10.06.2012 – 10.06.2012  36 °C

Early start today our first day on our East Coast part of our road trip! Our day started with us cleaning up our house swap house (we’ve been here for the past four days) and heading down to southern Florida and the Everglades!

To bring everyone up to speed since my last post from my Peaks, Plateaus and Prairies blogs we flew down from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale, Florida (it’s on the east coast of Fl) and spent the night in a hotel nearby to the airport. The next day we picked up our rental car (we’ve upgraded this time around to a premium car.. much more comfy, more room, I can even adjust the angle of the back seat!!! better all around!) and took off for Cape Coral. The drive across Fl (almost directly east to west) was fairly uneventful. Most of the trip was us driving across the northern part of the Everglades network, so lots of flat grassland areas interspersed with water.. I was expecting Mangroves and stuff? Our house in Cape Coral is interesting… the house itself is quite nice, modern brick house with a pool.. it’s not the house that is weird it’s the area! The suburb of Cape Coral was once one big land development.. all the roads are set out in straight lines, grid style, major thoroughfares all a couple of lanes each way. Probably about three quarters of the blocks of land have houses on them.. Think of a new housing development out the back of the GC (complete with canal and golf frontage) and then think of one that has been here for at least twenty years.. roads have potholes, no curb and guttering, daggy old post boxes, houses boarded up… I think you get the picture! Not what I was expecting southern Florida to look like! As we discovered, as we checked out the surrounding suburbs CC isn’t really that realistic of S Florida.. Most of it is as you expect, palm trees, gated communities, golf courses.. all neat and trim! Our few days in CC were pretty relaxing, D played golf, M&I got our hair cut, we shopped for our equip for this trip and swum in the pool, we even had some resident river otters who came and said hello! That’s the other thing! There aren’t any beaches here in CC or in the close surrounds!!

Ok back to the blog and today in the Everglades.. The drive down to the Everglades was about an hour and a half from our house swap. We entered via the western entrance and stopped just outside of Everglades City to take an airboat tour!! This was something the three of us were all really keen to do.. fang around on an air boat for half an hour.. woo hoo!

We found ourselves an air boat operator who seemed to do what we wanted; zoom around and maybe see an alligator. We hopped on put on our ear muffs and off we went! The noise coming off the fan is pretty incredible.. just like a small prop plane taking off. Our trip lasted just under thirty minutes and the whole time we were zooming along scaring the poor old wildlife!! You really don’t go an airboat though if you want to shoot wildlife shots! Its all about the adrenalin rush. The part of the Everglades we air boated in is mainly mangrove but when we did hit a grassy bit the airboat flew right over the top.. V cool! No alligators though, so we continued our journey thru the Everglades with a plan to stop at Shark Valley Visitor Centre to take their tram tour where we are more likely to see some of the big scaly creatures.

We arrived at the Shark Valley Visitor Centre just after 3pm to discover that the next (and last for the day) tram didn’t leave til 4pm so we killed our hour having some chippies and a cold drink and generally just relaxing. Today we are kitted out, long sleeved shirts, trousers and super DEET insect repellent.. The Everglades is bugggsville so we were prepped for our two hour tram ride into the heart of bugland. The tram trip was really worth the effort. For two hours we were chauffer driven around a part of the Everglades with a non-stop audio tour pointing out all of the different birds and of course Alligators!! Yep we saw heaps of the dudes.. In fact, we saw two of them super close to the tram so finger’s crossed I got some great shots of them!!

The interesting thing about the Everglades is the landscape.. I had always pictured the Everglades to big one big mangrove swamp.. some parts are, but the main part (and where we are today) is not!! It is actually a very shallow river (Shark River) that only really flows during the wet season. The river is covered in grass so is actually called a wet prairie. The grasslands are interspersed with these “islands” which are actually tree covered hammocks.. these little hammocks are where the native Indians used to live, they are home to the mammals (deer, cougars, racoons) and of course the Alligators! During the dry season the only way they can survive is to dig themselves a pool (before the water goes away) so that whatever water remains stays in those deeper pools.. Meanwhile, the fish, turtles etc join the alligators in their pools and run the gauntlet of whether they will make it to the end of the dry season (supposedly a lot make it, because Alligators go into a type of hibernation during the dry season to conserve their energy etc).

We also saw some pretty awesome looking birds.. big huge white and blue cranes and some really majestic looking vultures.. Yep, vultures are very majestic when they are wheeling up above the grasslands.. they’re a bit ugly when you get up close and see them walking around, but when they are flying there is nothing more impressive.

Probably one of the most impressive things today was getting very close to an Alligator. Half way thru our tour the driver stopped the tram so that we could get off and go for a bit of a walk along some paths in the parks. We started to wander along one of these paths and immediately saw a huge Alligator lying in the water right next to the path.. Well that was a bit too close an encounter for me! I very quickly back tracked down the path to the relative safety of the main path! I noticed that nearly everyone else seemed much more willing to get close to the beast.. (clearly they aren’t all Aussies who know the value of their lives!! J)

Our day finished by us driving another 40mins down the road to Florida City where we went straight in for a quick bite to eat and a hot shower! Its been one full day today!!

Song of the Day–   Bill Haley and the Comets, See you later Alligator!