The Sandcastle – Page 151 – Blowing in the wind

Miami Area

I found a few more notes I took in the Everglades so I’ll add them here. It’s really not far from Miami.

In camp at Long Pine Key it sounded like big, fat raindrops on our RV but it was really big, fat bugs flying into our windows and skylight. We couldn’t open our door without something trying to come in.

I discovered just how much I am addicted to the internet. I was ready to leave the Everglades before we got done there because I couldn’t get connected. I’m not happy to know that about myself but it is now a fact of my life. All my current friendships are through the internet and all my travel research is done there. Being disconnected is disconcerting.

Driving down Flamingo Road we went through Rock Reef Pass–elevation 3 feet!

And I saw a mirage on that road. The headlights of an approaching vehicle were reflected in water on the road where there was no water.

The entrance to Flamingo campground is being rebuilt. The old place where you pay was closed and the new one not yet opened. Dave and several other campers were trying to decide what to do. The consensus was to fill out the paperwork and wait for the ranger to come collect it But the ranger drove his rounds without visiting us. Free camping is good.

How could we not stop here?

Fruit and Spice Park in Redland, Florida, turned out to be a large collection of tropical plants from all over the world that had been turned over to Miami-Dade County to become a park. You can take a 45 minute tram tour of the place or do your own walking tour. They have samples you can taste at their visitor center. But the don’t sell any of them. And we were overdue for lunch. So we settled for buying some choco/cashew ice cream before leaving. After I tasted most of the samples, of course. Dave, not being an adventuresome eater as you may have guessed by now, tried none of them.

Our next stop was Scully’s Tavern in Miami–another Diners, Drive-ins and Dives place. The building was part of a yellow strip mall–not at all impressive. Inside was so dark we had to wait for our eyes to adjust before we could walk further in. But the food was fabulous! I had the Swisshroom Burger and Dave had the Cheddar Bacon Burger. I saved half my sandwich, of course, and all our leftover French Fries. I rarely save French fries because the don’t really reheat well but these were too good to not try to reheat them. Plus we got two deserts to go–my carrot cake and Dave’s Key Lime Pie. Later we had supper where French Fries and desert were featured items supplemented by deviled eggs and an apple.

In between those two places we passed a couple of interesting signs. One had the hurricane symbol we’ve come to know so well lately and said, “Emergency Evacuation Bus Pick-up Site.” I wonder if that sign predates or postdates Hurricane Katrina?

The other was a sign on an orchard that wasted no words. It simply said, “Thieves Shot.”

We went to Larry and Penny Thompson Park in Miami for two nights. This is another Miami-Dade County Park. Their campground is laid out in “pods”. They look like a child’s drawing of a cross between a lollipop and the sun. The road in is the stick then there’s a circular road with campsite radiating from it. There are also a few sites within each circle. There are eleven pods with 20 sites per pod with four restroom/laundry buildings spread among them. No problem getting a site midweek at this time of year. We got a site next to one of the laundry rooms so we could do four loads of laundry. It’s nice to have everything clean again.

Our table came furnished with a piece of fruit that was popular with the local wildlife. I got pictures of the first and last visitor but missed the pair of cardinals that also visited.

As you can see the blue-jay knocked the fruit off the table so I don’t know if we had any visitors after that.

As we packed up to leave this morning Dave discovered our left front tire is low. It is also showing uneven wear. Apparently the alignment we had done in Phoenix after noting wear in the right front tire needs to be done again.

As we left the park , we drove to the various laundry rooms there trying to trade all five of the paperback books I’ve read for new ones. We succeeded by taking all the books except the one in German but I’m not sure how happy I am about some of the ones I got in exchange. I decided better a couple of Harlequin Romances I haven’t read than keeping books I have read, though. At least they’ll make good trades down the road since they are popular with a lot of people.

