Boooooooring

Sunday, September 19, 2021 – Yup, your right, I’m going to say it’s HOT and HUMID.

This morning we took a LONG drive (45 miles 1 way from the park entrance) to the Flamingo Visitors Center.  We planned on taking a 9:30 boat ride arriving about 9:10, turns out the boat rides started at 9:00, well rats the next tour was at 11:00 so we decided to pass, we checked out the campground, the only thing there besides a small marina.

We spent a fair amount of time watching the manatees, and looking for the resident crocodile, by then it was going on 10:30 so we decided to take the boat ride after all.

We expected the boat ride to be similar to the one we took at Everglades City a few days ago but because this is misquote season, rainy season, the water was to high to get under a bridge so we were on a pontoon boat & there were 2 other couples for 6 passengers plus the captain. Not really the captains fault but this was the most boooooooring boat ride, it was just fast enough for a slight breeze, we just went out this 3 mile channel, across a bay and then back, didn’t see much of anything in the way of wildlife & the captain was not overly talkative.

One of the reasons we didn’t camp there were the warnings about the misquotes, and they didn’t lie, every time we got out we had to spend a couple of minutes chasing down skeeters that came in every time we opened the doors or windows.

This was our last exploration of Everglades NP this trip, we hope to make it back in the winter when the skeeters are almost tolerable.

Sadly the Everglades are dying, they are working on a multi decade, multi billion dollar plan to rehilabate the Everglades.

Problem 1 – the roads across the land are choking off the natural flow of the water.

Problem 2 – Lake Okeechobee, basically the beginning of the Everglades water, is so polluted with farm runoff (fertilizer) that if they reintroduce the water all that nitrate rich water would drastically change the plant life, the wrong, invasive plants, would take over. From that I understand things the nitrate rich water flowing into the ocean is what is causing the algae blooms along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf Coast already.

Problem 3 – they need to find a way to increase the water flow with out flooding millions of homes and farms

Problem 4 – Pythons are killing just about everything,  something like 80-90% of mammals have already disappeared .

We didn’t see any crocodiles but we did see a couple of baby gators.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis they stuck some missiles down in the everglades, the gate was across the road so we couldn’t drive back there.

The End