OUR SOUTH FLORIDA "ISLAND"

Pictures: This is the "island" we've spent time in this winter, from Lake Okeechobee and canals to the north, east and west coast Florida, and the Everglades/Keys to the south; blue scrub jay in Jonathan Dickinson State Park; non-venomous green snake at the Hobe Sound Wildlife Refuge; eagle above our trailer at an RV park in Fort Myers Beach; screech owl in the crevice of a palm in Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island; armadillo in Myakka State Forest in Englewood; alligator climbing out of the lake at Myakka River State Park; friend Madeline on our boat taking a ride on the Loxahatchee River; Heidi on the bank of the same river; mountain bike "bump" in J. Dickinson State Park (sort of like skiing!); Dick and Priscilla competing in bocce at their RV park; friends Randy, Josie, Joanna and Sandy in Naples at an outdoor concert on a cold night, listening to a Jimmy Buffet cover band; Ken at the helm; Venice dive charter captain showing us the fossilized shark teeth from that days' expedition; view from our seats at the UConn vs U of South Florida women's basketball game we attended; Ken with Dick and Barb (and dog Casey) on their boat off of Gasparilla Island, at a beach on Cayo Costa Heidi floated a coconut boat with 2 shells for passengers in the very clear water

On our move from Indiantown to Hobe Sound we got a great close-up view of a wheeling roseate spoonbill as it maneuvered above our windshield. This bird is big, with an average 50" wingspan and is completely pink. Florida is fun for several reasons and seeing wildlife up-close is one of them. Another reason is meeting people from all over, especially at the state parks. We've probably seen license plates from most states, as well as many if not all the Canadian provinces (how many provinces are there, anyway?).
For the month of February, starting on the 4th, we spent two weeks at Jonathan Dickinson State Park in Hobe Sound, and then drove across the state to Fort Myers Beach in southwest Florida and finished up the month in Englewood, an hour morth of Ft. Myers. Not far from Hobe Sound we found some friends from Cohasset (they had most recently lived in Maine, but we have kept in touch with them). Madeline and Chuck moved to Florida in late summer, and they are big supporters of the condo-in-a-warm-place lifestyle! They are in a development that is right on the Intracoastal Waterway. We all went boating on the Loxahatchee River that runs through the state park, and had dinner on another night with them.
The river was a constant source of entertainment for us while at the state park. Our campsite was near to the launching ramp and it was easy to get our boat in the water, or to walk over and watch kayaks being launched, or to go fishing, or to just go and watch wildlife--river otters on one day. We also took out our boating friends (Kevin and Chris, who we met six years ago on our first cruise to Florida) who live in the area but had not seen the Loxahatchee. After the jungle-like scenery of a 30 minute idle-speed journey, you come to a restored camp that was home to "Trapper Nelson". Visitors can get out and see the cabins and wild-animal pens that Trapper kept from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties. He was a colorful character and the interpretive ranger tells you some of his story.
In the Ft. Myers Beach part of our month we found a space for our boat at a storage facility. Lucky for us, their deal is that the first month of storage is free. They just have a small registration fee. Our travel trailer was at an RV park for 5 days, and there was no extra space there. One treat (?) at the RV park was a morning wake-up call from a rooster that strutted around our end of the park for about an hour and a half each morning! No one seemed to know where he spent the rest of the day.
Across the street from us was another RV park, a much bigger one, and we looked-up friends who winter there, Priscilla and Dick from our church in Duxbury. They showed us around the area, including going to Sanibel Island and taking the auto-tour through the wildlife refuge there. For the following few days we returned to Sanibel twice, once by boat. We also rode our bikes to Ft. Myers Beach, and went out to dinner with Priscilla and Dick. Priscilla is an organist and I got to see her play at a church on the beach, as she was subbing that Sunday. The building was built on a boating theme, with dolphins in the stained glass windows and the pulpit shaped like the bow of a boat.
On February 23rd we moved to Myakka State Forest, near Port Charlotte. There are only 20 campsites here and there is no electricity or running water. It gives us a chance to use our solar panel which Ken has wired to our batteries in the trailer.  Our time in the forest was fairly quiet. We got caught up on our emailing and bill-paying at the local library, using their wifi, and we explored the launching ramps in the area, for future reference.The weather was not as warm as it had been previously, so we did not take out the boat. There was time for a few hikes and bike rides, reading and banjo practice.
Our last move of the month was to Oscar Scherer State Park near Venice, just a half hour from the state forest. From here we are visiting friends (Barb and Dick from Falmouth Maine) who are renting a house in the area for the month of March, and we also took in several activities that are offered at this busy park. We are trying to figure out how to get our "equipment" home when we go back north so we are advertising our boat and trailer as well as the travel trailer for sale. We have had some interest in the trailer, not so much the boat, but no offers.
Barb and Dick also have a boat with them so they took us out to see Boca Grande, and other islands  in the bay here, separating Charlotte Harbor from the Gulf of Mexico. The weather so far in March has been perfect! We've been swimming in the ocean and in Barb and Dick's pool. We've been fed a whole days-worth of food, and returned the favor on another day. At the state park we participated in a canoe trip, had a great volunteer-provided pancake breakfast, went to a Saturday night Ranger Talk, and one other night attended an Old-Time music performance. One busy week!
One other great feature of Oscar Scherer Park is that a 10-mile paved bike trail goes through, and connects to another 5-mile bike trail so you can get to a beach in Venice and to the shops there by bicycle.  There are eaglets in a nest in the park and it is a popular place to see the Florida scrub jay.
We are finishing up our time in Florida at Myakka River State Park. There are a LOT of alligators here, many birds, wild hogs, and other great wildlife. We have been advertising our trailer for sale, so we can just bring home the boat and trailer we bought down here. It may get sold to a private party or we may need to leave it at a dealer to be sold on consignment. We expect to be back in Massachusetts my March 19. It has been a warm last two weeks, great weather. We'll definitely miss being able to run out the door to take a walk or bikeride with hardly any prep.
Thanks for reading along with us this year!

