A Friendly Visit

Long Pine Key Campground, Everglades National Park - Site #95

It was another sunny day at Kissimmeee Prairie on Friday the 23rd. We started with a short walk around the campgrounds. We chatted a bit with the park biologist who was on his way to the south corner of the park where about a half-dozen trucks and fire crew were off to do a prescribed burn. He is also a birder as well as a biologist and was interested in what we were seeing. We were seeing nothing new, but had been watching a Red-shouldered Hawk when he drove by. On return, we packed up Speedy, emptied the tanks and headed south.

We were going to Indiantown, specifically the Indiantown Marina. Our friends, Heidi and Ken, were staying there while helping out on a Habitat for Humanity project in Indiantown. It was secondary roads all the way, stopping in the town of Okeechobeee for grocery shopping. Okeechobee sits at the top of lake Okeechobee and is the only major town in the area. It has a Publix market, which is one of the major chains in Florida and the one we have been shopping in. The prices in this one seemed significantly higher than in ones we’d been in on the east coast.

The lake is right at the end of the road beyond the market and there is an access area there, which was under construction. We stopped for lunch anyway. The entry road goes up over the levee that surrounds the lake and back down to the lake side where there is a sandy stretch along the lake with a boat ramp at one end. It was a bit unkempt, but new parking lots and a pier were being built.  There really wasn’t much of a view. We probably should have continued along the lake as we passed several nicer looking ones on our way.

After lunch we drove along the eastern lake side road to the Okeechobee Waterway Canal, about halfway down the lake. The drive going out of town was a bit depressing with many older small RV and mobile home parks along both sides of the road, but once out of town it was pretty rural, with cattle ranches on the inland side. You can’t actually see the lake. It is entirely surrounded by a high levee, but for some of the drive, we could see homes that backed up to a mini-lake that ran along the inside of the levee, probably the result of dredging while building it.

At the canal we turned east along the south side towards Indiantown and the coast. The canal connects Lake Okeechobee with the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. The waterway continues across the lake to a canal on the other side which joins the Caloosahatchee River and empties out into the Gulf Coast Intracoastal Waterway at Cape Coral. Larger ships cannot make this transit because of a 40’ high fixed bridge at the lake exit, but it takes barge traffic and all manner of recreational craft.

Indiantown lies along the canal, about 15 miles inland from the lake. We crossed back over to the north side of the canal to reach the marina. It is an unusual place. Primarily a full service boatyard, it caters to recreational boats, with lots of storage (and many boats in storage), work areas, slips and sort of a campground. AS a campground, it doesn’t come up anywhere on any lists, books or databases of campgrounds and RV parks. The campsites are mainly interspersed among the stored boats and many are used for boat storage during the summer.

It seems like the marina is a place where northerners (lots of Canadians) store boats in the summer, come down to Florida in the winter in their RVs and use the marina as a base of operations, so they set up electric, water and sewer RV sites to accommodate. There is also long-term car and RV storage for those who go off for longer cruises to the Bahamas or live aboard in the winter. Some of those vehicles looked like the owners went off and never returned. Similarly, some of the boats in storage looked like they arrived from an Atlantic crossing, were put up on stands and left behind. But most were recent and well-kept.

There are all kind of boats berthed or stored there, with a preponderance of sailboats. There were two at the dock that caught my eye. One was a Cape Dory 30 foot motorsailer, which has great lines for a motorsailer. A Cape Dory 25 was our first sailboat. The other was a Herreschoff 33, a newer and larger version of our Herreschoff 31 Cat Ketch. This one had carbon fiber masts, rather than wooden ones like ours. It was probably fiberglass, not cold-molded mahogany. All of the later boats in that line were fiberglass. Neither was for sale…phew!

The marina owner is a supporter of the Habitat for Humanity project in the town. Habitat is building an entire neighborhood for low income residents. There is a large population of immigrants, primarily Guatemalan, who work on the sugar cane plantations in the area. The marina provides campsites, at a discount, to the Habitat volunteers who come down in RVs…there were quite a few.

They had no electric sites left, but they were able to give us a nice grassy spot behind a line of boats. We didn’t need electricity anyway. The positioning worked out quite well as a container on one side of us and a boat on the other effectively blocked out the security lights, giving us a nice dark, quiet spot. It was nice enough that Ken and Heidi were considering moving their trailer there after we left. With a long cord electricity is possible.

They arrived a the marina shortly after we did. They had spent the day at the Yeehaw Junction Bluegrass Festival. They are actually finished with their volunteer stint, but are staying for anther ten days. They also have a small boat and are using the marina as their base for day trips. We spent an enjoyable evening visiting with them, first with snacks on the patio overlooking the docks and later dinner in their trailer.

This morning began overcast and stayed that way most of the day, with a few drops of rain. After showers and breakfast, we said farewell to our friends and started our 200 mile boring journey to Everglades national Park, via AT&T, Starbucks and Robert Is Here in Homestead. The roads between Okeechobee and Homestead are flat, straight and open with sugar cane fields on both sides. It had lots of truck traffic (mainly trucks hauling sugar cane to the processing plants along the way) and a strong crosswind. Aside from the cane trucks, it was similar to driving in Texas last winter. Last time we came down here, my intent was to ride my bike from Ft. Clinch to the Everglades. When we  got down to this area, with the long straight busy road, the wind and the traffic, I decided it wasn’t worth it.

Our drive wasn’t completely straightforward. As we got into the main part of Homestead, on the main road that leads to the park, we ran into a parade. We zigzagged through a maze of back streets for about 15 minutes to get around it. We have no idea what they were celebrating, but it was a long parade.

We made a couple of strange stops while in Homestead. I was looking for an AT&T store to get an AT&T SIM card and plan for my phone. The only mobile service at Flamingo is AT&T, so neither our T-Mobile phones or our Verizon MiFI data card would work—no phone or Internet access, the horror of it all! AT&T has a prepaid plan that includes mobile data and tethering, which means we could use one of our phones as a mobile hotspot for the computers and tablets. It also meant we only had to pay for a month. We found the store, the salesperson knew exactly what I wanted and had me set up within about ten minutes and we on our way.

I’m running low on coffee and they had no brands of espresso at the market yesterday. There was a Starbucks just down the road from AT&T, so we stopped there for lunch and a pound of espresso ground Pike Place. that should last for a couple of weeks.

Our final stop before the park was Robert is Here, a very popular fruit and vegetable stand on the road just before you get to the park. We didn’t get vegetables yesterday in anticipation of stopping here. They have a wide supply of fresh veggies and fruits (and almost every tropical fruit known to man…except Durian). They also have great fruit-based milkshakes, with my favorite, a “to die for” key lime shake. Unfortunately, it is Saturday and the place was packed, We got our fruits and vegetables, but the line for milkshakes was about 20 people long, so it will have to wait for our next time. Fortunately (some of us would say), there is no way out of the park with out passing Robert Is Here.

Tonight we are staying at the Long Pine Key campground within Everglades National Park. We are only here for the night. Flamingo Campground is 40 miles into the park and is supposedly totally booked for tonight. We have 14 days reserved there starting tomorrow and rather than chance it and possibly having to drive an extra 70 miles out and back, we stopped here, only six miles into the park. (Also, one is only allowed to stay 14 days in the park during the winter season, unless there is room. Tonight, Ellen is staying at Long Pine and I’m staying with her. Tomorrow, I’m booked into Flamingo and she is staying with me.)

The weather seemed to clear a bit by sundown. It is supped to be cool overnight, going down to 50° (suppresses the mozzies) and tomorrow is to be clear and not too warm.