986-and-newer full-size Ford vans and also has a section with the text of the technical service bulletins and recalls. There were three very minor recalls for the ’94 Econoline 150 but none of them have to do with the engine. I searched some 500 messages about Econoline vans and found two reports of similar mysterious problems with the engine shutting down and starting just fine a few minutes later plus five or six other reports of running problems somewhat similar. While fuel pump was one of the possible causes, the others are throttle positioning sensor, a clogged fuel cap, an obstructed fuel-filler vent pipe, the ignition module, and the catalytic converter. Each possibility had its proponents. Well, we’re going with fuel pump and fuel filter and if that still doesn’t work then we’ll try something else.
The tech started what was estimated to be a four hour job after lunch and had to stay overtime in order to get it finished by 1800. The bill was just under $1000 (gulp!) plus the hotel room cost me $132 (with the 13% accommodations tax ripoff) so that made for a pricy day.
We left the dealer by 1830 and headed to the nearest Wal-mart where we thought we’d stock up and then head out the Tamiami Trail to a campsite. We figured this Wal-mart would not permit overnight parking and things didn’t look good in the parking lot—no RV’s in sight and it was well after dark. In the store we asked the greeter but she didn’t know and called for the manager. We waited 20 minutes or so but he didn’t show so we said we’d try the security guy we had seen cruising the parking lot. That was a trip in itself—he didn’t speak English. But two other employees were on break nearby and came to our rescue. We were indeed welcome to stay.
That turned out to be a mixed blessing. On the one hand we had a free camping spot for the night and it seemed like it would be a pretty good one. We found a row which didn’t have much traffic passing by and, after getting some ice, we settled in for the night. But this Wal-mart turned out to be a record-setter. It stands second only Staunton, VA for being the noisiest Wal-mart. After 2200 it was inundated by that special breed of Floridiots who love loud exhausts. To make matters worse, the loud exhausts kept setting off car alarms. You know those car alarms that have a series of sirens, honks, warbles, fire-engine BRACCKKKs, and whistles? Yep— they’d be set off and go through twenty or so cycles before silencing themselves. Nobody paid any attention to the alarms, they just wailed on and on for twenty minutes or so before falling silent only to start all over again after a loud exhaust or the parking lot cleaner would go by. I saw 0200 and hadn’t gotten to sleep yet. Then things settled down and we finally got some sleep. Sometimes the price of a free night at Wal-mart is pretty steep. Then again, we were awakened in our $60 per night campground in Key West at 0400, 0500, and 0600 by fishing boats roaring to life and chugging out.