Indiantown for a Month

Pictures: The Indiantown Marina storage yard has many boats from many places and is fun to roam through; not sure what type of lizzard this is, found near a work shed at the marina, but it sure is colorful; we are posing in front of the Habitat for Humanity house we worked on; the street of Habitat homes is in the background, sandhill cranes are in the foreground; nephews of a new homeowner have come to help put in volunteer hours, to go toward the 100 owner volunteer hours required; lunch on the worksite; Ken is fishing in the St. Lucie Inlet on our day off; the path to the beach from the Intracoastal Waterway at Peck Lake;one of the public buildings in Indiantown.

More Pictures:The Virginia bluegrass group Nothin' Fancy plays at the Yee Haw Junction Music festival; a smoke plume from burning sugarcane fields before they cut the cane for processing; during our off-week from building, Heidi attended a safety training for building and posed with Bob and Rosemary from West Virginia (we all got new hardhats); Ken is watching a hawk in the Dupuis Reserve near our marina/campground; we believe these are two immature eagles, that we saw from the canal near to the campground; Ken with Dennie and Chris (Habitat volunteers from Minnesota)

Our Habitat Project  in Indiantown Florida is rewarding us with progress in the building and chances to meet the new owners as they work with us on Saturdays each week.  We've also met a few locals who volunteer on a regular basis and the staff of the Habitat affiliate who are all very easy to work with.
The other volunteer builders who have come here in their RVs for this session are married couples from Wisconsin, Minnesota and West Virginia. We all worked comfortably with each other and we had a few social events as well. The marina has a wonderful waterfront area with a shaded patio, firepits, rattan tables and chairs, and a small store with extra soft drinks, beers and ice cream in case we run out! We went to dinner with our group and the volunteer coordinator from the affiliate, to a neighboring town one week, and we ate at a restaurant in Indiantown as a group the next week. We brought ends of pine studs from the worksite and burned them in several evening campfires at one of the firepits.
Working with Elek, our construction supervisor, gave us a chance to learn to use some new tools (at least for me) like a nail gun and a drill with a concrete bit. And we built walls with doorway headers and "California corners". I have a new vocabulary! All of this has been tiring, but as volunteers we don't have to punch a clock and if we are seriously hurting, we can take longer breaks or get assigned a job that uses different muscles. Our volunteer coordinator, Nancy, brings us snacks, lines us up with safety training, and in general keeps our spirits up. She has been a delight to work with!
The homeowners-to-be are mostly, but not all, immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico that have settled here to work in the agriculture industry. Some are second-generation and speak great English, some are Spanish-only, but we managed to communicate and get to know them a little. The town has several restaurants and bakeries that serve Guatemalan and Mexican food.
Indiantown has a hotel called the Seminole Inn with a great history and lots of attractions. One is the parrot that greets you in the lobby with a "Good Morning". We also heard that the racehorse that won the Belmont Stakes in 2014 is from a stable in town. There is also a "Championship Polo Field" in the horse-section of Indiantown. It's been fun being in an area that is a little bit like home, and not so much like the south Florida coastal towns. After all, Cohasset has the Red Lion Inn and a former major horseshow arena (that is now the Music Circus).
We are on the Okeechobee Canal that connects the St. Lucie Inlet at the Atlantic with Lake Okeechobee. So boating is still a possibility. We trailered our outboard to Stuart twice; one time we had a beautiful day and did some fishing in the inlet and sitting at the beach. Another time we took the canal from Indiantown Marina west, toward Lake Okeechobee, and we saw a lot of birds including two immature eagles--sitting next to each other, very cute!
