It's fall break, and we had plenty of credit card points saved up to cover the airfare, so we're back in sunny Florida for the week with a mission: visit all three national parks. Today we drove through Everglades from Homestead to Flamingo and back again, with plenty of stops along the way.
The first real stop was at Royal Palm, where we walked both the Gumbo Limbo Trail and the Anhinga Trail. We saw tons of wildlife, which was a great way to remind us all why we love visiting parks so much. Sightings included plenty of alligators (including one hiding not three feet off the trail in a little ditch), turtles, geckos, and even some very large grasshoppers.
The Gumbo Limbo Trail was a paved loop through the gumbo limbo trees, which are also known as "tourist trees" because of their distinctive red, peeling bark. Note: I wore a comically large UV-blocking hat which I'm sure clearly marked me as a tourist, and I was super red-faced because of the heat and general sweatiness ... but I managed to avoid getting a sunburn today, so I'm feeling like a winner.
The Anhinga Trail is a large wooden boardwalk out into the glades, and we walked all around in the quiet while (mostly) managing to avoid a large school group that was also coming through at the same time. We saw a couple of alligators close up (but, you know, with a boardwalk and a railing between them and us), along with plenty of birds, including lots of great egrets, a mockingbird, and some kind of brown egret thing we didn't actually identify.
Back in the car, we blasted the AC and chugged water while we headed for our next stop, the Pinelands Trail. This, apparently, is representative of a typical Florida pine forest, which of course is completely alien to someone used to a typical Indiana pine forest. Our forests don't tend to have tree snails or giant palms or big old snakes that you have to walk around. (Okay, I'm sure we have snakes ... just not like this.)
We made a quick stop at the Mahogany Hammock Trail, where we saw ... well, you know, a forest of mahogany. Then it was on to Flamingo, which is basically the end of the line. The visitor center at Flamingo is closed for renovation, but it turns out that it's completely worth the trip anyway. We saw manatees in the little marina right away, and a park landscaper was nice enough to give us directions to see even more of them. The manatees live in brackish water but drink fresh water, so they all tend to crowd around a drainage pipe in the seawall below the visitor center. They treat it like their own personal water fountain, and they fight over who gets the best access to it. We had so much fun just sitting and watching them. Another interesting tidbit about Flamingo is that it is the only place in the Everglades where alligators (which live in fresh water) and crocodiles (which live in brackish water) can be found together. The landscaper guy helpfully gave us directions to the best places to look, but alas, we came up empty-handed on the crocodile front. We definitely didn't feel sorry for ourselves, though. Seeing manatees in the wild made our day/month/year!
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