Then we went back to the Walmart in Florida City where I had my last prescription refill done. I found out this morning they’d only given me 30 pills instead of the 90 I was supposed to get. These meds are too expensive for me to want to pay for two months worth when the insurance denies the claim they already paid. I’m glad we are still only about 30 minutes from Florida City, though. Can you imagine trying to get the other 60 pills at a different WalMart? It took us two hours to get out of there but they did give me the rest of the pills without argument once my turn came. And we bought groceries and other stuff while we were there.

Then we drove to Miami Beach looking for the 11th Street Diner at the corner of 11th and Washington.

Parking in that neighborhood is on street and cars are parked bumper to bumper so we were beginning to think we wouldn’t get to eat there when we turned the corner in front of the diner and found a drive-in spot right in front of a loading zone. Our bumper and the Segway hung into the loading zone but there was a parking enforcement officer nearby so I hurried over and asked her if we would be OK. She said, “Yes.”

So eat we did. Dave had the Cowboy Burger, a chocolate fudge malt, and a piece of Key Lime pie. I had the Sobe grilled chicken sandwich with avocado and pineapple, a diet Coke, and a couple bites of Dave’s pie. No leftovers today. My sandwich came with chips and Dave’s fries didn’t look worth the hassle.

By now is was about 4:30 in the afternoon and all we wanted to do was get out of the big city traffic. Right. I saw a couple of vehicles that had been playing bumper cars but we didn’t participate.

Further north we stopped to get fuel. This is the first station where I’ve seen slave pumps. I’d heard about them on the Escapee’s discussion forum so I recognized them for what they are. Slave pumps are on the right side of the vehicle when you are pulled up to regular pumps on the left side. The slave pumps have no tops that let you pay there. You pay on the left and pump from both if you have a vehicle with auxiliary tanks. That way it doesn’t take as long to fill up those trucks with two large tanks. Plus the slave tanks have the larger nozzles that dispense fuel faster than the regular nozzles. We can’t use them. They don’t fit into our fuel filler pipe which is good because our tank isn’t big enough to keep us from pouring fuel everywhere if we filled that fast.

About 6:20 p.m. we drove by the exits for the town of Jupiter where our next museum stop was supposed to be. Way too late for that day. We just want to get to our next campground but its exit is till 14 miles ahead of us. At least at Jupiter we finally drove out of the city. It’s nice to see trees along the road again.

At last! St Lucie Lock Recreation Area. We were greeted by an attendant saying, “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to get here.” So were we but she obviously was looking for someone else since no one but us knew we were headed here. The people she was waiting for had reserved the last spot. They might still come so she couldn’t let us have it. That’s what we get for refusing to make reservations.

So we are in Phipps Park about a block away from St Lucie. It costs $21 instead of $12 but it has electricity so we can run our air conditioner. It gets hot in Florida at this time of year. Imagine that!

TTYL,

Linda

Cool Tool

During our most recent stop at Walmart we spent $20 to buy a new vacuum cleaner. We already had a tiny 12 volt wet/dry vac but trying to vacuum floors with it was such a nuisance we kept putting off vacuuming. So, I put vacuum on the shopping list. Dave, of course, was never going to buy one. So when I had to go in to WalMart the other day to straighten out my meds again I insisted we look at vacuums.

While walking to the section of the store where there sell vacuums Dave walked by a display of one type of them. Since they were in small boxes in the middle of the aisle he didn’t recognize them for what they were. But I was driving one of those electric carts which had only slow as a speed so the display was at my eye level and I had time to actually see it. This is what I saw.

OK, that’s not literally the store display. That’s the empty box after we unpacked it at home. I thought I should give you something to recognize in case you decide to go shopping for one of these. That’s Dave’s hat on my bed to give you a sense of how small this box is.

The vacuum itself is more or less a four pound Dustbuster type with a crevice tool attachment and a floor attachment. It has a telescoping handle. Here’s what it look like with the floor attacment on and the handle down and up standing next to our dinette bench so you can see its size.

It’s small enough to store in the back of our closet yet it’s amazingly powerful. At least it picked up a lot of dust and hair from our carpet. Maybe that’s just a sign of how long it has been since we vacuumed our carpet.

TTYL,

Linda

Everglades in Depth

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

Key Museums

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

More Keys

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