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Trip20

Friday. The Manatee Assault. Today. The day we board a Marine Assault Craft: an outboard powered inflatable, to prowl the river for manatees. It dawned cold and windy. We were not deterred. The boat was primitive. We put on wetsuits, layers of fleece, and still froze our asses off in the wind on the ride over. We persevered. We reached the drop zone. We dropped anchor, donned snorkel gear, and dropped over the side. We located the savage beasts and lay in wait on the surface. When the manatees came up to us, we stared danger in the face and did not blink. We conquered the wild manatee. Actually, we rubbed their bellies and giggled. Judy had a three-foot calf with a face the size of Annie’s, staring into her eyes from twelve inches away while she rubbed its belly. The adults are up to 3,500 pounds and are imposing but not dangerous. The calves are a curious delight. The rules require that you not chase these critters down to engage them, but wait for them to come to you. If they come to you and want their bellies rubbed, you don’t have to decline. Sometimes they just swim around and you can snorkel above them and watch. The water is clear. Sometimes you can find a couple sleeping on the bottom and just wait for them to come up. Mothers and calves. If they get tired of you, a couple flips of that giant tail flipper, and they’re gone. We spent a couple hours in the water with them. It was like paddling in British Columbia. Cold and uncomfortable, but that didn’t matter. They are gracious gentle giants. It was a thrill. Normally, wild manatees are to be left alone, but there are a few places that allow regulated contact. The place we found happens to be right outside a manatee park, and has a guy paddling around in a kayak, making sure no-one one is being unreasonable. There is a very limited area that people are allowed in. There are lots of places for the manatees to retreat to if they’re not in the mood for company. They are here because there is a warm water spring that feeds fresh water out into the river, and the river flows another ten miles out to the sea. During relatively cold weather like this. The manatees feed in the Gulf, then come up the river to get warm in the constant seventy-two degree water from this spring. They don’t have a tolerance for cold water, so there are a lot of manatees congregating here. Several different places run boats out there to drop people into the water to see these sea cows. We were the only two people out on our boat and got to stay in the water as long as we wanted. The RV crisis. The bad 12-volt outlets. Got the mobile RV guy to stop by and look at them today. He pulled the first bad one out, the one that hasn’t worked for months, and messed with it and it worked without a flicker for him, so he put it back in place and it was fixed. The next one was more difficult. He actually had to bend a piece of metal, that was apparently misshapen at the factory, back into place, and now it works flawlessly. An anticlimactic resolution, considering all the contortions we had gone through trying to bypass the problems. Now we can cheer on our Raiders in front-room comfort. No miles on the motorhome. West coast of Florida. I can now pronounce the name of the town we stopped in. It’s pronounced Homosassa, just like it’s spelled. It’s right down the road from Chassahowitzka and Withlacoochee. No birding. No swamping. No cat drugging. No driving. No new birds. One bobcat. Eight new manatees. Tomorrow. North.
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Trip19

