Everglades: Shark Valley

On our second full day in the Everglades, we all very happily climbed into our air-conditioned car, spent a frantic 15 minutes killing all the mosquitoes that had zoomed in with us, and then drove 2 hours north to Shark Valley (surprise surprise you can't just cut across the center of the Everglades...you have to basically go out, around, and back in). 



I'd rented bikes for all of us to go on the 15-mile Shark Valley loop (the story of Matthew and the bike seat is one I can tell you in person, but I promised the bike rental dude that I would not broadcast things; suffice it to say I wanted my littlest guy on the bike of my bike and not near the alligators. 

Because as you can see in this picture, they were RIGHT THERE along the bike path. (Looking at this photo I'm like what the heck why are we so close, but...we got kind of blase about it there? IIRC the park people tell you that six feet is enough and maybe we were just feeling overconfident on bikes and seeing how lazy the alligators were? We literally saw one almost get run over by the tram and the tram driver had to poke at it to get it to move off the road.) 

The only one that made me a little nervous was ol' stubby-tail here who parked himself behind the only bike rack at the observation tower and had moved about a foot closer to the bikes when we came back. 

I highly recommend the Shark Valley loop if you ever visit the Everglades; you can either rent bikes, bring your own, or book a seat on the tram (which I think takes about 2 hours). I saw one guy running it but I absolutely would not recommend that, it was 85 at 10 am and full sun when we were there in December (there is NO SHADE anywhere) and it was bearable as long as we were moving on the bikes and making our own wind, but the second we stopped for water or to reapply sunscreen we all started sweating so much that it was literally sliding off us and puddling on the ground. Soooo humid, so hot!!!  I personally think bikes would be better than the tram, the tram people all looked really hot and were fanning their faces like crazy. 

We saw 93 alligators on this loop. 93!!!! It was seriously so fun to count them and to bet on how many we'd get by certain points. 

Halfway through the loop is this observation tower, which has bathrooms and water fountains. Definitely climb up, it's really cool to look out and see...the sea of grass. 

And this giant alligator. 

I also struck up a conversation with a family on the observation tower walk; they were native Floridians and all wearing long pants and sweaters; they kept talking about how cold it was. I do not ever want to live in Florida. 

Are you tired of seeing alligators yet?! Hot tip, most of them are on the half of the path that runs along the canal, but we still saw about 20 on the grassier side, which was kind of freaky because it was basically the same stuff/same shallow depth we'd been canoeing through the day before. 

So interesting how just a rise in the land of 2 inches is enough to have a completely different ecosystem! Those lumps of trees are called "hammocks" and it is soooo different, we went to a much bigger one (Mahogany Hammock) and walked all through it and it was incredibly beautiful. Also pretty nuts to think about how many different ecosystems people have survived in over the centuries; I was reading all the signs about the ancestral peoples who lived in this area and comparing them to the Puebloans of the desert southwest. Incredible. 

And a road sign you don't see every day...

So so so so so many birds along this path, this would be a bird watcher's paradise. 

The second half of the loop mostly looks like this--grassy swamp and huuuuuge open blue skies!

After Shark Valley we drove the 2 hours back to the other side and stopped by the visitors' center (gotta get the Junior Ranger stuff!) and then went to the Anhinga Trail, which is supposed to be the best/easiest spot to see wildlife (I think it would have been much more impressive had we not just seen a million alligators in Shark Valley). 

Thankfully we did NOT see any vultures either at their playground or eating people's cars in the parking lot, although there was a huge bin of tarps that you could use to drape your car against the vultures while you walked the trails. Florida...wow. 

There were probably five or six smallish alligators along this trail. 

But what we enjoyed most were watching the turtles and the fish! We watched this guy swim around for probably 20 minutes (sidenote: there were SO many dead fish that the kids started counting them; the Biscayne/Congaree cold snap hit here too and killed off an insane amount of fish. Maybe that's why the alligators were all so chill). 



This area was really peaceful and gorgeous!  

Then we drove back to our little "hide from the mosquitoes" picnic area, ate dinner, then fled the mosquitoes, THEN we sat in the car at the campground for a solid hour and just read books and played games because nobody wanted to get out and face the mosquitoes. (Neil made us get out when quiet hours started and he didn't want to run the engine anymore, so considerate of other people but I was not feeling particularly generous at the moment.) We also walked around for a long time--can't remember if this is the night I walked down with the boys to the ocean? 

 

The next morning we broke camp and headed for the Keys, and you GUYS--it did not rain at all. This was just the effects of humidity inside the tent. Seriously everything was absolutely soaked. 



Then we walked out of the tent and there was a FREAKING CRAB just sitting there waiting to attack us (it pinched someone but I can't remember who). 



WHY IS THERE A CRAB IN THE CAMPGROUND?!!!! 

Neil and I kept saying to each other every night in the Everglades--this will all be worth it when we get to Dry Tortugas. That's what we planned this trip around, that's the focus, that's what we booked 18 months ago...this will all be worth it when we are sitting on the beach at Dry Tortugas all alone looking at the whole Milky Way spread out above us. 



And if you know what happened to us on Dry Tortugas...man. It was rough. 

Everglades National Park: Canoeing Nine Mile Pond

Okay, here is what I think would be the PERFECT Everglades visit: go in December. It's nice and breezy during the day and it's hot enough that it feels good to get splashed! And STAY IN A HOTEL. DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, CAMP IN A TENT. OR YOU WILL WANT TO DIE. 



