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Trip09

Monday.

Got a good night’s sleep… with the air conditioner and fans running. Spent the day in Key West. We were here about ten years ago for an anniversary. We spent a week and loved it. Today, it’s a little cooler. Only about seventy degrees. Key West has changed somewhat. Ten years ago, people that had been coming here for years probably bemoaned how busy it was compared to how it used to be. Today, we did the same. Key West has always been famous for it’s sunsets. Mallory Square at the end of Duvall Street is the scene of an impromptu gathering every night to honor and applaud the sunset. We attended every night for a week on our previous trip. Local artisans set up. Street performers entertain. People gather and visit. It was a delight. Key West is now a cruise ship destination. Cruise ship docks have been built up all around the old town section we were so familiar with. Mallory square has been improved and expanded. An entire new “Key West” village of souvenir shops has been built up to accommodate the cruise passengers. We even saw a sign announcing the official starting time of the sunset celebration. There were three giant cruise ships in port. There were two more anchored offshore. It was very crowded. We didn’t recognize much. It didn’t feel the same. The cruise ships were actually lined up directly between Mallory Square and the point in the sea where the sun disappears. Could you have a sunset celebration, and all gather to watch the sun sink and disappear behind the cruise ship? Would that generate a spontaneous round of applause? We decided not to hang around until dark to find out. For years, we’ve recalled fondly our favorite food vendor in Key West. It’s an old bar/restaurant here called Turtle Kraals. It’s built in the remains of the old Dutch turtle processing sheds about a half-mile down the waterfront from Mallory Square. They really did have a turtle harvesting industry here once. In all these years, it never occurred to me that I might not be able to have lunch at the Turtle Kraals the next time we came. We continued to wander and look for things familiar. Lunch time arrived. We got hungry. We headed to where Turtle Kraals used to be… And it was there. It was a little cleaner and a little nicer, but it was still there. Right there overlooking the dingy parking and all the people coming and going. We had our fish and chips. Life was good. Then we went to see if the guy in the big ocean-going trimaran sailboat, that we spent so much time with ten years ago was still there by any chance. The last time here, we had been wandering the docks, and found him sitting in the cockpit of his boat, having a beer, with a handmade sign advertising “Tours”. It was a pretty casual business. He took us out for a sunset tour. The next day he took us out to some islands and paddled out in the kayak to bring us drinks of fresh water while we were out snorkeling. His name was A.D. We found him! Well we found the boat. It is an unmistakable forty-five foot gray racing trimaran. But this time, it’s owned by some company advertising eco-tours. He didn’t seem very ambitions ten years ago. He wasn’t committed to Key West. He hadn’t been there for very long, and wasn’t sure how long he was going to stay. We hung around the boat for a little while, admiring it and remembering, and someone emerged. We talked with her awhile, and it turns out she is the driving force behind the “eco-tours” movement. Her husband, A.D. still drives the boat. She explained that they’re just a little more professional in how they operate their business now. It was a fun visit. We got to recall lots of little details that took her back to their first year of operation ten years ago. We went back to Duvall Street after lunch. The crowds had thinned. It felt better. The open-air bars and restaurants were loud, but they are loud from live music. It’s more than I can take to go inside, but from out on the sidewalk, it sounds just perfect. Judy bought me an ice-cream cone. We walked and lingered and enjoyed. Here at the KOA, they always answer the phone with: “It’s a beautiful day on Sugarloaf Key”, and they’re right. We got here at seventy-one degrees. We arrived in T-shirts and shorts. The people here were wearing sweaters and long pants, and apologizing for how cold it was. We marveled at their wear, they marveled at ours. We haven’t been here long enough to acclimate yet.Here’s a picture of Annie trying to relax. Zero miles on the motorhome. No new birds. May have to get more serious about the birds tomorrow. Surely, at the bottom of Florida, this is an opportunity to see some birds we haven’t seen before.

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Trip08

Sunday.

