Big Cypress

Just to the north of Everglade's National Park is Big Cypress National Preserve. On Tuesday we briefly headed into one of the two northern most visitor centers in Everglades, the Gulf Coast Visitor Center, and learned a little about Big Cypress and were told to stop in at their Swamp Welcome Center (the red arrow on the map).

At the visitor center we learned about the Florida panther. The used to be fairly common all along the east coast. Now, their range has been greatly shrunk to only small parts of Southern Florida and they are incredible rare. Each panther has a home range of a few hundred square kilometers. This makes it tricky to protect them, as they're bound to cross roads and stumble upon ranches.

Even though we had sworn off gravel roads we ended up driving 20 miles up a gravel road to the Bear Island Camp ground, in the area that is in the purple box to the North of the map. This camp ground was the most remote of the camping choices and we were told that if we were going to see panthers anywhere in the park it would be up in that region. We were so glad that we went up there, it was well worth the drive. Unfortunately we didn't spot any panthers.

We decided to spend two nights up at this camp ground so that we could explore the area a bit. There were a lot of off road vehicle trails in the area, so for our full day we went took our bikes out for a long loop on the trails. It was a beautiful ride, in which we saw lots of wildlife, especially birds.

 

One of the most fun things about Big Cypress what the fact that there were alligators everywhere! They were sitting right next to the road on the way in, including right outside of the visitor center. We'll discuss alligators and crocodiles more in our Everglades post!

 

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.

Expense Report: December

December was another cheaper month. It was kind of a mixed bag as far as expenses since we spent 10 days staying with family. Even though we rushed from Southern Florida to Austin, we didn't drive too much. Our biggest expenses were a little bit of maintenance and some sightseeing in a national park.

Maintenance: After a lot of searching, we finally found a spare wheel online at hubcaphaven.com. We had the tire mounted at Discount Tire, and bought a fuel filter and some o-rings at AutoZone.

New wheel + mounting: $193.95
AutoZone: $31.37
RV running total: $19,637.86

Fuel: As always, if you're interested, go check out our Fuel log. December was a pretty light driving month since we decided to rush to Texas, but then hung out there and didn't drive the RV at all for 10 days.

Gas: $502.59

Propane: $19 - This took us from all the way empty to all the way full

Food: $544 - Again, we did a good job not eating out. We did go to quite a few restaurants in Austin, but we also did a lot of big group meals with the family that brought expenses down.

RV Stickers / Postcards / Birthday and Christmas cards: $21

Lodging: $90 - We spent a night at Days Inn and $10 for a couple of nights at Big Cypress.

Sightseeing: $127.44 - we took 2 trips onto the water at Biscayne National Park, since it really is the only way to see it.

Phone and Internet: $76 - Did a bit better than previous month staying off data. Probably had a lot to do with time with family, who had wifi, and utilizing public libraries.

Total December travel expenses: $1583.76

Total cost of the trip so far: ~$30150 - This includes the RV and all of it's repairs, insurance and maintenance
Days Traveling: 142
Cost / person / day : 106.15

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

Natchez Trace Parkway

At Tom and Joanne's church in Texas, one of the members told us about the Natchez Trace Parkway. He only told us that is was a pretty drive. Since part of it was on our path and we had a bit of extra time, we decided to check it out.

We met up with the Trace in Clinton, MS. We had no idea what to expect so we got on it and drove only a few miles until we saw signs for a visitor center. It happened to be the Clinton visitor center, but it had plenty of information about the Trace. In the visitor center, we met two volunteer who were reading up on the best hikes in North Cascades National Park. They were planning a trip up to the northwest, so we had a fun chat about the PNW. They recommended a restaurant along the Trace which we'll talk about later.

The Natchez Trace Parkway is a 440-mile commercial free road that stretches from Natchez, MS to Nashville, TN. The trail was initially forged by Native Americans and used for centuries before being used by European Americans. In the early 1800s, it was used by traders from Tennessee and Kentucky who would build flat boats to carry their goods down the Mississippi. After trading their wares, they would sell their boats for the value of the lumber and trek back along the trace. Eventually, steamboats made the return trip much easier on boats and the Trace was slowly forgotten until the 1930s when, under FDR, the U.S. government decided to commemorate the history of the trail with construction of the parkway.

There were lots of historical stops all along the trace. The older ones native American villages and burial mounds. We stopped at a few of them along the road and enjoyed reading all of the posted information.

There were also some stops with some more recent history including the old mansion location and family cemetery of the an old politician Cowles Mead. His property was destroyed during the civil war so very little remains.

Further up the Trace, in Tennessee is a monument to Meriweather Lewis. He was traveling up the trace to Washington, DC when he was found dead of a gunshot wound and is believed to have killed himself. We didn't make it that far up the trace but are hoping to loop back around and see this monument.

Along the Trace there is a historic town called French Camp. There are several things to see and do around town designed to show how early Americans lived. However we arrived fairly late and only went to the town cafe, The Council House Cafe. We had been told at the visitor center that it was run by a school for students with disabilities in French Camp. This was half true. It is run by a Christian boarding school in town, but the students were no disabled. Either way, the food was amazing and modestly priced. We had convinced ourselves to go and spend money because we were thinking of it as a charity, but the food was well worth it and we were glad we went.

We spent the night at the only free campsite along the Trace, Jeff Busby Park. For a free campsite it was rather amazing. It was fairly crowded and the spots were not well defined and hard to distinguish in the dark, but we found a place to park. There were nice flush toilets and in the morning we took a nice hike up the hill to a lookout.

Even though the parkway is not a "National Park", we decided that, like Big Cypress, it deserved its own sticker on the side of the RV.