Flamingo, Monroe County

The idea came to me as I walked Rusty around the block where we keep our ten foot storage locker in Miami. It’s the space that contains all our worldly goods not stowed aboard GANNET2. We have 50 square feet, upstairs to avoid floods, air conditioned against humidity, a space any homeless person could call a comfortable home but that we use to keep surplus artworks, books, clothes, small bits of furniture, kitchenware, stuff we could use to build a small home when we have to stop traveling. $100 a month which may or may not be well spent…

As Rusty and I walked the issue of  where we might spend the night came into my head. When you live in a van you know you are a nomad if the question intrigues you rather than vexes you. To find a spot is my job usually unless Layne  has a definite desired destination in mind. Geography and history are my favorite subjects so I’m one of those nerdy people that likes to explore maps and travel articles and find lesser known oddities to visit. I am the expedition researcher. 

The plan was to arrive in Key West after Fantasy Fest, during the tourist lull before winter sets in Up North and all the grandparents say goodbye after the holidays and come south to arrive “on island.” We however we’re ahead of ourselves. So I thought of Flamingo, as you do when you want to pause before bursting into the Keys. 

I hadn’t been there in years as we usually were in a hurry to leave home or get home without side trips,  but right now seemed the perfect time to drive the Everglades. So we did. 

In the popular imagination the Everglades look like a chintzy B Movie set in a cypress swamp filled with creepy crawlies and weird toothless iconoclasts and hermits armed to the teeth with guns living in loathsome muddy shacks far from civilized society. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas actually described the Everglades best as “a river of grass,” in her immortal but largely unread book. Most of it looks like this:

The fact that the Everglades are critical to Florida’s ability to purify fresh water, feed lakes and rivers and protect the peninsula from storms doesn’t do much to get the marsh the respect it deserves. Things are better than they have been and Florida moves by reluctant fits and jerks to keep the river of grass functioning but there are far too many interests in the state that want canals and not free form fresh water movement. 

As much as agricultural corporations deny it the fertilizer run off from the mainland drifting through this swamp causes coral die offs in the Keys. Its surprising to be in Flamingo and know you are just thirty miles north of Marathon, half a day’s drive away. The two places are so different yet so connected by the water that flows through here. And just outside the park it’s all farmland in Florida City and Homestead. They love throwing that precious water in the air:

Layne thought a pause at the southern tip of the Mainland was a good idea so off we drove, tangled in rush hour traffic on the turnpike, struggling to reach Homestead and Highway 9336 to Flamingo.

When Florida was purchased from Spain in 1819 not only did the US buy a large tropical swamp but also the peculiar coastal panhandle that these days looks and feels more like Alabama than Florida. Tallahassee was the capital not least because it was the most livable place in a state composed largely of impenetrable bog filled with bolshie Indians and runaway slaves. Key West could have been the capital with its benign climate and access to the trade routes but it was deemed too isolated. 

However the territorial lawmakers figured Key West would be the seat of southern Florida government considering how impenetrable and unlivable were the bogs south of Lake Okeechobee  so Monroe County in those days was vast as you see above in a map dated 1825.  

Those who even notice that Monroe County covers more than the Keys do sometimes ask themselves why Key West is the county seat for Loop Road and Flamingo and as you can see that is all that is left of the huge slice of mainland that was Monroe County once upon a time. As people discovered how to live in south Florida not least by having a couple of Indian Wars they carved out new counties for themselves and Monroe shrank to what it is today. 

By the time we arrived at the entrance to the park the booth was closed with a sign asking us to pay the entrance fee online. Easy for us as we have the old folks annual pass which allows us into all national parks for free.

The two lane road to Flamingo is about forty five miles long, a series of long straights with gentle curves and no shoulders and open views and a 55 mph speed limit. Friday evening saw hardly any traffic so it was a pleasant cruise. There is no sign welcoming you to Monroe County “home of the Florida Keys” but there is a different watershed marked along the park road. 

There are pull outs and kayak launch spots and picnic areas and trail heads as you might imagine. Our Verizon signal faded slowly the deeper we drove. 

The roadside billboards show the distance to Flamingo or to the park entrance depending on your direction of travel. Of the two campgrounds, Long Pine or Flamingo,  we chose the one deepest into the park, on the shore of Florida Bay. One phone call (855-708-2207) and we had a $55 dollar spot(!) with electrical hookups to run the air conditioning without flattening our battery bank. 

It’s low tourist season in Florida and the campground was mostly empty. The first campground is for tents with no hook ups while the RV area has all the facilities in one area and no hook ups in the other both served with cold showers which are not a burden in the heat. I found them refreshing. 

Flamingo has a sense of wilderness that is out of proportion to its distance from Florida City. I felt slightly surprised to see such order and organization carved out of the wilderness of swamp, alligators and mosquitoes. The cold shower isn’t fancy but it was spotless and highly functional, the camp spots for RVs are lined up and organized in lines, decently far apart. The sky was black and the stars were out. And so were the mosquitoes! 

