We woke up to this on the bus. A good omen we are hoping.
It’s about 8 am and it’s stinking hot already. I wore shorts yesterday which was apparently a mistake because I got eaten alive yesterday. Edwin and the girls have been getting bit all over Florida. I’ve managed to not, until now, and now the sympathy has kicked in. So we are all wearing pants today.
We are at the Flamingo campground which is in the southern portion of the Everglades along the ocean/gulf of Mexico/Atlantic, but is technically called the Florida Bay
We rode over to the visitor center which is currently being remodeled and is right next to the boat ramp.
I had read that you can see manatees in the Barbour so we went to check it out. Success! Yay! The sea cows. Because we hightailed it’s from Mississippi to DisneyWorld and then to Tampa we missed the manatees on the west coast so we were very excited to see them here. And they were very active. About 6 of them just hanging out in the harbor.
We have a few pics but like whale watching…it’s hard to grab a pic.
After watching them for awhile we went over to the visitor center to confront the inevitable. National Park visitor is officially closed. As of today. The ranger was nice enough to give the girls a junior ranger packet and preemptive badges which he literally placed on the ground outside the door.
Ok it’s happening. Don’t think we can avoid it anymore. What a bummer on a multitude of levels.
There is no WiFi down here in the park. Except by the victor center. Like the 4 sitting on stairs figuring out what’s next we too sat their using some WiFi to read the news of the day. By the time we left there were easily 20 people sitting along the curb on their phones.
We listened in on a woman sitting in her car next to the visitor center anxiously talking to what sounded like her husband asking if they think it’s safe to drive home cross country. Personally I’m thinking the same thing. Do we want to get on the road? Is California where we want to go? Should we stay in Florida somewhere? The keys? We are so far away from home. But home is the epicenter. But now it feels weird to be on the road…
Slightly deflated and not sure what we wanted to do, we went back to the manatees.
And then went back to the RV to eat cookies and pin up what would be our last junior ranger badge??
On the way back into the campground I asked the ranger at the office what is he hearing and got a few clarifications…
He said that there is no National Park Advisory rather Trump gave the responsibility to each park superintendent to make the decision best for them. Florida national parks are open as of now but they are closing all visitor centers, tours, and concessions. For the time being you can camp overnight as long as you have a reservation, but you cannot extend the reservation or make a new one. Also, everyone must be out of the campground ⛺️ by Saturday. I wished him luck and asked him if he thought he would be ok and he said he was one of the lucky ones because he is one of the 2 full time employees and they are keeping him to close up everything. The seasonal workers only had 2 weeks left on their contract, but most of them have seasonal summer jobs at other parks that will no longer be there. I asked him what he’s hearing about when they may open up. He said he was told nothing till middle of May…but even that is subject to change.
The Bay Area is locked down. National parks getting locked down.
We have a reservation for tonight again in the Everglades, but part of think we want to move on. All of a sudden being in a campground with no reception of WiFi isn’t sitting well.
I’m at a loss with no visitor centers open…so here’s some info we got off Wikipedia…
Everglades National Park protects the southern 20% of the original Everglades in Florida. It is the 3rd largest national park after Death Valley and Yellowstone. It is the largest tropical wilderness in the U.S. and the largest wilderness east of the Mississippi.
Everglades protects wetlands and forests flowing out of Lake Okeechobee and into Florida Bay. It protects the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere. It is also an important breeding ground for many tropical wading birds.
36 threatened or endangered species inhabit the park, including the manatee, American crocodile (which is also often seen in the harbor but we did not see it) and the panther.
Mangroves: it was one of first forays into ecology and conservation. I took an Oceanography class at Berkeley and I researched mangroves for my term paper.
Mangroves are small trees that are salt tolerant. They have a complex salt filtration and root system that allows them to live in coastal waters and helps them grow in salt immersed water and deal with constant wave action.
They are very important for a coastal wetland ecosystem. They provide shelter and breeding grounds for many species away from predators in the open water. They also prevent erosion on the coastlines from wave action.
Mangrove forests move carbon dioxide “from the atmosphere into long-term storage” in greater quantities than other forests, making them “among the planet’s best carbon scrubbers” according to a NASA-led study based on satellite data.
We figured we might as well go on a few of the recommended walks, get to reception, and re-evaluate.
We went on the Mahogany Hammock Trail. Less than a mile but it holds the largest mahogany tree in the U.S. Back in day all the old growth mahogany trees were harvested but this part of the park was inaccessible at the time so there is still one patch of old growth Mahogany.
They also said to be on lookout for 🦉 owls. And we were lucky. We had Daisy with us and the owl would NOT keep its 👀 off her. It was entertaining walking back and forth with Daisy and the owl really would just turn it’s head. It was very cool.
We then went on the Anhinga Trail. Which was beautiful. Another less than a mile walk on a boardwalk, it was spectacular scenery. Alligators, birds, turtles.
This was a beautiful boardwalk and even with the alligators, a very serene trail. The greenery was gorgeous. I’m glad we were able to make it to this trail because we were looking forward to an air boat tour as we hear the best way to see the Everglades is by boat not by foot. But no chance for that now.
The egrets were very cool. I think they were my favorite bird to watch. Many herons as well. And this trail is named after the Anhinga. A very cool looking bird that we saw sunning itself back and the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge. Now we know why we saw it sunning itself a few days ago. The Anhinga is also known as a snakefish, it swims underwater to look for fish. It spears fish on its sharp bill as at swims and then flips it up and swallows them head first, whole. We saw the anhinga swim around in the marsh which was very cool. And it did look like a snake when it popped it’s head out of the water.
I’m happy we got to see so much wildlife because we had then decided not to go to Sharks Valley in the northern part of the Everglades. You can see lots of wildlife there but we decided against the hour and a half detour up there.
Even though my family wants me home they agree and think it might be wiser to stay out then make the jaunt cross country to the epicenter of it. Our house is rented out (thankfully), we could go to parents, Tahoe, or stay here.
We are deciding to head to forgoe our 2nd night of. Amping in the Everglades and we are heading down to the keys.
We did snap another Everglades pic on the way out.
Thanks Everglades. You were beautiful even if you were buggy and a little creepy. Glad Daisy made it out unharmed.