Beginning the return journey

On January 31st, as my cousin Greg and his wife Linda were leaving for their Australia trip, we too headed off on our return journey to Seattle.  Our car and RV have been worked over and refitted, and our itinerary is generally laid out.  We expect to travel about 5,500 RV miles, arriving in Seattle about the 4th of July.  The map of our itinerary is laid out on a page on this blog which you can look up if you want.  We will be moving along the Gulf Coast for quite awhile, then moving inland up through the Southwest.  Back by the summer.

On the first stage of our trip, we made a short stop at the Corkscrew Swamp Preserve, one of the original Audubon sites set up many years ago.  It was spectacular birding, with a very long boardwalk providing some of the best birding sites we've seen, as well as a visitor center with information on the history of the site and its importance.  

Our first camping stop was the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve State Park, a little gem in central Florida about halfway up the peninsula.  It turns out that Florida used to be largely prairie, about three million acres of it.  Almost all of that prairie is gone, converted to agriculture, but this park preserves many acres of the original ecology.  It is home to unusual birds and wildlife, and is very isolated, so far from the cities that it attracts a lot of amateur astronomers, who come there for the clear view of the night sky and the lack of city lights.  The few campers who stop here are very quiet and low-impact folks, and it is one of the quietest and most serene parks we have ever stayed at - definitely a favorite of ours.

Activities there are simple - hiking, birding, biking, and star-gazing.  That suited us very well.  Ivy did some painting and we both took bike rides and hikes.  The main roads are quite passable, but the further out ones can be quite challenging on a bike.  I traveled down one that was flooded a foot deep for over half a mile and then had soft sand for several more miles.  That was not fun and in the heat - did I mention that it was about 80 degrees during the day - and I got quite exhausted before I got back.  But the country is stunning.  Besides the prairie there are local islands of trees - hammocks, they call them - with some of the biggest and most lovely old live oaks that we have seen so far.

Leaving Kissimmee, we headed off to visit my step-mother Alice again on the way out of the state.  We had a great time there, as always, eating and visiting and getting in a little last-minute shopping.  Ivy created her very first chocolate souffle in honor of our visit.  Then it was off to Blue Spring State Park, a large manatee sanctuary north of Orlando.

 The park is very popular and the sites are really lovely.  And there were plenty of manatees.  In the winter they seek out warm springs to keep from freezing, and they stay at these spots for long periods and in large numbers.   They are not very lively, and often hard to see as they rest at the bottom of the warm springs. And pictures don't do them justice much.  But it is great to know that Florida is taking good care of them and providing refuges for their winter survival.  The area near Blue Spring is quite gorgeous, there is a good miles-long bike trail, and a river.  And nearby was the pleasant town of Deland, where we spent a short time looking around.

Next, we will be heading west across the Florida panhandle and on through the Alabama and Mississippi gulf coasts.  We expect to be in New Orleans for part of Mardi Gras, and then off through the Texas Birding Trails.   

January in Florida

We returned to Florida to meet with Steve's cousin Greg, and his wife Linda.  They joined us in Tampa, and we traveled south to stay with them at their winter home in Englewood.  We moved our RV onto their property, hooked it up, and we were pretty much set for the month of January.  The month was divided between enjoying the natural abundance of Florida and repairing and refitting all our various vehicles for the long trip home.  The repairing and refitting was the boring part, but very necessary, and it was great to have a base like Greg's house to work from while we did the work, or had it done.

Greg and Linda are friends of long standing besides being relatives, and we two, as couples, enjoy many of the same outdoor adventures.  Greg and Linda have done a year long camping trip around the US, and their venerable VW camping van with the pop top attracted attention whenever we went somewhere together.  And we went quite a few places.  Wildlife adventures were absolutely the theme of our times together.  Florida is a birder's paradise in the winter, and we took as much advantage as we could.  

We started out on Honeymoon Island where we saw as many osprey as we could shake a stick at.  We stopped off at a Florida Power and Light lagoon where manatees gather and saw quite a few of those.  And a wander in a park near their house yielded a mangrove cuckoo, an unusual bird in the winter.  Bald eagle nests were found here and there, but those eagles are much more common in our own Pacific Northwest, and we didn't find them as exciting as the locals did.  A wander on the local beach brought us a sighting of the black skimmer, a with its dramatic bill that is used to skim small fish out of the water as it flies along the surface. 

There were so many tropical water birds that are very common in Florida yet rarely seen elsewhere, that we were in birder heaven.  There were ibis, egrets, pelicans, storks and herons wherever there was water, and in Florida, water is pretty much everywhere.  And then there were the more exotic critters, like the roseate spoonbill, the anhinga, or the painted bunting.  We snapped so many photos of water birds that we cannot possibly use them all, but the behavior and habits of these critters are fascinating, and we enjoyed them thoroughly.

Greg and Linda were preparing themselves for a six week trip to Australia beginning on February 1st, so they had lots to do as well.  But we managed to schedule a joint trip to the Everglades National Park at the very southern tip of the Florida peninsula.  Unfortunately, my old reliable Canon camera finally gave up the ghost just a couple of days before we left for the Everglades.  So although we could use our cell phone for some photos, most of our adventures went unrecorded.  I ordered a new Nikon before I left, but it would only arrive on our return, so we were restricted to our ever-diminishing memories to record our adventures.

On  our way to the Everglades, we stopped for a few days with Linda's parents, who have a winter home on Pine Island, near Sanibel.  Their property is waterfront, and they have a boat that they use regularly for crabbing and just gadding about.  We were able to take a day trip to Sanibel Island on the boat for some serious shell-searching, and the next day Linda's dad treated us to a home-built crab feed, which we thoroughly enjoyed.

At the Everglades, we enjoyed birding, kayaking and hiking for several days. Greg and Linda  have their own kayaks, and we rented a double to keep them company.  We paddled through ponds and mangrove tunnels and down a canal where manatees kept us company for a bit. 

Upon our return, we joined our friends John and Mary, who had joined us previously in Glacier National Park.  They were down in Florida for a visit, so we took advantage of a gap in their schedule to join them for tours of Sanibel and Captiva Islands, where shells are legendary.  We spent lots of time picking up little treasures along the beach and had some very nice meals in local restaurants as well.  Another highlight was a tour of the "Ding" Darling National Preserve, a magnificent park with even more top quality birding. 

Another great stop was the Myakka State Park, which included the "canopy walk," high up in the canopy of the forest of  live oaks, palms,etc.  You got the sensation of what it looks like, perhaps, being a bird soaring over the terrain.

At the end of their visit, we completed our preparations and launched our official return trip.  The map of our planned route is contained in this blog on a separate page.  We expect to spend the spring along the Texas border and in the Southwest, returning to Seattle around the fourth of July.