The Sandcastle

Everyone who has never been there knows what the Everglades are. They are swamps. Dark, murky places with exposed tree roots with lots of Spanish moss hanging from the overhead branches.  

Everyone is wrong. The Everglades are a collections of nine different ecosystems none of which is called swamp. They are: 1. Marine and Estuarine, 2. Coastal marsh, 3. Mangrove, 4. Cypress, 5. Coastal Prairie, 6. Freshwater Slough, 7. Pineland, 8. Freshwater Marl Prairie, and 9. Hardwood Hammock.

Much of the Everglades is a river called the Shark River Slough which is 50 miles wide and 80 miles long whose depth is often measured in inches. It looses only 14 feet of elevation over that 80 miles which makes a grade of only o.003%. But that grade is enough to keep this fresh water moving. 

Sawgrass grows in that water. The grass hides the water from view at ground level so it looks like any prairie, but if you walk out into the river of grass you’ll get wet. Today you need to walk a little further out, though, since we were here during the dry season. You can see dirt at the front edge of this scene where there will be water when the rainy season starts.

In this river of grass are places where the dirt piled up a little more allowing trees to take root there. These are Hardwood Hammocks.

We drove Flamingo Road deep into the park and saw several of the ecosystems.

    

From the Pa-hay-okee Overlook Trail Dave saw these:

 

And from the Mahogany Hammock Trail he saw these:

  

This is a Poisonwood Tree. Don’t touch.

If you have a canoe or kayak you can follow one of the canoe trails into a backcountry campsite to get a real feel for this wilderness. We camped at Long Pine Key in the Pineland and at Flamingo in the Coastal Prairie.  

The Coastal Prairie exists only because of hurricanes. Storm surge smothers the roots of trees then the prairies grows in the sediment left behind. Hurricanes help other trees. This one made its way to the light when trees around it were knocked down.

One thing you don’t want to knock you down is one of these:

They call them panthers here. I always thought panthers were black. These are a tawny color which I always thought were called cougars. The music in my head, though, belongs to the Pink Panther.

TTYL

Linda

We visited two museums that tell a lot about what they Florida Keys are all about.

The first was The History of Diving Museum in Islamorada. This houses the diving apparatus collected by one couple. It is an amazingly complete collection of items from all over the world and was well worth the admission of $12–unless you can get credit for the $2 coupon you should have printed out from the internet like we did. There is no parking for big rigs. We managed to squeeze into a corner of their lot with our small RV. Here’s some of what we saw:

                

The other “museum” was the visitor center at John Pennenkamp Coral Reef State Park. Their 30,000 gallon aquarium was closed for rehabilitation but we watched their 30 minute video and looked at the smaller aquariums and displays and felt we got our $3 admission’s worth. You can park big rigs here; in fact you can camp here.  It’s a state park with a lot of things to do within the park and you can see these displays for free if you pay for camping.

   

Some of the displays had sayings we liked. Like this one.

And the one that said, “Blue, Blue. Sail on Through. Brown, Brown. Run Aground.” We’d already seen evidence of the truth of that one.

I was sitting on a bench trying to see the shells in a display across from me. I couldn’t read the labels so I asked Dave, “What’s the one that looks like a helmet?” 

He read the label then replied, “A helmet conch.”

Of course.

I was hoping to be able to tell you more about the diving displays but I am writing this from a WalMart parking lot where Dave just finished shopping and we need to go buy propane before the place closes since we will be boondocking back at Everglades National Park for the next couple of nights. We’ll not have the capability to upload all this there and I chose not to make you wait. For once.

TTYL,

Linda

On U.S. Hwy 1 heading down into the Florida Keys the concrete barriers are turquoise. They become plain concrete later on, though. Probably because the turquoise barriers would not show up as well against the turquoise water of the ocean and bays.

Also, as we approached the Keys the warning sign said crocodiles instead of the alligators we’ve become used to seeing. Your guess is probably better than mine as to why that should be so.

As we entered Key Largo one of the first things I saw was a sign identifying a building as a hurricane shelter. Sure glad it’s not that season now but just in cast there is a rogue one we’ll know where to go.

The next sign I noticed was a place advertising, “tie downs, roof overs, storm shutters.”

And the schools team is the hurricanes.

Do you think they are proud of living in the path of hurricanes?

Pop’s motel had a sign saying, “Wish you were here.” I bet they do. It’s what I call shoulder season now–most of the snowbirds have left and the summer vacationers aren’t due for a few months yet. That makes it a good time for us. The mobs are gone but the weather is nice.

This bridge is called seven mile bridge. If you look closely at the horizon to the left of the bridge you can see land.

The keys have their own deer. The Key Deer we slowed for as it crossed the road ahead of us was very small. I don’t know if they only get that large because we only saw the one.

