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!
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