Thursday. We packed up and pulled out nice and early. Drove north on freeways through Tampa. Crossed a magnificent bridge over Tampa Bay, or the Tampa River, or some large body of water that connects Tampa to the Gulf. It’s called the Skyview Bridge. All the structural support is located between the opposing lanes, so there is nothing between you and the water, which is a long way down, except the usual cement barriers, which look much less significant than usual. It was a little scary from our motorhome perch. Judy’s hands got soaking wet. As we were driving north, south of Tampa, we happened to look east, and caught the rising plume of the shuttle launch. We got to watch a shuttle launch from only about a hundred miles away. Our closest view yet! We could watch its progress until the main tanks dropped off and there was no visible vapor remaining to describe its path. We overcame an RV crisis today. Actually, it has been a series of successes, all attributable to Judy. A couple months ago, the 12-volt outlet above the table behind the passenger seat quit working. We didn’t bother to get it fixed. Earlier this trip, the television quit working. This is not a serious problem, the bedroom television in the back works just fine. It’s not always comfortable though. You have to lie on the bed to watch it. Sunday is football Sunday. How are we going to cheer our beloved Raiders on to victory if we have to do it from that crummy back television? My solution to the problem was to think of something else. That approach didn’t produce any results, so Judy went to work on it. She got the 12-volt extension cord and plugged it into the 12-volt outlet on the dash. She plugged the television into the 12-volt extension cord. It worked. Judy had fixed the television. We just had a bad outlet. So for the next two nights, while I wrote, or updated bird lists, or such, Judy watched some television. But the second night, the picture started shrinking. Maybe the television is broken after all. We didn’t solve that problem right away. We just filed it for future reference. This morning, we packed up, I put the key in the ignition, turned it, and nothing happened. I guess those little 12-volt televisions use a lot of electricity. The engine battery was dead. The television wasn’t broken. The picture just started getting smaller when it couldn’t get enough electrons to fill the screen. The engine battery problem was mine to solve. That was no big deal, because there is that silver override button underneath the left side of the dash. Push that and the house battery is connected to the engine battery circuit and there are suddenly electrons aplenty. The problem of how to watch some television without running down the engine battery again was Judy’s new challenge. It was quiet for a few minutes, then Judy started assembling pieces of her solution. Now we have a 12-volt television, plugged into a 12-volt extension cord, which is plugged into the emergency 12-volt outlet on the jumper battery, which is plugged in to the house current of the motorhome, which is plugged into shore power. It works great. We ran it for a couple hours today, just to make sure. The picture never shrank at all. But tonight, as soon as we turned it back on, the picture started shrinking. It seems the television draws power faster that the jumper battery can recharge. So now, while I’m wasting time writing again, Judy is back in the bedroom watching CSI. After driving freeways through Tampa/St Petersburg, we got off on a highway to get a closer look than freeways afford. I have heard that there are a lot of small towns along Western Central Florida. What I found is that what used to be a lot of small towns are pretty much all run together now as one continuous town. This was a lot like taking the coast highway through Southern California. Not much coast, and a whole lot of stoplights and stop and go driving. Two hundred plus miles on the motorhome. West coast of Florida. We stopped in a town whose name I can’t pronounce, but it pronounces itself as the manatee capitol of the world. No birding. No swamping. Cat drugging. Driving. Space shuttling. No new birds. No manatees. Tomorrow we board a Marine Assault Craft: an outboard powered inflatable, to prowl the river for manatees. Tomorrow. We swim with the manatees.
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Trip18

Wednesday.The Corkscrew Swamp. An Audubon Preserve. It has a two-mile boardwalk through the old growth cypress forest. We got up at first light to drive over and spend an hour and snap some photos before heading off north to our next adventure. After five hours, we looked up the number of the RV Park and asked them if we could have our site for another night. After eight hours, we took pity on poor Annie’s bladder, locked inside the motorhome, and came back to let it out. There is not really much there. Just an old swamp. It’s a really cool boardwalk, though, made out of some South American wood that lasts forever, is harvested sustainably, requires no treatment, gives off no pollutants, and you can’t get slivers. Nature’s most perfect wood, produced in nature’s most perfect way. Anyway, I always admire boardwalks, but they never seem long enough. This one was just right. This turned out to be a good birding site. I kept track of the birds we saw. Thirty-six. That includes the yellow bellied sapsucker, northern waterthrush, the ovenbird, the summer tananger, the swamp sparrow, and the painted bunting, all new birds for us. The painted bunting is the most colorful bird we’ve seen lately. It’s blue, red, green, and yellow. It looks like a kindergartner painted it. Lots of bird noises and we recognize most now. We followed the calls and hammering of a pileated woodpecker until we spotted it. It’s a crow-sized woodpecker. It sounds like someone using a hand axe in the forest when it’s looking for food. Saw all four woodpeckers they have there: the pileated, red bellied, yellow bellied sapsucker, and downey. Saw lots of warblers, herons, egrets, anhingas… Naa, nevermind, too many to list. Watched two red shouldered hawks share a serious dating moment. Found lots of friendly quiet people to talk to about the birds. Eight hours wasn’t nearly enough. The swamp has lots of cypress up to their ankles in swamp water. Some parts are pure black water reflections. Some open parts are covered in lake lettuce. Some deep dark parts are covered in bright green duckweed. It’s still relatively open because it’s January. Probably a lot darker in June. We really like this RV Park we’re in. It is new, quiet, clean, and friendly. It has a fifty foot deep lake in the center. A run around crystal lake drive, circumnavigating the lake, takes twenty-five minutes. Lake front lots cost eighty-five thousand. Seems like a bargain after the Keys. In the Keys, they were two hundred to five hundred plus. Here is a photo of another motorhome winner. It raises the bar to an entirely new level: like to about fifteen feet, not counting the continuous tracking satellite bubble. It does not supplant the last winner; this is a different contest. This is the contest to determine which motorhome brother Bill should get next. It’s forty-five feet long. Notice how it is hunkered down on the suspension while parked, so you won’t have to make any really big steps getting in and out. But that is not why Bill should get it. Bill should get it because of the windshield wipers. That’s right, windshield wipers. To my knowledge, Bill is the only one of us who has had two sets of wipers on a single car: windshield wipers and headlight wipers on the Volvo. To continue the trend, Bill’s new motorhome has two sets of wipers as well. One for the windshield, and another set for the upper windshields. No miles on the motorhome. Birding. Swamping. Gator watching. Laundering. Five, count ‘em, five new birds. No manatees. Tomorrow, north.
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Trip17