Eight hours. We’re in charge now. On the road again. This is the last travel day for awhile. We got to drive off into a Florida foggy sunrise (picture). Another quiet day. Good roads. Easy driving. Except the toll plazas. We spent the day on the Florida turnpike. The Florida turnpike is a toll road. We don’t have much experience with toll roads in Colorado. But, if they want to build a road, then charge me to drive on it, I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t have a problem with how much they charged me either. The toll plazas weren’t especially difficult to drive through, they were just often. They stopped us to charge us a toll eight times. Eight times we paid to drive on that road. It wasn’t that big a deal, but it seems in these high-tech days, this is an extremely low-tech way to collect a few quarters. OK. For a motorhome it’s more than a few quarters, but for cars, most of the toll stops collected seventy-five cents. I saw on one exit, in between toll plazas, that it cost another twenty-five cents to get off the tollway. Every car has to stop and pay another twenty-five cents. I would think for the fuel consumption and environmental inefficiency, they ought to just wave everyone through. We end up talking to other people in campgrounds everywhere we go. In Texas, it costs seven dollars a night to stay in the campground on the beach, or you can just park on the beach for free. We have heard from other motorhomers that it is expensive to visit here in the winter. So far, it appears they’re right. You can save money at most campgrounds in other states if you’re willing to stay a month, by paying a monthly rate of three hundred dollars or so. We checked with the KOA here, and if you’re willing to commit to four months or more, you can stay for a monthly rate of fourteen hundred dollars. This mobile hookup is so cool. I have a new cellphone hooked up to my laptop. It works almost every time. It didn’t work out in the middle of Kansas. It didn’t work down in the bottom of Oklahoma by a lake, but it has worked everywhere else. It even works way out here almost all the way to Key West. I have another Florida sign to share. When you leave the rest stop, they remind you of several important things you might otherwise forget. They remind you to buckle up: “click it or ticket”. Don’t litter. Don’t drink and drive. And. Are you ready?…. Turn your wipers on when it’s raining. Really. It says that. Wait a minute! If my windshield wipers aren’t on, and it’s raining, what if I can’t see through the windshield to read the reminder? How will I know what to do?This is from the people who also brought us “hanging chads”. I love Florida. We took a walk tonight, and ended up at the campground marina. On the little island right across from the marina, maybe fifty feet away, is a giant tree, full of roosting pelicans. That works. A pelican tree. We were here and set up by three pm. Another three hundred fifty miles today. We’re twenty miles from Key West. We’ve put two thousand five hundred fifty miles on the odometer. Wow! You drive a few hundred miles every day and next thing you know you’re twenty five hundred miles from home and there aren’t any roads left to drive on. Well, nowhere else to go from here, so I guess we’ll just have to stay awhile.

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Trip07

Saturday.

Ten hours. Maybe we’re all caught up on our sleep now. It was so easy to get up this morning. An uneventful day. We stopped once for lunch and a run. That was it. The next stop, it was three thirty, and three hundred fifty miles were gone. Fast roads and easy driving. We’re still in Florida, but we’ve turned south again. The weather is getting nicer. I got to run in just a T shirt today. Wait. I didn’t mean… OK. I didn’t have to wear a sweatshirt. How can I phrase this in the positive without describing everything I was wearing? I got to run in just a T shirt today. And I wore everything else you would normally expect someone running to wear. We like Florida state parks (picture). But not all of them accept pets. We got a list of which parks are pet friendly. But even the pet friendly parks require a current shot record. Of course we didn’t bring a current shot record for each pet, but we discovered this on a Friday, so Judy called our Vet and they faxed the critical info ahead to the state park. The state park made a copy for us, and we’re set for the rest of the trip, as long as we don’t try to stay at the wrong state parks. The pets have been great companions. Annie has gone into her giant brown sleeping caterpillar routine in Judy’s lap. Rags the cat struggles a little with the motion of the motorhome at first. He hides under the couch and drools, so we give him drugs. When the drugs kick in, he just goes to sleep in the chair and he’s fine. The second day, he doesn’t usually have any problem, but this trip he needed drugs again the second day. The third day, he was fine. He was running around looking out the windows, looking perfectly comfortable, until he jumped up on the dash board in front of me, looked up, and drooled. I think he’s become a seeker. He’s a user. We figured out how to get him to stop drooling. Now we have to figure out how to get him to kick the kitty drugs. He stayed pretty smashed on the drugs during the day, but after we started to wean him from them, there was a surprise reaction. Rags has never been a particularly demonstrative cat. He wants to be wherever you are, but he wouldn’t want you to think he actually cares. It’s not like he wants to get picked up and petted. Well, what happened after we drugged him in the mornings was that by the evenings, we had a cat that was only slightly stoned, discovering that he really, really, really, really, really loves us. I mean he REALLY loves us. He loves us so much; there is just no way to get enough of us. No way to get close enough to us. We finally had to give up and lock him in the dog’s crate for the night so we could get some sleep. A three hundred fifty mile day. This sets us up for one more three hundred fifty mile day. Then there are no more miles to go. We’ll be at the southernmost KOA in the US, twenty miles from Key West. We even called ahead for reservations to make sure we had a place to stay. We can spend a couple days there while we look around and see if we want to continue to stay there, or if we want to move to someplace else. This doesn’t look like a rustic KOA in the book. It looks very nice. It has its own beach and its own marina. It is priced like it is nice. We reserved a beachfront site.

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Trip06

Friday.

