More Time at Dupuis WEA

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

We decided to stay at the Dupuis WEA for a couple of more nights. It is actually quite nice here and the price is hard to beat ... it's free but you must apply for a permit.

Yesterday morning I headed over to the restrooms but they were being cleaned. There was a crew of men cleaning both sides (men's and women's) of the building at once and also cleaning up around the outside. I stopped and greeted them and while chatting with one of the men he said "You know we're inmates, don't you?" I didn't. They were wearing blue uniforms, but they didn't look like prison garb. I came back after they'd left and it was pretty clean inside except for the shower stall.

Ellen did a bit of birding around the campground and came back to get me. There was a nesting Great-horned Owl in a big pine right in the middle of the campground. Ellen had heard its classic hoot and followed the sound. The owl was just sitting in the nest looking out. As we watched, a little white downy-feathered owlet popped up and just stared down at us.

As we were watching a large horse came trotting by ... without a rider. I gave a couple of soft calls and it walked over to us and started grazing. It was saddled but had no halter and reins, so there was no way to hold onto it. It no longer seemed interested in running and its owner quickly appeared and got the horse under control. In the words of Skipper and Rogue (Massachusetts lady motorcyclists), their bikes never take off without them.

After this we decided to take Speedy for a drive to the visitor center and then on the back road through the property to a pond and fishing pier. The visitor center was closed but a rather grumpy staff member eventually appeared at the closed gate and pointed the way to the road entrance. It was a couple of miles away and was the same gate as the family campground.

The 7.5-mile road runs through the woods and is well-packed but sandy. Speedy had no trouble with the sand and it took us about a half-hour to reach the pond. There is a picnic area and a long pier out into the small and murky pond. We spotted our first Little Blue Heron and Common Moorhen of the year as well as our first alligator of the year, a rather large one stretched out in the sun on the far shore.

It was a beautiful sunny and cool day and this seemed a fine place for lunch. While we were making lunch, the inmate work crew showed up and sat around having their's as well. About the time we were finished, they were beginning mow and trim the picnic area. It was time to leave. We stopped on the return for a walk out to a wetland along a boardwalk trail but found there was no water. It seems to have been a pretty dry winter so far. None of the usual water birds were to be seen, so it was back to the campground for a lazy afternoon.

Today that laziness continued. While Ellen took her morning walk, I tried to fix a squeak in the rotating mechanism of the front passenger seat. I took the seat completely apart and relubricated the roller bearings. It seemed to have fixed the problem but not for long. It seems to be the pin that holds the seat in place facing forward has rubbed through the paint on the seat mount and scrapes metal-to-metal as the seat turns with someone sitting in it. Sigh. This may have to wait until we return.

We both tried the free showers and came back clean even if the shower stalls could use a  thorough scrubbing. What can you expect from a free campground? In our three-day stay, we never saw anyone at the campground host trailer nor did anyone ask for our permit. Go figure.

Spent most of the rest of the day relaxing (hopefully a key activity for this trip or is that a non-activity?) and processing photos. In previous blogs we used Picasa for processing photos and adding captions. However, Google has abandoned Picasa and the Picasa Web Service, replacing it with Google Photos. Unfortunately, Google Photos has many fewer features than Picasa did, like slide shows with captions or slide shows that can be linked to directly to the blog.

We have transitioned to Adobe Lightroom with the demise of program support for Picasa, but it doesn't have a direct method to upload albums to Google Photos. We spent much of the afternoon developing a workflow to upload our photos to link with the Speedy Journal (the results can be seen in photos linked to the last few posts before this one). It is rather more complex than the last method and requires going into Google Photos and reordering the album as it doesn't maintain the upload order as it did in Picasa. Groan.

Before dinner we took a short walk outside the campground. It was pretty quiet but we did find an immature Red-headed Woodpecker which is rare here. The last time we saw one was in Texas when we were volunteering at Aransas.

Tomorrow it is on to Long Pine Campground in the Everglades.