During our last 10 days in Indiantown we had Sunday brunch with the Habitat group at the Seminole Inn, and we attended a day-long bluegrass music festival in a town called Yee Haw Junction, about an hour north of us. Ken fixed a few problems with the trailer, water leaks that had been giving us trouble.  We spent some more time with a few of the boaters at the marina, including a couple from Rhode Island in a Cape Dory Pilothouse 30. The weather has been chillier and windy, but the daytime temps are still between 60 degrees and the low 70s.
Superbowl Sunday found us watching the game in our trailer and joined by Linn and Ray, the Rhode Island couple. We had some really good ribs cooked by the local grocery store, along with salads and drinks, and were greatly entertained by the football!! As some journalists have said, it could have been one of the best superbowl games ever (and our son Pete texted similar sentiments during the game!).
Finishing up our stay at Indiantown Marina, we said goodby to a western Canada family of 5 (with three boys) who launched and left for the Virgin Islands, and to Linn and Ray, leaving for Florida's west coast via Lake Okeechobee. The marina is very busy with lots of other comings and goings. We said hello to the new Habitat group who arrived for their two-week stint. And then it is our turn to leave, heading for a campsite at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, about a half-hour away. We plan to be there for two weeks and during this time, check in with friends from New York and New England that have winter or full-time homes in that area.

Winter Two

Pictures: The laid-back owner of Pelican Cay (in Key Largo) with her "pet" pelican; kayak view of the canal leading away from Pelican Cay;a view of one end of our Zeppelin travel trailer; out on the reef near Pennekamp State Park where we snorkeled; one hazard of being close to nature in the Everglades; our camping lot at Everglades National Park; a break in playing card games with Mike and Tammy; if you take the canoe trail in the Everglades you would camp at this chickee complete with outhouse!; introductory meeting of the Care-A-Vanners, two volunteers from Minnesota with Ken; Mike celebrating his New Year's Eve birthday in a memorable (?) way; Ken and I have been trying to get better wildlife pictures (these are all from the Everglades Nat. Park): anhinga with beautiful feather pattern drying out, purple galinule; osprey; white pelicans, endangerd wood stork (although we saw quite a lot of these in the last week of December).


Winter Two of our camping experience, this time with a compromise, began on November 28 a few hours after having Thanksgiving dinner. We were packed and ready to go, had a great meal at my brother Joel's house, then pulled our trailer as far as a Cracker Barrel restaurant in the New York City suburbs.  

We had booked a week in the Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park (Key Largo, Florida), starting November 31. To get there on time we needed to put in quite a few miles on each day, and our plan worked, getting us to Pennekamp after dark, but still on the 31st. We even had time to stop in Cocoa Village on the last day of driving, to have lunch with friends (from Hull, Mass.) who were cruising and anchored there.

As part of our "compromise" we wanted to maybe get a small outboard boat to use this winter. It means that we will have two trailers to move each time we go to a new spot, but the other part of the compromise is to not move so much, so we are cutting back from 24 different campgrounds from last winter, to 8 this winter. After looking at about 6 different boats for sale, we came across one that filled most of our desires, and seemed to have a good working outboard engine. It is a 17 ft. Aquasport on a trailer with a 90 HP four-stroke motor.

