Today we wrestled alligators.

If you believe that we have some fine Florida swampland we’d like to sell you.

We did start our journey North. In a way we were happy to leave the Keys and see something new. We crossed the lovely 7-mile bridge again and discovered that the old bridge was in fact a railroad bridge.

We again avoided the interstates and followed SR-997 for a while.  They are a huge number of nurseries, orchards and fruit stands along this highway and eventually we had to give in and stop to buy some excellent mangos and milkshakes. Velfa, the beautiful girl who looked after us, educated us about the different mango varieties and helped us select exotic fruits for our milkshakes. We ended up choosing Mamey and Guava.

With renewed energy we continued our journey and turned onto US-41 which led us through the Everglades and to Clyde Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery. This was the third gallery we visited in Florida – the other two being the Peter Lik Gallery and the Jorge de la Torriente Gallery, both in Key West. Clyde does amazing black and white work with view cameras and produces stunning mural sized prints costing up to $35,000.

His swamp images inspired us to ask at the visitor centre where the next swamps where. Sure enough, two were close by and had nice boardwalks to keep us dry and away from the messy bits.

The posted signs scared us a bit – with mention of black bears, panthers, alligators and white tailed deer thrown in for good measure. We were ready to risk life and limb to get exquisite photographs of all of them. We ended up with a nice portrait of a locust and a couple of alligators of different sizes ranging from about two feet to about eight feet.

The swamps themselves were interesting from a vegetation perspective as well.

Exhausted, hot, sweaty, mosquito bitten, tired, thirsty and hungry we were ready to find a home for the night. This was not an easy task as several of the state parks were closed for the season or renovations. We finally arrived at the Koreshan State Historic Site at 8:30PM, ten minutes after sunset when the park closed. The gate was still open and we surprised the ranger who was just closing his office. He was kind enough to let us stay the night.