Our netting kept the bugs out but also killed the breeze so we buttoned up and turned on the cooling air. It occurred to me many people come to Flamingo for a vacation, a break from the routine. We by contrast were enjoying the luxury of shore power compared to our usual style of wilderness camping completely self contained. 

The old visitor center is slowly being restored after it was wrecked in distant 2005 by Hurricane Wilma. It is classic old Florida style and I’m sure it will be beautiful when restored. But for now it’s closed. 

It was a quick overnight for us, starting to get acclimated to hear and humidity, enjoying the greenery and the sense of abundance that is south Florida. The end of rainy season isn’t the best time to visit the Everglades, the swamp is full of water. But it’s beautiful stark beauty to me. 

Up next: Back to the Keys. 

St Petersburg

We arrived in St Petersburg for another round of moochdocking at Dale’s place, until Friday. I promptly overdid it and got laid up by a bout of heat exhaustion and find myself in a bed in Dale’s pool house with Rusty sighing at my midnight restlessness while Layne sleeps aboard GANNET2 outside.

My mood is one of restlessness, because though I enjoy Florida I find myself back where we started a year ago. Layne is enjoying the familiar and remarks on how easy it is to manage a life on the road when we know where we are going. I want change and I feel goofy for being impatient. Change is coming in spades in a couple of months and you’d think I’d know by now how to enjoy the moment. 

After the National Forest stop we had a truck stop shower and in clean clothes presented ourselves for lunch with Nancy, a former resident of Big Pine Key at the grandiosely titled World Equestrian Center outside Ocala. 

We ate in the outside courtyard in perfect Fall temperatures and reminisced. I left them to it after a while and took Rusty for a walk under the giant live oaks festooned with Spanish moss. I couldn’t shake off the feeling of irritation hanging over me like a cloud. 

Layne is a patient listener and she sat me down and worked it out. We have to wait until January before we can leave the southeast for Arizona and ultimately Mexico. Thanksgiving has to be in Florida this year, we have doctor appointments in the Keys quite aside from friends to spend valuable time with. After that, instead of heading west we now have to plan end of year festivities in freezing North Carolina. 

It’s good to be around people we care about and I need an attitude adjustment. Knowing that makes me feel worse. I have had more exploration across the US this past summer than most people have had in a lifetime. Yet it’s not enough. I’ve seen places and talked to strangers in landmarks I’ve waited all my life to see. I evaded the horror of Hurricane Ian and the ghastly endless clean up. Dale, a great conversationalist has opened his doors to us and two fabulous spots to park await us in Key West. To say we are lucky grossly understates the case. Indeed we have done plenty already for one retirement. 

I think that cascade of good fortune pushes the pessimist in me to wonder when it will end. I fear the two month pause, I fear lose if kind Tim, I fear ease and comfort and don’t trust myself to keep pressing on.  What if…? Layne the practical as usual calms me down. Rusty treats me like the idiot I am by stretching out and enjoying the comforts of home while we have them. 

The future is there, waiting, but learning to live in the moment is as tough a lesson as ever. You’d think I have it figured out by now.  Silly me. 

After the pause this week we will have to remember to enjoy Florida once again and that’s not hard to do. 

Ocala National Forest

General gun hunting season starts November 5th this year and runs into sometime in February in Ocala National Forest. Normally I wouldn’t care one or the other but dispersed camping isn’t allowed during the shooting season, for reasons that are obvious I hope, so during some of the best weather for boondocking the national forests in Florida  are closed. 

Which was one reason we chose to spend a few days in the forest this past week. There are three national forests in Florida, in addition to Ocala there is Apalachicola and Osceola and all three have varied General Gun Seasons you need to check for each winter. 

By the time General Gun Season is over and cool weather dispersed camping resumes we expect to be swimming Mexico’s Pacific Coast. A different form of dispersed camping.

In addition to National Forests Florida’s water management districts offer low cost or free campgrounds and some dispersed camping, which may also have hunting season black outs but those we shall save for later when we travel north in December. This year we wanted to get at least some Florida boondocking under our belt and we succeeded in that. Five nights of utter serenity. 

I found a spot on iOverlander with no waterfront, no views and no features. Our spot was up a short dead end, perfectly level, surrounded by second growth pine tree monoculture and if no great scenic value at all. Perhaps that was its greatest value to us. We were well off the beaten path. Even on Saturday we saw only three vehicles pass by on the sand track a hundred yards away through the trees. The rest of the time we were alone in silence. 

We had internet access on Verizon and occasionally we could hear cars in the paved Highway 445 in the distance. But we felt alone. The sun was low on the horizon half hidden by the young pine trees so we did run through our batteries and we had eight gallons of water left in our 30 gallon tank while our trash bag was pretty full. But those were all just signs we had a very excellent stay. 

