Travel Update 12

After Thanksgiving and showers in the Ocala National Forest, we headed south to see Florida's national parks. We drove a pretty direct route while avoiding big cities and freeways. Our first stop was in Naples, a very tourist heavy town. We decided against paying $6 to see the sunset at state park.

Crossing southern Florida, we first stopped in the Big Cypress Swamp before reaching Homestead. Most of our nights were spent at Cracker Barrels this week, as there weren't any free camping options outside of Big Cypress. We spent a full day exploring Everglades and saw so much we had to break it into three posts (1, 2, 3). We also took a day trip down the Keys.

On the 7th, we took some time to work on writing blogs and tried to take Aiden to a local dog park. The park we found was closed for renovation but had a lot of agility equipment. The park also had a variety of simple exercise stations with instructions on how to do them.

 

That night we decided to stay at a hotel since the 8th is Kathleen's birthday and she loves hotel breakfast. We took our evening tour of Biscayne Bay and got some really good Jamaican food from a small hole in the wall restaurant called Yardie Spice recommended to us by the Everglades park volunteer from Bremerton. We stayed up late to catch the Hawaii vs Oregon men's basketball game before getting a decent night sleep before waking up early to continue exploring Biscayne.

Keys

We spent a lot of time trying to make Dry Tortugas National Park work. To go to Dry Tortugas without our own boat, we needed to drive to Key West and take a boat early in the morning. Our RV would not fit in the garage of the place that ran the tours, nor could we figure out where to park it in Key West otherwise. No RV parks were close enough to the dock to solve the parking problem. We tried to look at hotels and AirBnBs, but very few are pet friendly, and the ones that do tended to have restrictions such as: one dog, under 30 lbs. So we decided against going to Dry Tortugas and made a long day trip out of the Florida Keys!

We started out early in the morning, hoping to catch sunrise on Key Largo. Turns out there are very few places we could see eastward on the key, but we found a park that wasn't open, but we parked beside it and watched.

On the way down we just drove, enjoying the narrow stretch of keys that were initially connected for railroad use. When we got to Key West we decided to go to Fort Zachary Taylor State Park because we knew we could park the RV there. Unfortunately, they don't let you walk out of the park and re-enter, so we didn't get to see much of the town of Key West.

The end of HW-1 in Key West.

In the state park, we took a free guided tour of the fort. The fort was built with French help as a mid 19th century effort to secure the Atlantic coastline. There are several other identical forts (including Fort Jefferson in Dry Tortugas) that together guard the few channels that exists into the Gulf of Mexico.

The french design worked well in a lot of ways, because it was a structurally sound fort. However, there were also several ways in which southern Florida differs greatly from France that were not taken into account. For example the toilets in the fort relied on the 7-8 foot french tides in order to "flush." Southern Florida has tides closer to one foot and those toilets simply didn't work.

Fort Taylor held a significant strategic position in the civil war as well. It was always controlled by the Union and stopped many blockade runners from getting supplies from Pensacola to confederate forces further north by water.

As the weapons of war changed, so did the fort. When artillery became strong enough to shoot over the horizon and radar could be relied on to target boats, the top layer of the fort was taken off to make a lower profile. They also needed to the walls from bricks to concrete. There are records of outdated artillery being sold to different cities for display purposes. However, when the parks service hired someone to track them down, they could not be found. It turned out, that they were used as filler for concrete and somebody either forged the sale documents or walked away with the money. Modern scans of the concrete have found all the old cannons buried in the concrete. 

Before leaving Key West, we took a short stop at the Eco-Discovery Center, where they had some informative exhibits about coral reefs, the Florida national parks and deep sea exploration. The highlight for us was a 3-D video of snorkeling in Dry Tortugas, which made up for us not being able to go this time around.

On our way back, we got hungry and decided to stop at a Cuban place we had seen on the way down. It was a cute little hole in the wall place that offered authentic Cuban sandwiches. They were amazing!

   

We caught the sunset on the way up too and made it back to the Homestead to catch the Pac-12 championship game!

 

The Keys are a beautiful place to visit, but not easy to plan with an RV. We would love to go back to Key West and spend some time there in a B&B and just walk the streets. You don't need a vehicle to get around.

Everglades - South Entrance, Part 3

The sixth stop of the day was the Pinelands trail, the light blue arrow on the map. This trail is a lot different from other trails in the park and reminded us more of Eastern Oregon than the tropical trails in the area, although there were still occasional palm trees.  For Kathleen the most exciting thing on this trail was the tree snails. They can be hard to see at first, but if you slow down they are everywhere. 

 

 

They come in a wide variety of colors, and given the fact that they don't move very far or quickly their range is quite small. This means that there are large genetic differences between the populations even a few trees over. Collectors used to take a few members of a population and then burn down the tree in the area to make their specimen more rare, and drive up the value. 

After this trail, we decided to skip ahead to the visitor center, the dark blue arrow, because we concerned that they were going to close before we got a chance to fully look around there. The visitor center was pretty typical, and nice. The fun thing at the visitor center though was chatting with another couple that was entering the park in their RV. 

They were probably in their late 40s, early 50s and we learned they were from Bremerton. They are on a similar trip to ours and we had a great time discussing the Pacific Northwest with them and the park ranger who happened to be from Seattle. They said they were headed to the southwest in the late winter / early spring, so hopefully we'll see them again down the road.

