Trip description

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Geo: 25.4479, -80.4792

For our Florida trip, we flew into Ft. Lauderdale and rented a car. Our flight from GSP to Atlanta was delayed so that we missed our connection in Atlanta and were later getting in than scheduled which put us in rush hour traffic driving to Florida City and our motel. Rush hour traffic in the Miami area is really bad – akin to Southern California. But we made it and spent four nights in the Fl City area while visiting Everglades and Biscayne National Parks. The first day at Everglades, we took the Anhinga trail, a boardwalk into a wetlands area with huge amounts of birds and alligators. We then drove to Flamingo, rented a canoe, and paddled down and back along a canal to Coots Bay, then out to Florida Bay. Interesting and fun time taking in the shallow waters of the bay and the wildlife along the shore. The next day, we took one very long and pretty boring hike in the pinelands area of Everglades NP and barely made it to a 2:00 PM tour of the Nike missile site in the park. This is where missiles were aimed at Cuba after the Cuban missile crisis in the 60's. The site was finally closed in the mid or late 70's and had been allowed to deteriorate considerably. The tour guide had served at the site and had lots of interesting tales about it.

The third day, we went to Biscayne NP where we took a guided canoe trip out into Biscayne Bay. Biscayne is 90+% under water so not much hiking to be had there, but the canoe trip was interesting with sightings of birds as well as a few manatees feeding in a canal that flowed into the bay. The bay's salinity content historically has been around 20 to 30 parts per million which compares to 0 ppm in fresh water and around 60 ppm in the ocean. Due to water control features built over the last few decades, the salinity now ranges between very low when fresh water is dumped into the bay to prevent flooding and as high as 50 to 60 ppm when fresh water is withheld inland. While withholding fresh water to provide drinking and irrigation water for the huge population and agriculture industry is probably necessary, the salinity fluctuation has caused marine life to take a hit in recent years.

On our fourth day, we drove down highway US #1 to Key West where we stayed at the NAS vacation rentals at Trumbo Point. Checked into the two bedroom trailer there (cost $65 per night – a real deal for the KW area) and walked into KW. Lots of people and lots of touristy things to do that we pretty much didn't do. The next day we were up early and caught the ferry to Dry Tortugas NP. The Garden Key in the NP is the site of Fort Jefferson, built over several decades, off and on, in the mid 1800's. It is about 70 miles from Key West and took about two and a half hours on the ferry. For the ride out, we had a following sea which made for a fairly gentle rocking and rolling ride which had lots of folks feeling pretty seasick. Anne got a little queasy but made it ok. I managed to keep my sea legs pretty well.

The fort is pretty amazing. It is the nation's largest masonry fort built in the 1800s. Construction was started in 1846 and went on for 30 years but was never finished. It was built to control navigation to the Gulf of Mexico and protect Atlantic bound Mississippi river trade. Waters between the fort and the Florida peninsula are very shallow and deep draft ships had to round the Tortugas to traverse from the Atlantic to the Gulf, which is why this fort was built, seemingly, in the middle of nowhere. The fort never fired a shot in anger and before it was completed the invention of the rifled bore cannon, which, mounted on warships, could penetrate the thick walls of the fort, made it obsolete. The fort was used as a prison during the Civil War to hold union deserters. It also held four men convicted of complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the most famous of which was the doctor, Dr. Mudd, who set John Wilkes Booth's leg after the assassination. The fort was abandoned in 1874, became a wildlife refuge in 1908, was proclaimed a National Monument in 1935, and was re-designated as part of Dry Tortugas National Park in 1992. Neat place.

Our trip back on the ferry was rough. Traveling into the wind and seas, it was extremely windy and pounding which made moving around on the boat rather hazardous but somewhat less likely to make you seasick since there wasn't as much rolling and wallowing. Back in Key West, we walked back to our trailer and were in for the night. The next morning, we drove around Key West a bit, found the marker for the southern most point in the continental US, then drove back to a motel close to the Ft. Lauderdale airport for our flight back to GSP the following day. Flight back was pleasantly uneventful.

I will post pictures on the following pages with most of the commentary in a picture album containing the pictures on that page. Clicking on one of the pictures will take you to the album where you can page through the pictures and read the comments about each specific picture.

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