Sunset last night. Today we were lazy, shopped and went to the Flamingo museum. It is in a frame shop, Cindy collected all of these. She applied to get the guinness world record for her collection. At the time she had 793, but now she has over a thousand. Very interesting.
83 degrees and partly sunny. We went to Ocklawaha Canoe Outpost and had them run a shuttle for us so we could paddle 10 miles of the Ocklawaha river. Mostly we just laid back and watched the scenery to by. We didn't see another soul until the very end.
It was very brilliantly spring green and peaceful.You may have to used your imagination for some of these photos. The animals were kind of skittish. They allow hunting of the gators here. From upper left , two limpkins (birds), a rhesus monkey. We saw two groups of them. In the early 1900's the guy who ran scenic river trips on the Silver River released them to interest his customers. They have since multiplied and spread out. They have no real predators and they carry diseases. But it is kind of cool to see them. One of the many gators we saw, most slipped into the water before we could get photos. Some got caught up in all the branches and cypress knees and thrashed around in a panic before disappearing. A couple turtles, some ibis and dragonflies that landed on my boat.
John floating ahead of me enjoying the view and he took this one of me. I had my feet up on the bow of the boat just watching scenery.
We floated by this flock of ibis. When I paddled back to get photos they flew up river.
Turtle. There were tons of butterflies, they were flitting all around, many would buzz me, but I couldn't react fast enough to get photos, these were feeding or drinking something on the shore. The top one is a black swallowtail and the bottom ones are eastern tiger swallowtails. I also saw a blue swallowtail. These signs were at out pick takeout at the Ocklawaha Canoe outpost.
We left Silver Springs, which is outside of Ocala-The horse capital of the world, past tons of fancy horse ranches, Through Perry, where we stayed right after our bus was totaled to the beach with lots of shells. The last one is a crushed shell in the shape of a heart. Beautiful historic downtown Apalachicola, Florida which is the closes town to Indian Pass where we are. It is the oyster capital of the world and home of the inventor of the the refrigerator and the refrigerator museum.
Somewhere on this stretch of the road we had the head on accident with the last bus three years ago. The good news is that I couldn't have told you where when we went by. The bad news some bozo tried to pass us when there was a car in the oncoming lane. With John and the guy in the oncoming lane braking and swerving all of our lives were saved. Florida has been a scary state to drive in. The bus parked at Indian Pass campground. It is at the end of a the road at the end of a peninsula on the gulf. Very lovely campground and area, this is our second time here.
The beach at Indian Pass mere steps from our front door. The island in the first photo is a wildlife refuge and you can only get there by boat. We kayaked there before and hiked. Very nice.
Sunset from the beach. The full moon rising over the clouds that were on the horizon.
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