Pennekamp was a fun place to start out in, and we returned there a few times after we moved to our next camping site. There is a small camping loop, it is clean and friendly, there is a concession building, lots of rental boats, swimming beaches, and an aquarium. Most people visiting the park are going scuba diving or snorkeling on one of the larger boats docked there. There is access from the park to a bicycle trail that runs along the main road in Key Largo and to the other Keys. 

So our first week camping was taken up in getting parts for the boat, taking bike rides, checking out the Key Largo neighborhoods, etc. One highlight was taking a tour of a dolphin facility, Island Dolphin Care, where veterans and kids recovering from serious illness can come to swim with the dolphins and be part of the programs. There is a book written about this place, and I met the young man who, as a boy, was the first client in a recovery program started there.

For our weeks 2 and 3 in Key Largo we moved to Pelican Cay Harbor and Campground. We found a boatyard nearby where we could keep our boat and launch it. Now we were in the north part of town, not as convenient for biking, but close to a sunset vista and tiki bar that became a favorite hangout.  We even got a call from a friend from home (Alicia Crabbe)who was stopped at the tiki bar dock for the night in a friend's boat. We joined her and the other's with her for dinner that night. 

We took a few nice trips in the boat, including one to the coral reefs to snorkel. We also had a canoe and some kayaks to use at Pelican Cay, and we were steps from a dock in a mangrove canal that had good fishing. Our campground was a little sketchy, with older trailers and trailer parts scattered around, and with an owner who keeps late nights outside at her firepit, with a loud voice and very smoky fires! But she was friendly enough and had a somewhat tame pelican hanging around.  Prices for overnights in the Keys are high, even for camping, and this place was more affordable, and a little bit of an adventure!

Weather has been excellent and the following two weeks were no exception, as we moved to the Flamingo area in Everglades National Park. In five weeks we've only had one afternoon of rain, and a few nighttime showers. The Everglades were packed full of campers for Christmas and New Year's weeks. The wildlife here is amazing, birds everywhere, and there are alligators and crocodiles together (NOT close together but in the same part of the park), which is very unusual. Manatees come into the park boat basin, and there are Burmese pythons hiding in the underbrush--we are told they are very hard to see--and in fact we did not see any, even though there are supposed to be thousands of them in the park. That is fine with me!

Tammy and her fiance Mike visited us after staying with Mike's mom in the Orlando area at Christmas. We all (including Mike's mom and his step-dad) had dinner at El Tub in Hollywood Florida,  then we drove Tammy and Mike the rest of the way to Flamingo. We also went to El Tub the week before, when we drove up to see Justin and Jamie on their one night in the area before they took a ferry to Freeport, Bahamas for their honeymoon! (El Tub overlooks the Intercoastal Waterway, has most of it's tables outside in a "forested" patio, and has a tub-and-toilet motif.) 

During the time our visitors were with us we took two trips in our boat, and we did a 3 1/2 hour canoe trip with a park ranger and about 10 others. We had some great sightings of white pelican fly-bys, all choreographed so that they swirled over us and up over a cay in a perfect corkscrew, all in line, and we had manatees at the stern of our Aquasport while docked, right at the surface so we could touch them.

It was Mike's birthday on December 31 and we celebrated with a night out at the only place to eat in the park, and had pizza. Then we returned to our trailer for freshly made cupcakes. As we had to do every night, we spent about 15 minutes killing mosquitoes inside the trailer before we could sit down. It was too bad that the bugs seemed to be even worse during the time Tammy and Mike were with us. On January 1 we went to another of the Everglades' highlights, a slough with a boardwalk and tons of birds and alligators, then drove T & M to the airport. 

We are currently in Indiantown, Florida, near the eastern edge of Lake Okeechobee working for Habitat for Humanity, staying at Indiantown Marina and Campground for two weeks. We are helping to build a 4-bedroom house with 6 other volunteers and a supervisor in a neighborhood that will eventually have 40 Habitat homes. The work includes putting up walls of two-by-fours, installing and caulking windows, finishing-off the rafters in the overhang of the roof, and other tasks.

Our best to all in 2015 as we start a new year. We're looking forward to what it may bring!