We’ve tapered off to nine. We’re not afraid of no stinkin sleep monster. It was good to stop and search the swamp for wood ducks, but I wasn’t through driving yet. I like the feel of just rolling down the highway, then looking around after eight or ten hours to see where you are. We only drove a couple hours on Wednesday, then the motorhome didn’t move at all on Thursday. We got up this morning before the sun. We turned left. We turned left, driving straight east, into the strobe light torture of a brilliant sunrise over perfectly flat Louisiana through a tall pine forest (picture). The strobe light torture lasted about two hours. It was harder on Judy than on me. She occupies the south side of the car. The low winter sun lasts longer on her side than on mine. It doesn’t seem fair, but that’s the way it is. We’re considering only taking trips in which we drive west from now on, just to even things out for awhile. Louisiana is behind us. Mississippi too. Then Alabama. Tonight we’re in Florida. We have crossed a lot of rivers on this trip. Down south, they have all had a chance to get big from all the water flowing down from up north; by the time we cross them. They are all crossed with impressive bridges. The bridge over the Mississippi was the biggest, but there have been bridge after bridge to cross these rivers. In Colorado we have streams. These are clearly rivers. Our favorite bridge of all, though, is the one in Mobile that goes under the river instead of over it. Here you are, driving along. You know you’re approaching another river and you’re watching for the bridge approach. You get closer and closer, and still don’t see the bridge, then you just duck down and go under it instead. Cool. We stopped for the night at Falling Waters State Park in the Florida Panhandle. Before it got dark, we took a walk to find the falling waters. Halfway there, is the impoundment with the swimming beach. Now remember, this is Florida. Right next to the swim beach, is the sign announcing the presence of alligators, and warning that it is illegal to feed or molest alligators in Florida. I swear. I’m not making this up. It didn’t say to be careful not to get eaten by alligators, it warned everyone to be careful with them. Farther down the hill, (you go downhill to go see the waterfall in Florida), is Florida’s highest waterfall. Wait. Let me rephrase that. Farther down the hill is the waterfall with the most vertical drop of any in Florida. That’s it. Remember, this is Florida. Florida is pretty flat. There is not anyplace really all that high to fall from in Florida. Sixty-seven feet, and an impressive sixty-seven feet it is. Now you might be wondering how Florida manages even a sixty-seven foot waterfall. And you’re right to wonder. There is a trick. They manage a sixty-seven foot waterfall by having a stream fall into a one hundred foot sinkhole. To see the waterfall, you follow the stream downhill to the point where you can look over the edge and watch it fall sixty-seven feet into a hole. And you might be wondering how the water only falls sixty-seven feet into a one hundred foot hole. Well, me too. I’ve just telling you what the signs said. It was an awesome sight. For Florida. A four hundred mile day.

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Trip05

Thursday. The Wood Duck has landed! Got our ten hours. Got to the Bluebonnet Swamp, just as it opened at nine am. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? Having to wait for a swamp to open? This swamp is a city park. It has a headquarters and exhibits and staff. Maybe it is an elusive duck after all. Our search involved considerable debate at the swamp headquarters about whether the wood duck is actually there right now at all. Seems they can’t always tell. After three hours of searching the swamp, we finally spotted them. We got to see a whole bunch, but never any one for very long. They were only in one place, way back between the trees, paddling around in a little open spot of water. We couldn’t spot them at all with the naked eye. We only saw them by staring through the binoculars at just the right spot, at just the right time, until one swam past the field of view. Once we saw them, though, we got a really good look and got to watch them for as long as we wanted. Victory! This is what we came for. We came for wood ducks. We got wood ducks. The Bluebonnet swamp is a young swamp. It wasn’t always a swamp. Two hundred twenty-five years ago, it was a creek. Settlers here shifted some land around, inadvertently changed the water flow, and voila! A swamp was born. The high ground is an oak ( and whatever else kind of tree) hardwood forest, just like it always was. The swamp land is Cypress and Tupelo Gum trees (picture). No pictures of wood ducks. They were a little too far away for that. Would have needed a camera mounted to the birding scope. We saw other birds too. We saw cormorants, great blue herons, great white egrets, snowy egrets, killdeer, turkey vultures, red tailed hawk, red-bellied woodpeckers, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, eastern phoebes, blue jays, Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, American robins, northern mockingbirds, brown thrashers, cedar waxwings, orange crowned warblers, yellow-rumped warblers, and northern cardinals. The wood ducks, red-bellied woodpeckers, and Carolina chickadees are all new birds for us. We can’t quit thinking about Lake Murray in Oklahoma. When Judy checked in, the camp-host told her it had been raining all day, but that the lake didn’t have any streams emptying into it, so we didn’t have to worry about flooding. OK. It doesn’t have any streams emptying into it. Let’s see. It doesn’t have any streams emptying into it. We can’t figure out where all that water in the lake came from then. It’s a big lake… Wow. We found the wood duck. Now what? What else is there to do? A zero mile day in the motorhome. Not very far in the car either.