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.
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Trip16

Monday.

Everglades day. Did the usual oatmeal, coffee, food bar, and headed off for the rental shack. Didn’t rent a kayak where we expected to. Reserved a canoe out at Nine Mile Pond instead. It sounded like a better place to paddle. Took a four hour self guided canoe tour across a lake, then through mangrove swamp and sawgrass swamp. Wow! It was wonderful. It’s buggy in the campground, even in January. It wasn’t buggy on the canoe trail at all. Passed a couple gators on the way across the lake. Disappeared into the narrow winding passages of the red mangrove swamp. Some passages were so tight we didn’t even use paddles, we just pulled ourselves through by the surrounding branches. There were a total of maybe six other canoes out on ten miles or so of trail. Nice density for Judy and I who like to be out by ourselves. There were times we got total swamp isolation. We could just glide and listen to the creaks and croaks, splashes, sudden squawking complaints, and flapping wings. About halfway through, we burst out of the mangrove and spike rush swamp and into the sawgrass swamp. We could see farther now, but with our heads lower than all the clumps of stuff growing around us, we were still in wilderness. We saw great big turtles underwater. We saw lots of fish. Lots of birds. We saw an underwater plant called a bladder wort that sends up pretty little yellow flowers, while below the surface, its other parts are eating tiny animals. Saw a three-foot Florida Gar. Saw a couple more frigate birds. On the way back, to close the loop, we passed within a few feet of a seven-foot gator. Oops. Didn’t mean to get quite that close. Almost ran over one on the bank when we returned the canoe to shore at the start/finish. Spent the evening hanging around the visitor center and marina. Watched a couple crocodiles doing some serious dating. That involved some close contact with heads held perfectly vertical out of the water, then some chases and mock chases. Crocodiles, not alligators. They have them both here. A manatee surfaced. Saw a roseate spoonbill fly over. I left to go for a run, and was only gone for a few minutes when Judy came to get me in the car. She picked me up and took me back to show me the white crowned pigeons she had spotted. We thought we were too far north, but we weren’t. White crowned pigeons. They are not very common. They are not even listed in my Stokes Eastern Bird Book at all. We got the white crowned pigeon! But then it got even better. We stopped at the swamp pond on our way back to the campground, as it was getting dark, and guess what popped out of the reeds. A purple gallinule! Right there in the middle of all the moorhens, ibises, and herons, there was a purple gallinule muttering its way through the marsh. Then it got too dark and buggy. While we were in the RV Park, back in the Keys, we watched some football, and flipped around to the local channel to see what was on. There was a guy describing the indigenous plants. He was explaining that when he referred to a tree as deciduous, that meant that there was a two week period in January when the tree had no leaves at all, then it grew them all back. That’s pretty funny considering how tight all the deciduous trees are locked up in Colorado for six months. Tonight we’re sitting here listening to light rain on the roof. Zero miles on the motorhome. Alligators. Crocodiles. Mosquitos. Manatees. Two new birds. Tomorrow, the Big Cypress Swamp Preserve. Oh Yeah. A picture. What’s that saying? A bird in the tent….