Everglades National Park

We slept well at the Florida City Travelodge. The motel checks all of our important boxes: clean, quiet, comfortable. We walked to the breakfast area near the registration desk and found the choices to be disappointing with only three sugar cereals, a little fruit, toast and little muffins to offer. There wasn’t even butter, jelly or peanut butter. We had tea, cereal and a banana before returning to the room.

We got in the car to drive toward the Flamingo area of Everglades National Park. We passed Robert is Here fruit stand but didn’t stop, planning to visit on our way out of the Everglades this afternoon. We entered the park and stopped at the Ernest Coe Visitor Center for information and to visit the displays. I purchased another annual senior pass at the entrance gate. I will probably turn my two expired annual passes next year for a $40 price reduction on a lifetime senior pass.

We stopped at the Royal Palm Visitor Center to walk around the Anhinga Trail and Gumbo Limbo Trail.

Ibis

 No one was in the ranger station when we arrived.  We covered the rental car to prevent the numerous black vultures in the parking lot from destroying the windshield wipers and rubber gaskets on the car. We saw vultures pulling at tarps covering other cars in an attempt to peck at window and door seals or anything made of rubber.

Because of the cold snap, no alligators were visible along the Anhinga Trail, which is very unusual. We also saw very few birds, perhaps because of the cold wind. We did watch a few turtles and fish swimming before we moved on to other trails in the Everglades.

Tree snails

We walked a lot of the trails including the .5 mile Pinelands Trail and the Mahogany Hammock Trail, where we enjoyed finding the tree snails on the cypress trees. The snails are only active during the wet season (spring and summer), but Mary is quite skilled at locating the dormant snails on the trunks of small trees in the hammocks. We were walking on a short trail to a hammock when we heard a young couple hooting like they were looking for an owl. After they started on the path back to the parking lot, I made an owl call that brought the two of them back to the hammock looking for the owl. I was laughing, but Cindy was scolding me to stop. The two looked and looked for the owl and eventually gave up and got about half way to their car, when I called again which brought them running back to the hammock again. We left the area and moved on to visit other areas of the park.

Swamp lily

We went to the Flamingo Visitor Center for lunch. Mary got her National Park Passport stamped for the Flamingo site as well as the southernmost point of mainland US. Because of storm damage, the visitor center is still housed in a temporary facility while the building is being repaired. We had our lunch of peanut butter and crackers near the marina, where a manatee played among the boat slips and an osprey flew with a fish in talons overhead. The osprey nest nearby had young hatchlings awaiting the meal. The usual crocodiles that can be seen at the marina were not there because of the cool and overcast weather.

We walked along the 1 mile Guy Bradley Trail from the marina into the Everglades. We saw a hawk and an osprey very near the trail. We also found several plants that we couldn’t identify so we took snapshots and planned to look them up soon.

On the way back out of the park we stopped at the Eco Pond Trail, a half mile loop around a freshwater pond then on to the Snake Bight Trail that leads to the Florida Bay. We thought that this trail was 0.5 mile each way, but it turned out to be about 1.8 miles each way. Although the walk took longer than we expected, it was a nice walk to an observation platform overlooking coastal mudflats. We saw a number of wading birds feeding, although at a distance since the tide was out.

It was time to leave the park by the time we got back to the car. We drove back to the Travelodge in Homestead cleaned up, met Mark’s sister, Jodie, and his brother-in-law, Grant, for dinner. Because we had such an excellent meal there the night before, we went back to Mario’s Cuban Diner. We all had great meals and enjoyed the conversation. We visited back at the motel, packed to leave for the Keys in the morning, and then turned in for the night.