Now that we have that out of the way...we drove to the Everglades directly after leaving Biscayne. Here are a couple of things I never want to forget--the absolutely hilarious gales of laughter we were all in changing into regular clothes out of our swimsuits (we changed in the car/around the car/sort of near the car with the incidental aid of flapping towels). I don't know why it was so funny but we were all dying of laughter. Then we picked up pizza in Homestead and drove to our campsite at Flamingo, which was about an hour away. By the time we got there it was fully dark. And the mosquitoes had Come. To. Party. It was 10000x worse with any lights, so we set up in the dark, and we were all sweating like crazy by the time we were done, because the Everglades did not get the memo from Biscayne about being chilly. It was the most humid buggiest place I have ever been in my life and apparently this is the good time of year? 

I think this picture is from our second night, but yeah, notice the full pajamas (and hoodie) on Isaac despite the heat; it provided some slight protection against mosquitoes but the kids were counting bites in the hundreds despite all the repellants we applied. Man oh man it was awful and please just trust me and don't ever be in the Everglades once the sun goes down. I saw somebody wearing a full-body mosquito net and I've never been so jealous in my life (I also saw lots of guys walking around shirtless and we decided they must have been so crazy drunk they either couldn't feel the bites or the mosquitoes weren't into alcohol blood, judging from the stacks of beer cases by their campsite maybe their blood alcohol level was so high that mosquitoes just sort of veered away from the fumes?). 



Anyway, thankfully the mosquitoes were so much better in the rest of the park (maybe because it was so breezy and sunny, although we noticed that our area of the campground was way worse than others; we were walking in loops every night until it was actually time to go to sleep and trust me, we explored every inch of a 3-mile loop around that campground and there was a noticeable uptick in mosquitoes near our site. We also noticed that nobody was camped in the two sites on either side of us so maybe all the locals knew something we didn't. Okay enough about the mosquitoes, they were just seriously so so so bad. So bad. Don't stay there). 

We rented four canoes and went out to canoe the Nine Mile Pond Loop. We got all checked in, talked to the dockmaster, talked to the canoe guys, talked to the paddles & lifejackets guys, and then the last person--as we were walking away with our gear--said "Oh they told you that all the posts are blown down in the back half, right?" Um no they did not!! I was SO glad that random person mentioned this; Neil was talking to a guy a few days later on the Dry Tortugas ferry who had spent FIVE HOURS lost on that same path trying to find the blown-down posts and ended up being out there way after dark. 

Abigail and Luke were paired together, then Isaac and Juliet, Nathan and me, and Matthew and Neil. This had a consequence we did not foresee but none of us could stop laughing. Several of the waterways were shallow enough that Neil said he could feel the canoe dragging on the bottom; Matty's paddle barely touched the water! Haha!

The first part of the route takes you across a huge pond (Nine Mile Pond) and it was TOUGH combatting the wind here! We kept getting blown totally sideways and then while I was working to straighten us out the wind would rocket us in the wrong direction so much harder than I could paddle.
 

Then we made it into the shelter of the mangroves, this was easily the best part. So twisty and turny and really fun to navigate because you had to constantly readjust and could never just go in a straight line for more than a few yards at a time. 

Here's Abigail with one of the trusty markers we were using to navigate! 

Everyone was of course very competitive about who was in front and when it would momentarily widen out people would paddle like CRAZY trying to pass other canoes. 

I think this was Matty's favorite part of the trip! 

Hahahahahahaha!

Here's Luke!

I think this was the only spot where I could easily see everyone at once, we did a lot of yelling "Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!" 

And Jules, who after a snack break yelled "Get outta my way I'M POWERED BY JUMJILLS!!" (which is what our family calls energy balls thanks to one of our favorite books). 

Here's Isaac with the dreaded "corndogs" in the background. This part was so, so, so hard and several of us were in tears. I've never canoed in anything like it--there was some sort of cattail or underwater plant, we weren't really sure which, but something made this horrific carpet of basically thick plant matter that created the most intense drag on the canoe's forward momentum. So whereas normally you paddle and glide forward on the momentum of that paddle stroke, this stuff was so thick that you would move forward exactly the length of your paddle stroke. It was AWFUL. It was so incredibly exhausting, there was no current but there was a very strong headwind (so if you stopped paddling for one second you'd go backwards and sideways). I was working as hard as I could and the canoe was just barely inching along. Poor Nathan got so overwhelmed that he stopped paddling and started crying, and then I almost started crying because everyone else was out of sight and we were way back, and I was worried that we would literally run aground and then I would for some reason have to get out and get eaten by an alligator, because the guide thingy said this was where the alligators liked to hang out, PROBABLY TO EAT THE BECALMED CANOERS. Anyway Neil was way up ahead and trying to keep his position against the wind so that he could still see us without losing sight of the other kids. Long story short, I was so proud of Nathan because he had his total freak-out moment and then realized that he had to just buckle down and work with me to get us out of there, and he squared his shoulders, wiped away the tears, and picked up his paddle and started pushing as hard as his little arms could go. And I paddled harder than I've ever paddled and we made it through!!

But yeah every time we saw the "corndogs" from the road/bike the next day, we all shivered a sigh of relief that we were not canoeing in them!!

Despite the corndogs, it's one of my favorite things we've ever done in a national park--it was so unique and so awesome to get off the boardwalks and really get a feel for what most of the Everglades looks like! 



Speaking of boardwalks, as you can imagine there is...not much hiking in the Everglades. We did this short loop around another lake and then ended up coming back to its picnic area multiple times because it was not mosquito-y (until the sun went down and then we hightailed it out of there because the devil bugs were in full force). 



So many air plants--we got really into trying to spot them!