Everglades National Park

Everglades National Park: Main Road

You know, I never really check to see if anyone else ever sees these pages. Maybe they do, and maybe you’re someone who just stumbled onto this site entirely by accident. Just in case you are, know that this is the third page describing a trip a couple of seventy-somethings made to South Florida in January 2023. You can start the tour here, or you can just concentrate on our trip through Everglades National Park that starts on this page Either way — carry on here when you’re ready.

And if you stick around, there’s a bonus page after this one: Harvesting the Honey.

After our Shark Valley experience, we were excited for our next trip to the Park, this time without such a long drive. The Homestead entrance was only a short distance away, but we were a little concerned about crowds and parking given the problems we’d had before. Driving up to the Welcome Station and seeing a school bus disgorging students didn’t help that fear at all. As it turned out, though, once we left there and started our drive through the park, we were practically alone most of the places we visited. We drove the full length of the road, all the way down to the southern end of Florida, making a few stops along the way and taking it easy.

Mahogany Hammock

The Ranger we talked to had recommended this as a good stop for us, so that was our first stop of the morning. We drove a few miles through grassland, seeing a lot of pines and cypress trees in the distance. The talk the day before really helped us  understand what we were seeing in the distance, with one type of tree island after another. This time we saw a lot of pines — those weren’t around in Shark Valley.

This was also our first time to actually get our and walk through one of the hammocks, this one full of hardwood trees like mahogany, gumbo-limbo, sweet-gum bay, palms, and even some oaks. At least those were familiar ones. The trail is a raised wooden walkway about a half mile long, easy to get to with some informational signs along the way. I was really struck by the number of air plants and orchids growing everywhere, as well as the size of some of the ferns. I made the full loop, but it took a lot of time; I couldn’t help stopping and looking at every new plant or bird I saw. But no alligators!

Flamingo

When we left Mahogany Hammock, we decided to keep on going on the Main Road all the way to the end. We could stop at other locations on the way back, and even at 40 mph we would get to the Flamingo Welcome Center at the bottom of Florida in time for lunch. That’s always an important consideration, of course. At times it was hard to resist stopping but we persisted and made it to the tip of the state before starvation set in.

The actual Welcome Center was closed for construction activities, but we walked around, drove through the campground area, exclaimed over the lodging accommodations being built, and bought sandwiches at the marina store. Altogether satisfactory to stand at the edge of the land, looking out toward who-knows-how-many small keys, and think about what might lie beyond in almost any direction. I talked with one of the Rangers in the welcome center and found out those trees with funny looking pods were more mahogany trees. Who knew? Those without pods growing on them were probably poisonwood trees, my plant ID app said, something we’d heard about only when we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. Living and learning all the time. In contrast to all that, seeing Spanish Moss on some trees wasn’t strange to us at all. 🙂

Finally we had our fill of the annoying bugs that wanted to take up residence in the car and started back north. But it sure was a nice place to rest awhile in the sunshine.

Pa-hay-Okee Trail

Our first stop on the way back along the Everglades Main Road was another place recommended by the Ranger at the Coe Welcome Station. I still don’t remember the origin of the name, and it seems a little strange to call this one a “trail.” But it was another fascinating walk along a raised wooden walkway from an almost deserted parking area into one of the “tree islands.”

I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised to find out this one was oriented  a little differently. Instead of running into the center of the Hammock and circling that part, this walkway led to a rather roomy elevated observation space at the far edge of the hammock. We went from the pines and hardwood trees close to the parking area through the wetland sweet bay and cypress to the edge of the grass. Standing there we saw what appeared to be a unique landscape in each direction. TBH I didn’t realize that until we got back to Birmingham and I looked at my photos. What fun!

Royal Palm

This was our last stop for the day, and I’m glad we stopped, in spite of the mid-afternoon time. We saw a notice of a Ranger Talk that would start a little later and decided to wait around until that before we just took off. I enjoyed walking the Gumbo-limbo trail, which actually turned out to be a slightly paved trail on the ground, not a raised walkway. Somehow that felt much more like walking through a tropical jungle than it did when I was on the walkway at Mahogany Hammock. Judy elected to stay back and watch an alligator in the water near the station. She got the prize photo of the week when the lizard opened its mough, while all I got was some nifty looking wood grain on a fallen tree trunk!

Once we returned to our base in Homestead, we had done everything on our little south Florida list but one very important one. We had talked with Debbi Miller, our friend from undergraduate years at Birmingham-Southern College, who now lives (with her husband Terry) somewhere north of Miami. Once she knew when we were going to be closer to her home than Alabama, she invited us to lunch and an afternoon harvesting honey from her three hives.

To find out how that experience wnet, just click here and go to our Harvesting the Honey page.