A few years ago, I wrote a couple of posts about our road trip west through Colorado to Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. They were relatively well received, and since i almost never write anything here even though I’ve been here forever (aside from rare dumb comments), the response was nice. At the end of the second diary, I said I would soon follow up about the Grand Canyon and other places we visited. Unfortunately, life got in the way, and to make it worse, the memory stick with pics for my next installment (Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, etc.) was eaten by one of my dogs. Seriously, that happened. I even took a pic of the remains (you know what I’m talking about), but I’ll spare you that. So I never followed up.
Since then, we’ve gotten on a bit of a national park kick, incorporating park visits to every trip we take (or making that the focus of the trip). My wife has, as we call it, the itchy feet. This habit can be somewhat expensive, depending on the park’s location, which might explain why my rapidly aging car is held together with duct tape and used chewing gum. Good thing i can ride my bike to work. Plus, I take on a LOT of overtime and have the shredded hands to prove it. But it’s worth it, and I thought I’d share some of our experiences.
Case in point: Last fall, we headed to southern Florida to visit that state’s three national parks. First up was Biscayne National Park, which is noteworthy for the fact that 95 percent of it is under water.
Fun facts and observations: Biscayne National Park was designated a National Monument in 1968 in response to proposed plans for development of the area. It was expanded when named a National Park in 1980. The park is located in Miami-Dade County, with Homestead as the closest municipality (motto: “Gateway to Everglades and Biscayne National Parks”). We stayed in Homestead for several days while visiting Biscayne and Everglades (the latter in another diary, maybe), and we really enjoyed it. The city is incredibly diverse, with 16 percent white, 62 percent Latino, and 20 percent black (per 2010 census data, from Wikipedia). My kids liked it a lot, despite the fact that everybody was speaking Spanish. Not that this mattered much to them, because when we lived in Chicago, a lot of people in our neighborhood spoke Hindi or Farsi, so they were used to it. One thing I found interesting was the number of palm nurseries in the area. I guess all the palm trees in Florida have to come from somewhere and don’t instantly spring up like magic, but it was still weird.
I also thought it was a bit odd that so many houses and buildings in Homestead looked relatively new (there was some but not a lot of mid-century or older construction you see elsewhere in southern FL), until I remembered that Homestead was obliterated by a direct strike from cat-5 Hurricane Andrew in 1992. I’m no architecture expert, so this might be a dumb observation (and no doubt incomplete, as we didn’t tour the entire city), but that was my impression.
Anyway. We got up early on whatever day it was and headed to Biscayne National Park. We had reservations for a morning snorkeling excursion, and we wanted to check out the area around the visitor center beforehand. There really weren’t any trails to hike, aside from a small walk directly around the visitor center, but that was fine. (Note: there are trails out on the keys in the park, but that wasn’t on our itinerary.) At one point, I saw a bird I thought was a cormorant (which are everywhere there) land on the water near us, but then it disappeared. So I sat down with my wife’s uber-camera and waited. She had snapped a pic of the bird in flight, and upon further review, I saw it was an anhinga (the thin neck and pattern on the back of the wings are tell-tales).
I kept seeing something out of the corner of my eye out in the water, but i couldn’t focus the camera on it. Finally I caught it: the anhinga had dived (dove?) and captured a fish. And I caught it!
At that point, we joined the other members of our snorkeling excursion and were issued masks, snorkels, and swim fins. A ranger gave a presentation about some of the things we’d see out in the water (coral, sponges, etc.), and we boarded the boat.
We had three possible snorkel locations: the outer reef, one of several shipwrecks (both options on the ocean side of the keys), or a protected leeward bay with mangroves (one tree is a mangrove, plural is mangroves, a whole bunch are a mangrove forest. i had to look it up). I was hoping for reef or shipwreck, but unfortunately, the winds were too strong (25 mph) for the ocean-side spots, so we headed for the mangroves.
Along the way, I noticed a magnificent frigatebird (actual name) trailing us high overhead. I pointed it out to my replicants, and when our awesome boat captain saw me do that, she immediately throttled down. “Good eye,” she said, “and any time we see frigatebirds, we find dolphins.” Sure enough, the dolphins showed up. After a few minutes, the captain headed out again, and the dolphins followed, playing in the boat’s wake.
After about 45 minutes powering across the bay, we reached Billy’s Point off Elliot Key. We anchored and hopped into the water, and it was on like a pot of neckbones.
Mangrove roots serve as a nursery for small fish, and all the fancy, colorful fish you see in those pics and videos of Florida coral reefs started in the mangroves. However, it was hard to get close to the mangroves, as it got very shallow near the shore of the key, and we didn’t want to disturb the grasses and coral on the ocean bottom.
Like I said, I had hoped for reef or shipwreck. But when I saw the amazing biological diversity of the shallow bay around and in the mangrove roots, those misgivings disappeared.
We came armed with a pair of underwater digital cameras. One was an inexpensive Nikon my wife bought a long time ago to take with her when kayaking (after an unfortunate cell-phone incident). The other was a fancier Olympus. The Nikon didn’t survive the trip, but the Olympus was a champ. After a while, I borrowed (stole) the Olympus from my replicant and went off on my own, and I quickly hit paydirt.
i saw a large fish in the distance, but once i closed in a bit, i realized that it was a SHARK. A nurse shark to be exact, about five feet long. After snapping a few shots, I surfaced and yelled at my fellow snorkeling companions, “Hey, there’s a damn shark over here, so watch out!” Then I looked under again, and it was gone, and nobody (including my kids!) believed that I saw a shark. Imagine my triumph when I went back through the pics on the camera and saw that I had captured the above image.
After a few hours of snorkeling, it was time to head back. Everybody got onto the boat, but after a head count, it turned out one person was missing. There were a few moments of panic before someone spotted our wayward snorkeler, about a quarter mile across the bay. How did he get that far, and why? He never told us. The boat couldn’t motor over to pick him up, due to the shallow water, so the captain blew an air horn to get his attention and we had to wait for him to swim back. Jerk.
So we made it back to the dock at the visitor’s center, and that ended our visit to Biscayne National Park. Or did it? No! My middle replicant collects national park maps, and after returning to our hotel, we realized we hadn’t gotten one from the park. So later that afternoon, he and I headed back (it was only about 15 minutes away), collected a map, and had a long chat with a ranger in the visitor’s center about what we had seen that morning. National park rangers all need a huge raise, because they are awesome.
Next (maybe): Everglades. We visited Shark Valley (the northern entrance) a couple of years ago, but this time we entered on the eastern side (Royal Palm, I think it’s called. At least, that’s the name of the visitor’s center there). I’ll combine pics from both of those into one diary, assuming I ever write it. But before I go, I just want to plug Publix, a local (?) grocery store chain. As far as groceries go, they are as good or bad as any other store. But they have Pub Subs, which are a delight. In the deli section, they have what is basically a Subway shop, if Subway were a hundred times better. So many topping options, fresh-baked bread, inexpensive, quick — perfect for a tired family looking to eat good food without a lot of hassle and without breaking the bank. Yum.
With subs in hand, all three kids (and my wife) fell asleep on the drive from Publix to the hotel. It was across the street, total driving time about 2.5 minutes. Mission accomplished.