Myakka River State Park Arcadia, FL

What a lovely stay we have enjoyed here. We are more inland, about 15 miles from the coast, and in the largest of the state parks we have visited. With it’s large size, there is more wildlife here. There is also a wide variety of hiking and biking trails here.

Along with some good kayaking, above you see me paddling in the wilderness area where access is limited and therefore you see more wildlife. We saw a lot of alligators on this paddle, but they behaved themselves as did we!

We had two special birding treats while here. The picture shows sandhill cranes dancing for us at the lake. We were treated with this scene the first day here and haven’t seen them since. They are very large birds and quite stately.

Here is a Burrowing Owl. These little owls actually dig and live in shallow burrows in the sand. Can you see the sand flying out as the mate takes its turn digging? You will see pictures in the slideshow at the side of an owl that took a short cut and adopted a drain as its burrow. You will also see that these owls are “city dwellers”.

There is such beauty here. God’s artistic hand is so evident here. The weather has been so summerlike. Les is in seventh heaven! We move Saturday, March 5th, more inland to Highland Hammock SP. Some camping friends, Gerri and Leon, will be there as they are volunteers this year there. We spend a week there then move to a new park in the Tampa area.

Oscar Shearer State Park Osprey, FL

This is our second week here at Oscar Shearer SP. The first week was cold and rainy but we met and met up with camping friends to occupy our time along with hiking the trails here in the park. Valentines day brought more sunshine and some warmer temperatures. Above is the wonderful chicken kabobs Les made us for dinner, Yum.

The weather this week has brightened and is gradually warming. We have had the opportunity to go to the beach some and it is so nice to hunt shark’s teeth. Someone once told me that walking the beach was better than blood pressure medicine and I must agree.

We have met so many nice people while camping. Here we are enjoying a sunset with Dottie and Frank from NY. And tomorrow we go to visit Trish and Steve from RI to do some kayaking to shell.
We leave Saturday for two weeks at Myakka River SP. There is always some good wildlife there and I hope the kayaking is good this year.

Everglades National Park, FL

Oh my, we had such a good visit to the Everglades. Our theme for this stay was birds. We stayed in the most southern campground called Flamingo four days. Most of the sites are dry camping, no hook-ups, but they do have 41 sites with electric. After three days our battery was very low so we moved to an electric site to charge it. We will be researching solar panels for these situations.

There were many osprey nests in the Flamingo area and great sightings of osprey with fish. We also sighted a nest where the baby was up and getting fed. See the slideshow for pictures. It was amazing to have regular experiences with hawks sitting in low branches with their catches eating.

This red shouldered hawk fed off the grass beside our camper everyday. Wow, we would sit in our chairs and the hawk would pop down just feet from us feeding on grubs or worms in the grass. An eco pond just outside the campground had a great gathering of birds early in the morning: snowy egrets; great egrets; green herons; little blue herons; wood storks; roseate spoonbill; and red shouldered hawk. All those in one area of the pond chatting away. It was so neat to experience.

For our last day we moved about 38 miles north in the park (Everglades is a very big park) to a second campground available, Long Pine Key. Here there is no hook-ups at all. What we really enjoyed about these campgrounds is the silence. How nice. Here at Long Pine you are in more pine forested area and found the biking very nice.
A short drive to a trail titled, Anhinga Trail, gave us LOTS of great bird viewing. Baby Anhinga, purple granule, common moore hen, grebe, green heron, great blue heron, cormorant, white egret to mention a few. This cormorant bit off more than he could chew! I’m going to try to get my new slideshow on today but I may have to wait a few days to do it?
We moved to Oscar Shearer State Park Feb 5th. We will be here two weeks. I will post on this park next week. On Feb. 19th we then move to Myakka River State Park.

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.