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Trip14

Saturday.

The morning was beautiful. Clear and warm and calm. Perfect for either the manatee paddle, or the white-crowned pigeon birding. So we did neither. We got to talking with the neighbors, Don and Lisa, with the birds, and visited till noon. We were out on the dock, admiring the morning sunshine, when the guy brought the cages back out and set them on the table in the shade. He arranged everthing just like he wanted it, then opened up the cages and five peach-faced lovebirds came wandering out onto the table, talking and squawking, and eating the seed he had spread there. It was irresistible. He was sitting there with his arms out, talking to his birds, picking different ones up in turn, holding them for a while, talking to them, or rubbing their little bellies, then putting them back down. Little birds, just roaming the entire tabletop, but not venturing anywhere else. By noon we were picking up little Lovie, Dovie, Bert, Jack, and ZZ, handling them, talking to them, putting them back down and getting another. Judy and I have seen skeptical expressions when we’ve resorted to spelling words around the dog, because she’ll understand what we’re talking about if we just say the words outright. It makes a difference if you say the word b.a.t.h., or spell it in Annie’s presence. Well, we caught these people spelling words in front of their birds. t.r.e.a.t. Come on people. They’re tiny little birds with tiny little brains. They’re not warm blooded thinking people like Annie. We had birds on the table. Birds on the ground. They put them on the ground and let them run around too. Then Don said out loud, “who wants a treat?” instead of spelling it. Five little birds all hurried over to his feet to be first. It was hilarious. Turns out we didn’t forego the mangrove paddle either. Don and Lisa also have a sea kayak, just like the one we paddled in yesterday. We spent the afternoon paddling canals, shallows and mangroves. Back in the mangroves we got really close to a green heron. It’s like a little night heron. For the longest while we just floated out in the bay and let the drift take us. It took Annie about thirty seconds to get used to the boat. Then she just sat in the bottom, or hung over the side watching the shallows go by with her ears dragging in the water. There was lots of interesting stuff to see. After visiting with the neighbors, lunch, kayaking, and an afternoon run, we decided to go back to Key West one more time in search of the white crowned pigeon. Found the Botanic Gardens, no mean feat in itself, and prowled the depths. Gray catbirds. Palm warblers. Eurasian collared doves. No white crowned pigeons. No more chances this trip. I think we’ll be north of their territory by our next stop. Guess we’ll just have to come back and try again some other time. For this trip, we figured we’d just drive down, find a KOA, then look around to get our bearings and see if we found something we liked. We did. We found all of the keys. We like them all a lot. RV parks are very expensive here, but hotels probably cost a lot more. It cost twenty-five dollars just to spend the night in a State Park, except you can’t spend the night in a State Park unless you made a reservation months ago. They’re reserved up solid. We feel we were lucky to find the Bluewater Park we found. The Keys are the closest thing to the Carribean we’ve seen. Great turquoise shallow water. Mangroves. Lots of islands. Swimming. Fishing. Kayaking. Snorkeling. We saw an advertisement for a restaurant that claimed they were conveniently located at the intersection of heaven and earth. Not too far off. The Keys are expensive, but definitely worth a look. No miles on the motorhome. No new birds. Neighbor meeting. More dock sitting. Birding. Kayaking. Tomorrow, time to head north. We’ll spend the next night at the Flamingo campground in the southern end of the everglades. I read an account of some purple gallinules there.

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Trip13

Friday.

Nice early start. Got up as soon as the sky got blue. Nice warm calm day again. Moved back to an ocean front site. Sat on the dock. Schools of fish. We have our own resident barracuda on this dock. Under this dock, anyway. He’s only eighteen inches long, but he does the whole barracuda thing. Watching. Just hanging there motionless, and watching. I think he likes us. He seems so interested in everything we do…. Drove up to sugarloaf key, then off to the side, across another bridge, to another island. Walked through a mangrove swamp looking for the mangrove cuckoo. Never saw it. Might have heard it. Got stopped by the police. Came back. Had lunch. Headed off to Key West for a sunset sail on the fabled trimaran (picture). This boat only takes six passengers at a time. We got luckier than that. We were the only two passengers for the afternoon, so we got a private tour. Left at two o’clock. Motored across the flat water to an uninhabited mangrove island. Tied up the boat. Launched the sea kayaks. Paddled for a couple hours. Rebecca from the boat paddled with us and gave us the eco-tour, and showed us some really cool places to paddle through. Saw tons of seabirds. Saw mangrove crabs, and a mangrove snake underwater. Played with a sea cucumber. Motored back across the flat water to the harbor, spun the boat around and admired the Key West sunset (picture). Got a stuffed manatee that seems to have the same expression as Annie. Maybe Annie is actually a Cockatee. Or a Manapoo. More and more, I find myself birding by sound. I’ll sort the different noises I’m hearing, identify which ones I’m familiar with, and focus on finding the source of the ones I don’t recognize. When we moved our motorhome today, the first think I noticed when I stepped out were the bird noises coming from the bushes right next to our site. New birds. Exotic birds. Immediately, I went to investigate. I found two cages of exotic birds the people in the site next to us apparently carry around and set outside, weather permitting. I assumed that part about weather permitting, we haven’t talked to them yet (the owners of the birds, not the birds). But certainly, you’d have to be conscious of whether you were in Key West, or Keystone, before you put the birds out. They could freeze right up if you weren’t paying attention. Saw pelicans, cormorants, frigate birds, yellow crowned night herons, little blue heron, tri colored herons, a thousand black skimmers, a stingray, a dead cormorant, a coopers hawk, egrets, terns, seagulls, ibis, and more palm warblers. Sat on the dock tonight and listened to the fish splashing in the dark. Annie sat with us. She didn’t actually sit, she did that stretch out to look at something, prepared to flee at any moment, growling that growl that says “I know you’re out there. I don’t know what you are, but I know you’re out there. Stay back. I know karate.” She was almost gotten by three different things. They were, in order, a floating bait bucket, a floating mangrove leaf, and a dock cleat. Judy finally took pity on her and held her for a while so she could relax a little. Traveled one hundred feet in the motorhome today. No new birds. Motorhome moving. Dock sitting. Dock sitting in the dark. Bird watching. Sailing. Kayaking. Tomorrow, either canoeing in the State Park to a place that’s supposed to have manatees, crocodiles, alligators, and sharks. Or bird watching back on Key West to try to see the white crowned pigeon, a new bird for us. Tough choices.

