Ending the Year with Snake Bight

That’s not meant to be click bait, I promise. We were the first to hike the Snake Bight Trail this morning—I post about that, way below. But first …

Where We Are

It’s been so long since we moved that I should start out with this!

We left our community-centered, 55+ RV resort near Naples and moved south, to the Everglades again—but this time way south, to the southern-most spot: an area called Flamingo.

We’re here to break up our drive to the Keys, plus of course enjoy this part of the Everglades that’s more grassy and wet than where we spent Thanksgiving north of here at Big Cypress.

This campground is also easing us back into campground life. It’s funny how we’d forgotten in just three weeks at the resort what vacation-type campgrounds are like versus live-in communities.

What We Didn’t Miss from Campgrounds

• kids screaming
• kids riding their bikes and scooters around and around our home
• small dogs barking
• small dogs being walked around and around our home
• people in tents and pop-up campers whom we can hear as they get ready for bed, get up in the morning, basically live their lives.

This boils down to us relearning how to deal with almost everything about a campground.

There’s totally a good side, though.

What We Did Miss

Immersion in nature. Even though we’re camped right next to people, the campground itself has nothing but the Everglades to the north and the Gulf to the south (Florida Bay, it’s called).

We’ll be here for four days and hope to dip ourselves in both places as much as we can.

We’ve also put up our screened tent! We couldn’t set it up at the resort (rules), but we can here, and I’m so glad to have my outside living room back. Last night Tracy and I listened to music and played cards as the wind blew and the rain misted about, and we were dry and comfy under the full moon.

Snake Bight

So, a bight is a curve along a coastline.

And Snake Bight Trail is one of the busiest trails here in Flamingo, so we hit it at 9:00 am.

We beat the crowd and we were the first scare up the flocks of birds in the mangroves, but the sun was behind the birds, and I didn’t get a single good photo. We saw hundreds of white ibis, great egrets, and even groups of roseate spoonbills (pictured here, poorly).

Imagine the air around the mangroves full of giant white birds rising to the sky, with occasional pale pink among them. It was the most birds I’ve seen together, ever. And not a robin in view.

Farther down the trail were bromeliads hanging beside us and above us.

Plus various trees I’ve never seen (Tracy left his tree book back at the trailer in favor of the bird book; I walked empty-handed and took pictures).

Only after we were walking back to the car-lined road and had passed a million people headed toward the water (thankfully all putting on their masks when they passed us) did we see an alligator.

So, there were almost no birds once we walked out to the water, perhaps because we were there at low tide. But we are so happy to be out in nature again.

Check Out My New Map

Post script: If you’re reading this on a big screen, you’ll notice in the sidebar that my Where We Are and Where We’ve Been maps are gone. I’ve combined them into one map that you can access by clicking on the Map button at the top menu (right below the giant picture of moi with the blog title).

As I say on that map page, it’s a work in progress, but the idea is to be able to click on a location and get to a blog post about us staying at that place. This helps me remember where we’ve been.

Happy New Year from the Everglades!

May 2021 bring a U.S. government that serves the people (some, at least) and a vaccination for all.