Rusty

Layne calls me a helicopter parent to Rusty. I suppose that must be partly true but as much as I fuss over his welfare I also like to see him run free. Or not…

Over the years in the Keys  I watched him vanish into the mangroves and leave me standing on the trail waiting for him to return. At first I worried he would get lost or injured and would disappear but pretty soon it became obvious to me he was more at home in the swamps than in suburbia. As much as he irritated me by refusing to come when I called I never stopped him running free and waited for him to come back to me at the side of the road. 

Then there was the time I couldn’t wait and according to a passerby he saw me drive off to an appointment without him. He ended up in jail and only next morning could a friend on his day off run over to the Marathon SPCA  and pick him up and bring him home for us. After that episode he never failed to come when I whistled so from that ghastly lemon we made lemonade. 

I never worried about him running off in Mexico. He was scared of the street dogs in a country where canines are not quite family members among the working classes. They get fed scraps to live, they hang on the streets like school yard toughs and when some middle class American dog walks through their neighborhood they gang up and try to see him off. 

The quiet streets of North America suit Rusty, the place where well fed  dogs spend  all day locked up and only come out wrapped in harnesses and bibs and all manner of restraints. He looks with scorn at the poor devils restrained in yards half mad from boredom and loneliness. Dogs are pack animals and Rusty knows his pack. We are his gang. 

When we arrive somewhere he sits outside and watches the world go by. I keep him leashed where I have to but he doesn’t need to be tied up. I even have a long tether for the rare occasions we use campgrounds where leashes are a requirement. Check out the Mexican campground in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán the only place in Mexico where the rules said we had to keep him tied up. Obviously  the tether stressed Rusty out completely: 

His home is GANNET2 and when he does get stressed or just wants to let go without worrying about being taken by surprise, he hops in and jumps up on his bed which travels on top of our bed. He sits up there and checks the world through the back windows. 

His other favorite spot is under the van. He’ll lay out in the sun for a while, then he’ll seek shade. Rusty isn’t a lap dog. He’s an American dingo and he lives like one. He survived being dumped in the Everglades so I know if we get desperate he knows how to keep us alive! For now we keep feeding him his treats. 

He learned to love to beaches in Mexico, a place where he couldn’t be ambushed. Seen here near La Ticla in the dangerous part of the coast of Michoacán…dangerous for turtles as we watched a cheerful man on a motorbike raid a nest. Rusty just played, no danger to anything. 

It was up in the mountains of Baja that I had one moment of worry for Rusty. I was enchanted by a condor circling over us only until it occurred to me that Rusty could be lunch. A quick swoop, a push over the edge and he would have been a fifty five pound meal on a cliff for the bird to pick over at its leisure. We spent a couple of nights at the vista point but I never expected it to live up to its name of “Condor Lookout.” Surprise, surprise. 

I try not to worry about him. Is he happy? Are we stressing him by driving him all over the place? 

A few months after we got him we took a planned trip to Canada. He was in his running free phase and we had a few scares when he disappeared but always came back. We spent a great time touring the  Ile d’Orleans and here is checking out the St Lawrence River:

I like to think he enjoys traveling as much as we do. Of course, if he doesn’t we are still going to keep rolling, so my fussing about him is to some degree empty self serving nonsense. Layne says he’s happy just to be with us. I agree. 

I try to imagine what a small abused abandoned dog thinks when he finds out the world includes temperate forests, cold winters and deserts so wide open he can run all day and not reach the end. 

He eats whatever kibbles we find along the way and much to our surprise his favorite treats are sticks we found in a Mexican supermarket. We call them licorice sticks they look so dark but they smell of meat. We’ve been rationing them out since we got back to the US to make our supply last. I don’t suppose he’ll miss them when we finally run out next week.

I am fond of saying you don’t get me without my dog and Rusty does his best to keep his side of the deal. Webb Chiles has never had a pet but he likes Rusty a lot. The best dog he’s ever known and Rusty is actually glad to see him. They are like old friends when we get together then he sits apart on his leash and watches us talk boats from his spot in the shade. 

They say the dogs you bond with most tightly are the hardest to train and the most resistant to domestication. Rusty fit the bill. I used to despair of myself, wondering if I was the right person for him he was so willful. Even now he sometimes refuses to walk or sits and stares at me until I give him what he wants. However he also knows when I really need obedience by my tone of voice and the balance is restored. 

We’re in the woods a few days, taking advantage of the cold front in North Florida and enjoying a wild camp before hunting season begins in a couple of weeks. Mornings are cold, 42  degrees, and when we let him out I wonder if he thinks back to all the places we have been where the cold set him free to be a dog. 

I hope he enjoys the journey as much as I do and the memories we make because without him the experience would be far less rich than it is, trying to see the world through his eyes. 

For some reason I don’t understand what breed of a dog you have fascinates people. Rusty is what I call a Miami Street Dog but a chance encounter with a stranger in Key West in 2016, the year we got Rusty, put me straight. 

https://bittersoutherner.com/carolina-dogs

Our vet’s best guess puts him at nine years old. His behavior makes me think he may well be a Carolina Dog. Who knows?