Long Key to the Everglades National Park

No pictures on this post. The wifi is not good still here in the Keys. We leave the Keys and move to the Everglades National Park. This will be our first visit to the southern regions of this wild land. We will dry camp for 5 days there and will have no wifi or cell service while there.

We are looking forward to the birds and wildlife we are hearing about from other campers who have been there. Hopefully we will have good pictures to share here with you the first week of Feb?

We will go to Oscar Shearer State Park Feb 5th. They are located south of Sarasota and have wifi IN the park. How nice that will be. I should be able to post from there that first week. Two weeks there and we go inland to Myakka River SP where we really enjoy the wildlife and paddling.

God Bless to all.

Long Key State Park Marathon, FL Keys

Sorry that the blog has not been updated for awhile. We are not finding reliable wifi here in the Marathon, FL area. This is a week behind so I have posted two entries: this and one on Curry Hammock SP below. We will probably not be able to post again until the beginning of Feb when we get to a park that has wifi there.

All four state parks here in the Keys are unique. The special thing about this park is that all campsites are on the beach. The ocean at high tide is just a yards from your camper. The water here is so pretty with the shades of turquoise.

This park offers a very nice nature trail and some biking. One bike trip is to a two mile fishing bridge just a few miles south and accessed by a bike trail. We have also been able to do some paddling here in the ocean. There have been some good calm days that make using our kayaks on the open water pleasurable. We haven’t seen any sharks yet.

This land crab thought our tire was a good hiding place. We sure don’t want to shake hands with him! The weather here has been great most days. We are experiencing summer in January most days. Today a cold front blew in and dropped the temps from 78o to 64o. We can’t complain knowing that PA is getting 20os right now.
We leave this park Jan. 31st and this view. We plan to dry camp in the Everglades Nat’l Park for 5 days, if our battery allows us. We are looking forward to going there for the first time. There will be no wifi there and probably no cell service. Feb. 5th we will move to a state park south of Sarasota. That park offers wifi at the park which will be nice. The next posting will probably not be until then. God Bless all!

Curry Hammock State Park Marathon, FL Keys

This is our last week at Curry Hammock SP. We have enjoyed good weather the most of this first week. A cold front is blowing through today, that means it was 51o this morning. The wind is very gusty though and that will keep us in most of the day. Good we have a camper with some inside space now.


Tuesday we paddled our kayaks around this little key where the park is. It was a nice trip but the sun was very intense that day. We had to make sure that we did it at high tide as some of the waterway is very shallow.

This big fellow was on a tree along the inlet. He is quite different from the lime green iguana we normally see here in the Keys. These are invasive creatures that are becoming a big problem in southern Florida. People have released their “pets” when they became too big to be cute and they are thriving in this environment. Unfortunately they have no natural predators here and are harming the native animals that compete for the food. There are a lot of them in this area and they are big.
Here is a hermit crab we found. He is a big one for what we usually see. He was not happy with us at all for picking him up. I included this picture for Evan. Maybe he will like seeing it? We miss you Evan.

Winter Escape 2011

We were a bit nervous about the weather again this year. Last year’s FL winter was very chilly, but nothing like the temps at home. When we stopped at our first campground in NC, we thought that we were in for another cold one. This area had gotten 12 inches with that Christmas storm and it was not going away quickly. The morning temp was 24o, brrrrr….. But on the road again and keep heading south. The weather soon turned to the normals and Les was thrilled. Day temps soon were 70’s.
We stopped again at my cousin Jan’s home in Jacksonville and visited with them for New Year’s Day. She treated us once more with a sumptuous meal and we had a chance to see her son Nathan and his young family. His son, Bradley, is the age Evan will be next year and that was cute to see.
A stop at Jonathan Dickinson SP on the way down I 95 gave us a chance to meet up with David and Barbara. These good folks were one of our references for our African adventure and it was great to meet them and share pictures and stories. They surprised us by taking us out and treating us for supper.



We arrived at Curry Hammock Jan. 3rd. Oh my, our site is perfect and so is the weather. We wake to 68o and it tops out at 80o in the afternoon. The wind is calm so paddling is very nice.

One day we paddled out to Deer Key to see a rookery there. My, the pelicans and cormorants were packed on the mangroves.
All around us as we paddled were birds diving in the water for fish. We were treated to a music jam fest just next to us. Some folks played accordions and a wash-tub base and we enjoyed some down-home folk music.