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Trip12

Thursday. This is a full park we’re staying in, without reservations. We moved to a canal-side site today so we could stay. A lower low last night. It got down to fifty-six. Made eighty-one for a high today. Woke up to a cloudless, windless morning. Sat out on the dock to have coffee and the ocean looked like a reflection pond. Watched schools of fish and a barracuda pass below. Sea gulls serenaded. The coffee was good. That took up the morning. We embarked on a more ambitious project for the afternoon. We have seen some mailboxes being held by manatees. That doesn’t sound right. It wasn’t a whole bunch of mailboxes and a whole bunch of manatees holding them up all at once. One mailbox, one manatee. The manatee stands about five feet high. Our mission was to find who sells them and take a look. We drove north. Did you know there are forty-two bridges between the keys? One of them is seven miles long. We drove all the way back to Key Largo and found the shop. Outdoor statuary. Manatees holding mailboxes. Five feet tall. They’re pretty expensive. Bought some smaller stuff. Stopped at John Pennekamp State Park to check it out. Stopped at a wild bird center. I got to grab a pelican’s bill and wrestle with it. I won! Judy had one land on her shoulder. That’s a little intimidating. Saw a yellow crowned night heron. I’m still bothered by the enormous impact of those giant cruise ships docked at Key West. They dwarf the town. My observation was that most of the cruise passengers weren’t getting more than two hundred yards away from the ship. Everything within two hundred yards of the ships has been built within the last two years. Is there a logic problem here? You travel to an exotic port on a cruise ship. Get off the cruise ship. Look at all the stuff they built for you to see in cruise village. Then get back on the ship and head for another exotic port. Sound just a little too much like Disney World? Disturbing. We had a romantic candlelight dinner for two. Just the two of us… and rags, the giant furry moth. We have Annie the giant caterpillar asleep on Judy’s lap, and Rags, the giant moth. He just can’t help himself. He’s drawn. His whiskers are shorter now and a little curly on the ends. He’s still trying to get the rest of the wax off his paws. Traveled three hundred feet in the motorhome today. No new birds. Motorhome moving. Cat drooling. More dock sitting (picture). No lunch: just munched all day. Tomorrow, the eco-tour aboard the trimaran: snorkeling or kayaking or both.
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Trip11

Wednesday. Moving day.Last night’s low was fifty-nine degrees. Still closer to Fidel than to Jeb.We’ve been at this KOA for three nights. Not very good luck with neighbors. We have reservations for the KOA fifty miles up the road at Fiesta Key. Thought we’d try that one, but someone recommended we look at a different place first. We drove down the highway from mile marker 20 to mile marker 14, and found the Blue Water Key RV Resort. Now this is very nice (pictures). We called and cancelled our reservations at Fiesta Key. These are all privately owned lots that the park will rent out while the owners aren’t here. We have encountered parks with length restrictions before, but this is the first one we’ve stayed at that has a minimum length: twenty-six feet. Only big motorhomes. Only full hookups. Eighty sites. Wide lots. Waterfront sites. Canal sites. Tiki huts. Private docks. Lots of rules, but they’re all about being considerate of the park and considerate of your neighbors. Rules we can live with. No monthly rates. If you want to stay here a month, it costs three thousand dollars. It reminds us of the condos at Wailea on Maui. Not the kind of place we could afford to buy, but we can afford to visit for a few days.We put the pets out on leashes and let them hang out outside for a while. The cat loves it. He rolls around in the dirt, on the asphalt, in the grass. Annie is such a mommy’s dog, she can’t stand to be anywhere without Judy. If Judy is not there, the only place Annie wants to be is on the back of the couch, watching for Mom’s return. Rags is content to stretch and roll around outside for hours, until he has to get back inside to the cat box. We had left the door to the motorhome open. Annie was still on her leash, but on the back of the couch, inside. Rags was inside as well, but with his front end inside the cat box, straining against the leash to get his rear-end into the cat box as well. I think it was good that I noticed this and unhooked him.We brothers had a conversation a while back, wondering if the Banks power packs were available yet for the Chevy V-10. A new Endeavor parked next to us, with a Banks Power sticker on the side, right above the V-10 emblem. I guess they’re ready.Fifty years of Pepsi! After fifty years of drinking Pepsi, I’ve finally burned out. Years ago I had to switch away from the sugar of regular Pepsi and adapt to diet Pepsi. It wasn’t easy, but I wanted my Pepsi, so I persevered. Several weeks ago, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t stand the thought of any more nutra-death aftertaste. Pepsi may be out of my diet for good. I miss it. I don’t want it, but I still miss it. I haven’t figured out what to replace it with yet. Something with no sugar and no artificial-sweetener-after-taste.Saw palm warblers and a merlin. I’m having trouble figuring some of the birds out, but I describe them to Judy and she looks them up and tells me what they are. Together, we make a pretty good birder.Six miles on the motorhome. Two new birds. Motorhome moving. Private dock sitting. Club sandwich for lunch. Lobster for dinner. Not a bad day.I think we’ll do it again tomorrow.
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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.