Trip10

Tuesday.

The low last night was fifty-eight. Still closer to Havana than we are to Miami.

We’re staying at an awesome KOA, but it is still a KOA campground. Space is at a premium here. Nobody gets to be wide-side against the beach. We got a premium spot, but we’re all lined up end-against-the-beach. It’s a beautiful place, but everyone has very close neighbors. I think I’d rather be in a State Park. There are three State Parks in the Keys, but none of them allow pets.

Spent the day checking out the State Parks. They still don’t allow pets. Found a great beach on one. Ran the length of it. Laid on it. Walked it. Birded it. Spent hours there.

Saw black bellied plovers, wilsons plovers, short billed dowitchers, and a little blue heron. Saw sea ospreys. One had a fish. Saw a giant flock of buzzing chattering tree swallows.

A response from McKee makes me realize there is something I should explain about swamps. I would like to clear up some confusion I might have caused… if only I knew how. Maybe I should tell you what I don’t know. Swamps are swamps. I know that. But there are other things too. You know how the Eskimos have forty-seven words to describe snow? Or is that how many words the Japanese have to describe rice? Anyway, they have that sort of thing working down here too, only I don’t know all the different words to describe them to you. On a previous trip to New Orleans, we got to chatting with some locals in an old café, and one guy was showing us pictures of his hunting shack way out in the swamp. Except that he didn’t call it a swamp, he called it something else. I just can’t remember exactly what he called it. Swamps are deep dark places with cypress trees, clinging vines, croaking frogs, screaming bugs, and creepy noises. His hunting shack was located out in something very marshy, except that I don’t think the word he used was “marsh”. The Everglades is a swamp, but much of the Everglades is really a very slow moving river of grass, punctuated by the occasional “hammocks” of higher ground populated by trees and brush. It’s not all a river of grass. Some parts of it are a deep dark swamp. That picture of the Atchafalaya I sent? Twenty miles of open water with a few things sticking out of it? I called it a swamp, but it’s not really a swamp. I don’t know what it’s called. In Louisiana, they don’t even call it a marsh, or anything else. They just refer to it as the Atchafalaya.

Here’s another picture of the Bluebonnet.

We have a new modification to the motorhome. The screen door has a bunji on it. We were sitting outside last night when Rags came bounding past us, out of the dark, and disappeared into a mangrove. That screen-door-slam we had heard a few minutes earlier was from our screen door. It took a little coaxing to get him to come out of the mangrove to get caught and returned to the motorhome. When he wants to go out, and he thinks no-one is watching him, he drops down onto the bottom step, wedges himself between the step and the screen door, and pops it open. He doesn’t just squeeze it open a little and sneak out. He slams it open. It takes a strong bunji cord, and a squirt bottle with water in it to discourage him. That’s the temporary solution.

Zero miles on the motorhome. Two new birds. Sun bathing on the beach. Nature trails through the mangroves. Barbecue for lunch. Got some cold water and Alka-seltzer at the grocery store. A good day.