Vivian's RV Vignettes

I can hear y’all saying “it’s about time!” I set out on this trip to see national parks, but with the decision to spend time at Kennedy Space Center plus some of the logistical realities of campground scheduling (a topic for another post), I just got to the first two today — Everglades National Park and Biscayne National Park.

Of course, I’m sure I could easily have spent several days at each of those parks to really see them all… if I had several days to spend. I only saw a tiny (hopefully representative) bit of each. That’s just how this trip is going to be. 34 parks in 6 months + travel time + working time + taking time to enjoy other things along the way, = very limited time in each park. I’m ok with that. My goal is to have one characteristic experience in each park, and to have an idea of which places I want to come back to later to see more.

One good thing… I don’t have to feel like I’m wasting the price of admission. Today I bought my America the Beautiful National Park Annual Pass. For $80, it covers park admission to all the national parks for a year. If you’re going to more than one park in a year, it’s a GREAT deal. Having my pass makes me feel “official.”

My campground is over an hour’s drive from each of the parks, but they’re pretty close to each other, so that’s why I did them both in the same day. I started out at the Earnest F. Coe Visitors Center near Homestead, the main entrance to Everglades National Park. Since I already got to take an airboat ride in the Everglades (outside the park), my goal was to drive across the southern end of the park to the Flamingo Visitors Center, to take in the views and to look for manatees in the water around Flamingo (where they are reported to often hang out). I’ve never seen a wild manatee… in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person.

The national park infrastructure in the Everglades is in rough shape right now due to Hurricane Irma last year. The Flamingo Visitor Center main building is still closed for repairs, so they’ve got a temporary center in a portable building onsite… but it is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so I didn’t get to see it. The third visitor center (Everglades City) is closed altogether due to storm damage, and the fourth (Shark Valley), which has some of the best easy-access opportunities, is closed most of this month for parking lot and road repaving. Signage in the Coe Visitor Center warns that you really need to get out of your car and hike or paddle to see it properly. I’d say that is accurate, but I frankly wasn’t interested in hiking in the heat today. I decided to settle for whatever I could see from my car on the road plus what I could see from walking around at Flamingo.

When I reached Coe at the east side of the park, I realized I’d forgotten to stop in Homestead to refill with gas. I looked at my remaining range with touching faith and optimism, and decided I had enough to get to Flamingo and back. By the time I reached Flamingo, I knew I had been foolish. (Among other things, I did not consider the effect of having my kayak in the truck bed, and the air drag it created.) Thankfully, Flamingo has a small convenience store with a fuel pump. But they take full advantage of their remoteness and lack of competitors… by the time I’d bought three gallons of gas, a can of spray-on sunscreen, and a bottle of water, I was almost $50 poorer.

The view from the road definitely surprised me. The Everglades is known for its “River of Grass,” which literally is a river, the Shark River Slough — it starts out 20 miles wide and channels water incredibly slowly across half of south Florida. The kind of terrain I saw the other day during my airboat ride at the Sawgrass Recreation Park is what I expected to see: tall coarse grasses growing out of shallow pools of water, with occasional open-water stretches. But that’s not what my drive looked like at all. There were certainly large grassy areas, but they looked more like prairie or savannah than swamp. And I definitely wasn’t expecting the trees… scrub brush, cypress, and flourishing young pine forests.

I looked at a map when I got back to Coe and it made sense.

The main slough is north and west of where I drove, emptying out into the Gulf above Flamingo. There’s another road, the Tamiami Trail, that runs along the north park boundary and through the Big Cypress Wildlife Management Area, which probably has more of those sawgrass swamp views. But clearly the Everglades is more diverse than that, and has its share of dry-ish ground too.

Besides its convenience store and (temporary, closed) visitors center, Flamingo has a full marina with boat ramp, a yurt campground, and seaside condos under construction. On the advice of the store clerk, I walked all around the marina as well as along the sea wall overlooking the Gulf to try to spot manatees. Apparently they are very commonly seen in that area… but I didn’t get lucky. Honestly, the water in the marina was deep green and cloudy, and there could have been any number of manatees frolicking in the depths without being visible from the surface.

I did, however, see some other fun wildlife, like this horseshoe crab.

