Downtown historic Homestead

Sun, 12/9/07
Everglades: Rained at about 4:00 a.m. this morning. Then it cleared off and by the time the sun came up there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Went for a walk and then came back and relaxed for a while. Then tackled cleaning the other half of the camper. Looks pretty good. Put everything away and sat around and read for a while. Then decided to drive into Homestead and have some Mexican food to celebrate getting that lovely cleaning chore done. The little historic downtown area of Homestead is really cute. Our dinner was great. After walking around the little downtown area, we headed back to the park and drove around a little bit trying to find an old road the ranger told us about where we could bike. We finally found it. Looks like it will be a great place to bike—11 miles each way and there are two primitive campgrounds along the way—one of which we could have lunch at. While driving around we started noticing a ditch that was cut out along side the road. Not sure what is was for, but it shows a great cross-section of what the terrain is like here in the Glades. There’s just a little bit of soil and grass on top (maybe an inch or so) and the rest is this porous rock. We’ve been told you can walk anywhere you want in the Glades, but to start out across this vast grassland would be very treacherous walking when you could step into one of those holes in the rock—not to mention all the other stuff that might be out there. I think most of the critters live in the hammocks though. By the time we headed back to our campsite, it was getting dark. I was hoping we’d see a panther. They are all around here apparently. But we didn’t. When we got back there was a little tree frog on the window of the truck. They are so cute!