Kathleen's Window: Part 3- Wilderness in Florida- Kissimee Prairie Preserve and Back to the Atlantic

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Our next reservation was at Kissimee Prairie Preserve State Park. We stopped for groceries near I 95 at Love's Whole Foods Market and Cafe. Nice to find something besides the conventional grocery stores. We took I 95 for two hours south and then cross country from Vero Beach west to the Preserve. It's located 35 miles northwest of Lake Okeechobee. At 54,000 acres it, “Encompasses and protects the largest remaining tract of dry prairie, a globally imperiled ecosystem that occurs only in Florida.”

We had a long drive across flat central Florida to get there. First we passed orange groves and cattle ranches and then drove into the prairie. After we entered the park we traveled another 9 miles on crushed seashell wash boarded roads to the campground. It has 18 sites with electric and water. The facilities are nice with showers and a washer and dryer.

When we arrived it was much drier than the beach where we had just been. All our bedding and the inside of the RV were damp from the humidity at Tomoka. I wanted to wash and dry a bunch of stuff including the sheets, just to dry them out. We awoke the next day to fog and dampness. Greg took a bike ride out into the prairie while I did laundry. He had a lot of trouble getting back, and had to backtrack due to flooded roads. Just as I finished taking the clothes out of the dryer, Greg returned and we had a downpour!

That was the first of many downpours during our five days there. Unusually warm humid weather over Florida was colliding with the seasonal cold fronts. Thunderstorms were rolling west to east across the state and we were feeling the fullness of them. The area where we had just camped at Tomoka State Park was hit with a tornado the day after we left. We experienced our first heavy thunderstorms at the Preserve. Lots of lightening flashing in the skylight above the cabover bed. The rain on the roof was deafening just a foot or two above our heads. We had to run the air conditioning most of the time we were camped there just to keep the humidity down in the RV. Not good sleeping with it cutting on and off and blowing across the bunk.
In between the storms we explored the Preserve. What an amazing place! We hiked through the hammock, the wooded, boggy area where we saw evidence of feral pigs, beautiful butterflies and lush vegetation. We rode the crushed shell roads on our bikes out through the open expanse of grassland prairie. We explored another hammock area that had lots of birds; vultures, hawks, crested cara-caras, swallows, egrets and ibis. We saw our first alligators in the water and lazing on the side of the road. As long as we kept moving they didn't seem to care. On other rides we saw deer, and crayfish in the ditches. We had a group of female turkeys that made their daily walk through the center of the campground looking for insects to eat. At dusk the first night we sat outside and just above our heads swarmed dozens of dragonflies catching gnats! At the bathhouse we had a little green tree frog sitting on the countertop of the camp sink while we washed dishes. Greg has had tree frogs in his shower other places, too.

Deer in dry prairie

Crawfish that successfully crossed the road

Female wild turkeys patrolling the campsite

Dry Prairie

Butterfly

Resurrection Ferns on Live Oak

Zebra Striped Butterflies

Spider in tree

Crested Caracara waiting for more crawfish

Admiring the view from the top of the hill, Elevation 10?, 12?

Waiting for a fluffy little dog...

Kathleen admiring a gator from a safe distance

One of our neighbors was a volunteer astronomer, a retired professor, who exchanged a free site for a month for nightly viewings from his powerful telescope. The Preserve is one of the few Dark Sky areas in the South. We saw the stripes of Jupiter and the three moons, with one in transit across the surface, and the Orion nebula, which is the sword. It's a star nursery and we saw three new baby stars in it. On another night we saw the next galaxy and with our own eyes, the Geminid meteor shower. Even with the rain and overcast skies, we were fortunate to see these during a few clear times. While we were looking through the telescope we heard coyotes out on the prairie. I asked the professor if they ever come into the campground. He said, “ No, but don't look like food!”.

We met two of our neighbors; Scooter, a thirty-something Asian-American who travels fulltime in his small Class C RV. He used to live just below the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and got tired of urban life. Jeff is a twenty-something from Illinois who had been tent camping out of his Audi for the last four months, and seeing the country. The rest of our neighbors were snowbirds and fulltimers and included several Canadians.
We spent some time talking to the ranger. That's how we learned about the feral pig problem in the South. They are escaped domestic pigs. A breeding pair within two years can be responsible for 1,000 offspring! Within a few months the males have grown tusks, and the first feral generation already has elongated snouts. They root around and tear up acres and acres of the countryside including crops. We saw evidence of them here and at Silver River State Park. The Preserve has local specialists that hunt them. They were hoping that the last hunt had taken care of the problem, but we saw fresh evidence of the pigs.

Trail torn up by wild pigs

December 14, 2012

The sky cleared as we broke camp and it promised to be the nicest day yet at Kissimee Prairie Preserve, but we'd already made reservations at Jonathan Dickinson State Park near the Atlantic Ocean in Jupiter, Florida. We dumped our tanks after going five days without needing to. We wanted to see how well we could conserve the gray tank for future boondocking. We had access to bathrooms and a camp sink to wash dishes. We made a point of dumping some dishwater into the black tank since that tank fills more slowly.
We passed the cara-caras and the ibis on the way out. They were hunting in the ditches for crayfish. Traveling back across the prairie and then south we arrived at the town of Okeechobee and Lake Okeechobee. We were hoping to see the lake, but the northeast quadrant that we were driving around hides it with a huge dike. Below the dike is a canal and a small strip of homes with docks, and RV and trailer parks between the canal and the road. A few places a canal intersects the dike and there are locks to let boats in. We didn't see the lake until we reached the St. Lucie Canal that comes in from the Atlantic. Here we also turned to go east toward the coast.

Arriving in Jupiter we drove north up the coast on Route 1 until we reached the state park. The campground was brand new, but the photos we looked at on-line when we made our reservation didn't show Route 1 just behind our site. We had a small berm to hid the view, but not all the noise. The park although not on the beach, looked interesting. It has hiking and biking trails and a boat tour up the river to an old Florida homestead. We thought there might be a way to bike over to the beach, but again, that was going to require crossing a bridge. Our site had full hookups, a gravel pad, picnic table, fire ring and clothesline poles. It was pretty barren since the trees were still small, but nice facilities.

Greg got to experience the park and the ride to the beach, but I didn't. Walking back from the bathroom the first day I hit the few inch difference between the paved road and the gravel pad the wrong way and turned and severely sprained my ankle. Looking back, I'm fairly certain I tore a ligament. Greg rode his bike to the camp store for a bag of ice and I spent the rest of the time at Jonathan Dickinson nursing my ankle. Needless to say I needed Greg's help to get in and out of the bunk.

Greg took several bike rides to the beach and around the park and nature trails. We had rain and some fog on and off. Greg's first bike ride to the beach started with a downpour five minutes after he left and he got the worst of it waiting for the drawbridge to the beach to close. Didn't bother him. I would have been a whiny mess! I rested my ankle and busied myself in the RV. I never saw anything besides the campground.