I also spotted what looked like small eels swimming in the marina. And then I glanced over the edge of the dock and saw this big guy.

He’d found himself a nice shady spot to snooze the afternoon away. I took the picture and then backed away quietly and respectfully. If he noticed I was there, he didn’t say anything.

It was really hot out, so I eventually gave up and went back to Coe, then drove on in to town with the intention of filling up properly with gas (at $3-something per gallon instead of $6-something) and getting some lunch. But before I got there, I stumbled upon Robert Is Here.

I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention if Gypsy Guide hadn’t made a big deal about it, with a whole audio side-trip segment describing it. Robert Is Here is south Florida’s most famous fruit stand, described by Gypsy Guide as “the Disney World of exotic fruit.” Of course they have familiar stuff like watermelons and bananas, but then they also have fruit I’ve never even heard of before. Apparently they grow some things themselves, and import others. They’ve got a little on-site restaurant that makes amazing milkshakes and smoothies with their fruit along with Cuban sandwiches, so I decided to do that for lunch. My milkshake was mango, strawberry, and banana, and it was fantastic.

They’ve got a petting zoo out back with all kinds of farm animals plus emus, and a cage of exotic birds.

And then there were the free-range chickens.

This girl decided early on that my lunch should also be her lunch, and she hovered around me the whole time I ate, staring judgmentally. I wouldn’t exactly call her “aggressive” since she didn’t attack me and backed off (a little) when I shooed her, but she certainly was persistent. She did in fact try to snag a bite when she thought I was distracted, and squawked indignantly when I waved her off. By the end of my meal, a couple of her boyfriends showed up and encircled me, crowing. I felt very outnumbered. I noticed they had fresh eggs for sale up by the cash register… I’m thinking those might have been her work. Maybe that’s why she felt entitled to share the guests’ food.

I decided I shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to try a fruit I’d never heard of before, so I picked up a sapodilla. They look and feel like round potatoes, but they are reported to taste like “a pear with brown sugar.” The clerk advised me to let it ripen for four or five more days, so I’ll have to report back once I try it. I also bought myself a sun hat.

I finally got my truck filled up, and then headed on over to Biscayne National Park on the east side of the southern tip of Florida. There is a visitor center on the mainland, but nearly all of the park is open water and a handful of islands. The coast is lined with mangrove thickets and has the feel of unspoiled wilderness, but surreally, you can see the Miami skyline across the bay.

Obviously boat is the best way to see the park, and I had brought my kayak for that reason. But it was very hot, and it was 3pm, the time of day when my sense of adventure tends to be at lowest ebb and my desire for a nap the highest. It’s actually been a while since I’ve done any kayaking, and I’m not experienced in sea kayaking (or in dodging alligators and snakes). I was on the brink of backing out and just enjoying a view of the park from the rocking chairs on the visitor center porch. But I talked to a very nice ranger who recommended an easy paddling path for me, along the shore in shallow water, and he assured me it was the best place in the park to see manatees. So I kicked myself into gear and got my kayak in the water.

My pictures from the kayak look like a little kid playing with a camera with a few “oops, didn’t mean to take that” moments. I got a floating waterproof case for my phone to hang around my neck, and it actually is made of some kind of plastic that lets you operate the touch screen without taking it out, but it’s still not easy to snap pictures in a kayak that is being pushed around by small waves… you have to hang on to your paddle and not let the boat get too far off course, besides the usual difficulty of seeing what exactly is in the frame when it’s being blanked out by bright sunlight. But I got a reasonable picture of this big white bird (crane? egret?) who was not best pleased to see me in his neighborhood.

Sadly, I still did not see any manatees, but I’m glad I got out there and got to experience the mangrove thickets. I went up a side canal with beautifully calm, still water, but when I came back out to paddle back to the visitor center, the wind and waves were against me, so I got a pretty good workout. (Thankfully the waves were only a few inches tall, nothing extreme.)

I thought about driving back up to the Tamiami Trail to see more of the Everglades, but I realized that would be 2-4 hours in the wrong direction on top of the hour-plus drive I already had back to my campground, so I just came home. I feel like I’ve gotten a good representative sample of what the south Florida mainland has to offer. Now I’ve got the rest of this week to enjoy the Keys and visit Florida’s third national park.