Tuesday.
Dump the Everglades day. Time to get away from the mosquitoes. On the road by nine. Thirty–eight miles back to the park entrance. Drove backroads all around the east then north side of the Everglades. Drove through the Big Cypress Preserve on the north side of the Everglades. This morning’s topic of conversation was: “Did this place get its name by being a really really big place with cypress trees, or is it a place with really really big cypress trees?” The former, it turns out. It has already been logged. It is interesting, but didn’t look like a great place to camp, so we marveled at the abundance of birds and alligators, had lunch, and moved on. Gators everywhere.
Naples Florida. A Sams Club stop. A grocery store stop. A stop for the night. We’ll look around here a little.
While we were driving in, we noticed that essentially every house in Naples has a completely screened in aviary over the back patio. They must really like their birds here. As we were driving around exploring, I noticed another funny sign. We’re passing swamps and levies and ditches, all totally full, and we pass a sign: “mine entrance”. Mine entrance? What could they possibly mine here? I can just see a guy out in a field with a shovel shouting out “Hey! I found water!”, and everyone else answering back “Yeah! Me too! There’s water over here too!”
South Florida. There is lots of agriculture going on here right now, in January. New tomato plants. Waist high tomato plants. Hundreds of thousands of tomato plants. Maybe thousands of thousands of tomato plants. Corn plants five feet high and tassled.
Oh. I learned a little more about diesels. We brothers were speculating as to why diesel drivers will leave their rig running for half an hour, rather than just shutting it off and restarting it. Alan, the bird man, drives a diesel. He said it has no power when it first starts up. It is very sensitive to operating temperature. It needs to be fully warm to compete properly on the highway. That and it takes practically no fuel at all to idle, according to Alan.
Tonight we’re sitting on the edge of a beautiful lake. The last couple KOAs we stayed at seemed kind of crummy, so we used the Woodalls Book and found another park like Bluewater to stay in. Privately owned sites with the unoccupied ones for rent. Talked to the neighbors to our port side. They stopped here in their motorhome seven years ago. They bought a site and stayed. I don’t know what a site costs here. Given that about half the motorhomes here are Prevosts, I’d guess it’s not cheap. At Bluewater Key, we saw one of the less desirable sites (none of them are bad) advertised for two hundred thousand dollars. What’s the rule of thumb for houses? You should spend twice as much on the house as you spend on the land? Let’s see, five hundred thousand for a Prevost, two hundred fifty thousand for a place to park it. Yeah. I guess that works.
Two hundred miles on the motorhome. Bird watching. Gator watching. Manatee sighting. Grocery shopping. No new birds.
Tomorrow, the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp. It’s supposed to have really really big cypress trees. It hasn’t been logged yet.
