2011 Airstream Trip to Southeast: Day 15 – (05/17) Homestead, FL (Day 2)

Today was beautiful. It was mostly sunny with a steady breeze. Temperatures reached the mid-80s.

We visited Everglades National Park. Many childhood impressions of the Everglades went poof today.

The Everglades, sometimes called the "river of grass," is seasonally dominated by a shallow, slow-moving sheet of water that flows from Lake Okeechobee to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida Bay. During the wet summer months, the vast grassy prairie acts both as a home to a tremendous variety of plants and animals and as a filter for the fresh water river. These clean waters ultimately supply and nourish the productive coastal estuaries further to the south.

First, we drove the 38 miles from the park entrance to Flamingo. You can’t drive any farther south in western mainland Florida. We took a narrated, 2 hour boat tour into the mangrove estuary, Coot Bay, Tarpon Creek and Whitewater Bay.

This was our ride

Sights from the Estuary

We saw this endangered American Crocodile as we left the Flamingo Marina. This is the only place in the world where alligators and crocodiles co-exist.

Crocodile

Osprey

Red Mangrove Tree
It's called the walking tree. It uses tendrils to walk out into the water.

Red Mangrove Tree

The narrator called this the "Killer Tree" ... it's the Manchineel Tree.

The Caribs used the sap of this tree to poison their arrows and would tie captives to the trunk of the tree, ensuring a slow and painful death. Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon was struck by an arrow that had been poisoned with Manchineel sap during battle with the Calusa in Florida, dying shortly thereafter.