We drove over a boat. It’s OK. We were on a bridge over a causeway it was transiting.

Dave got a kick out of the billboard that said, “Prevent scurvy. Eat Key Lime Pie.”

Whoever is in charge of bridge construction here has been hard at it. We drove on lots of bridges that had old ones still standing along side. Instead of spending money to tear them down they take out a section at each end to keep people off them.

Or, if the bridge is not too unsafe they leave parts of them as fishing piers or walking paths. Or, in this case it is closed to all vehicles except, apparently, ones for this island. They still have their access ramp and I saw one very small truck near their end of the bridge.

We camped two nights at Long Key State Park in an attempt to catch up with ourselves. We had the ocean right behind us, Hwy 1 not far in front of us, and Florida Bay on the other side of the highway. We had really good breezes here which made me not mind the heat of the day so much. Here’s how close the ocean is to our campsite:

   

And here’s a little fellow that came to visit.  You can see he’s shy; he ran away when Dave went out.  So it’s good we got his picture through our window before he did.

 

I saw a billboard advertising Rapala fishing lures. It said, “More hits than Google.” I doubt that’s true but it’s a good line.

There were lots of people along U.S. Hwy 1 waiting for the bus to come. I wondered how long they would have to wait since the clerk at Boyd’s, when we asked about taking the bus to Mallory Square, said something along the lines of, “You’re in the Keys. The bus will come when the driver is ready to bring it.”

We saw some kids about middle school age walking home from school. I looked at their backpacks and found myself thinking, “The girls have their whole lives in those packs. The boys have today’s assignment.”

As we were crossing a bridge I saw a floating billboard telling boaters they are coming near a tiki bar. And that, my friends, is a fine example of the Florida Keys.

TTYL,

Linda

We blew our budget big time in Key West, Florida. We just kept telling ourselves this was a once in a lifetime visit as we spent more and more money.

It started with the campground. We went to Boyd’s Campground. No, I’m not related to any of these Boyd’s. Perhaps if I was they would not have charged us $111 to camp one night. My stepmother let us camp in her driveway for free. Boyd’s was a nice enough place but only their location made it worth anywhere near that much money. It turns out if we had waited three more days to come here we would have hit their off-season discount. No, you don’t want to know what it would have cost then.

Next, we asked the campground clerk about driving into town. She marked a map showing us that we couldn’t drive anywhere near where we wanted to go in our RV. No vehicles over 21 feet are allowed in Old Town (ours is 24 feet) and the streets are too narrow to let us meet oncoming traffic in an RV as wide as ours. We had heard from friends who have an RV like ours that they were told, if they parked theirs, it would be towed away. They were told, “Yes, you can park here. But we will tow it if you do.”

So we did some research into various modes of transportation and decided the best thing to do would be rent a car from Enterprise and have them bring it to the campground this afternoon and we would bring it back in the morning. They said, “Fine. That’ll be $75.” Ouch! Not having our own insurance that covers rental cars sure hurts. But we reminded ourselves–once in a lifetime.  So they brought us a car and we drove into town with only two stops on our agenda.

The first was the southern most point in the continental U.S.

This is undoubtedly the closest I will ever get to my birth place. My Dad was in the navy stationed in Cuba when I was born there. I was only three months old when we came home and none of us have ever been back.

Our second stop was, of course, Mallory Square for their famous sunset celebration. Only $12 to park for three hours there.

We went a couple of hours before sunset to get a good spot since we’ve been told thousands of people come out for this. There was a cruise ship parked between the square and the sunset so we walked further south and found the Bistro. They have tables with umbrellas on the dock so we decide we’d have a leisurely dinner thus claiming comfortable seats for the wait until sunset. We did not know that the seating area on one side of the walkway had a different menu from the one on the other side so we choose the expensive one because it had better shade. Of course the shade moved as we sat there so we wound up in the sun again. Then, because we had lots of time to kill we had a four course dinner:  appetizer, salad, main course, and desert. Oh, yes, and Dave had wine. $125. At least I have some steak leftover. And Dave said their key lime pie was not bitter.

While eating we also watched some free-lance entertainers who hang out in the area each evening making money off the sunset watchers. There was one entertainer who didn’t understand crowds, though. He yelled and blew a whistle trying to drum up an audience. Not enough people came so he didn’t perform. Wrong. You start performing to draw a crowd. Who’s going to stand around and watch him blow his whistle when there’s all those other performers actually doing something?

And we watched boats.

Some of the people in the boats were also there to watch the sunset. The crowd got very unhappy whenever a boat passed between us and the sun. But Dave managed to take enough pictures of the sun setting into the ocean without boats blocking the view to satisfy those of us who have always lived inland.

       

And I got to see the green flash. For me, a once in a lifetime event.

TTYL,

Linda