After the visitor center we went back to one of the most popular trails in the park, the Anhinga Trail. This trail, marked with the purple arrow on the map, also says it has the Royal Palm visitor center. There isn't a lot by way of a visitor center there, although they were setting up for an event outside the next day.

The trail itself is a short boardwalk through a swamp area with a view of tons of birds.

 

 

 

We got there just at the right time,  just as the sun was starting to set and everything was gorgeous. It was the perfect end to our first day in Everglades.

Everglades - South Entrance, Part 2

After leaving the Flamingo Visitor Center area we wanted to visit all of the boardwalk trails on our way back up the park road. Our next stop was the West Lake Trail, marked on the map with a yellow arrow.

All throughout the park there are canoe trails and canoe campgrounds that look like they would be a lot of fun to come back to. The West Lake trail head is the start to one of these trails, but it also has a short boardwalk hike down to the lake. Unfortunately the boardwalk down at the lake end was destroyed in a hurricane, so you couldn't complete the loop. But the walk was still beautiful and we saw lots of really cool plants and animals.

 

  

We also spent some time in the parking lot messing with camera settings and getting great pictures of a crow.

 

The next stop up the road was the Mahogany Hammock, the light green arrow on the map. "Hammocks" are everywhere in Florida. They are little "islands" of trees that pop up in a very different ecosystem, usually due to a small change in elevation in a wetland. The area around this hammock is marl prairie which is basically a flooded grassland. Unlike other places around the park that are sloughs, the water here doesn't flow, it just slowly sinks back into the ground. The marl prairie is full of sawgrass and periphyton which help nourish fish that live in the area. 

 

Once you get into the hammock itself the environment changes completely and becomes more like a dense jungle. 

There are several very cool plants plants in the hammock, including multiple species of bromeliad. Although pineapples are in the bromeliad family, most of the bromeliads in the everglades are "air plants." They live in clumps on the sides of other trees, often catching water in their leaves. They often have beautiful flowers, but we were not in the right season to see them blooming. 

 

One of the most interesting plants in the hammock is the strangler fig. While most plants have their fertilized sprouts start in the ground and grow up, the strangler fig actually works in reverse. The sprouts land on an already established tree and then sends roots down until they find the forest floor. Eventually these roots can cover the entire host tree and effective box the other tree out, tacking its place in the canopy. 

 

After Mahogany Hammock we headed up the Pa-Hay-Okee overlook, the dark green arrow on the map. This boardwalk features an elevated overlook to look out of the "river of grass" in the Shark River Slough that everglades is known for. In contrast to the marl prairie above the waters in this slough are steadily flowing south down to the ocean, although from above it almost looks like a dry prairie. Somehow, we didn't seem to take any pictures on this trail.

As you can see on the map at the top, we made three more stops on the way out of the park. However this post is already getting long and it's getting to be time to leave the library. So it looks like our singe day in the south entrance of Everglades will be coming to you in three parts. Stay tuned! 

Everglades - Flamingo Visitor Center Area

Everglades National Park is the third largest national park outside of Alaska, tenth overall because the Alaskan parks are huge. There are three ways to access the park, two of them of them are in the northern section of the park and we skipped past them in order to do them on the way back out. Instead we took a day to drive in to the southern entrance and along the longer road into the park.  

As you can see on the map, there are a ton of different ecosystems in the park. Southern Florida is very very flat. The highest point in the 1.5 million acre park is 20 feet, and every inch of that elevation makes a huge difference in the ecosystem. 

We started by driving the entire road down to the far visitor center, Flamingo (red arrow on the map). The Flamingo visitor center has a marina and is the main place where the park meets the sea. The center itself was badly damaged in 2017 by hurricane Irma and they currently operating out of a temporary trailer while they fix the building.

Southern Florida is the only place in the world that has both crocodiles and alligators. They don't actually live "together" because alligators live in fresh water, while crocodiles prefer the brackish water in the mangroves, but they are living very close to one another. Aside from where they are living there are a couple of ways to tell them apart. The easiest is to look at their head shape.

Alligator Skull on the left, Crocodile on the right. 

Alligators have much boxier skulls that extend more or less straight out to their snout. The upper jaw of the alligator is wider than the lower jaw so their teeth are hidden when their mouth is closed. The crocodile, on the other hand, has a very V-shaped skull and their upper and lower jaws are the same width, resulting in a "toothy grin" appearance when their mouths are closed. 

Alligators are much more common southern Florida. We saw tons of the them all over Big Cypress as well is in both the southern and northern sections of Everglades. We were pretty lucky to get to also see one crocodile hanging out in the Marina next to the Flamingo visitor center. 

We also got to see some Manatees swimming around in the marina. Unfortunately the water was very murky so they were hard to see, and ever harder to take good pictures of. It was still fun to see them though. They were swimming around each other very playfully and one of the rangers said that it was part of a mating ritual. 

Down near the visitor center we also did a quick hike around Eco Pond, which is known for its bird watching. It didn't disappoint.

Left - Great Egret
Right - Snowy Egret

Wood Stork

Ibis

Crow eating a baby turtle