We’ve by no means become experts at this long-term travelling thing, but now that we’ve been at it two weeks or so, it is starting to feel more like a journey instead of just a vacation. The coolest part may just be getting out and walking in quiet places each day. We don’t have a routine to follow, and we’re usually not in a hurry. In order to not burn out, and also to match our preferred rambling pace, we aren’t trying to see too many things in a day. There are so many interesting looking spots that we aren’t getting to visit, but we can generally stay as long as we like at the places we do choose. Most every location is new to us, and we’re enjoying seeing the different scenery as we move from place to place. If there’s a convenient country highway, we’ve been taking that instead of the interstate.

Without a routine though, there is a lot of research and decision making to do each day. We don’t have any convenient fallbacks to save time or energy, unless you count McDonald’s sweet tea and fries. We’re making extensive use of, and also wishing for improvements in, google maps and navigation, and also trip advisor. Where is the nearest post office on a route we might take? Do any of these small town restaurants have decent reviews or will we be served rotting tomatoes on our salad, despite decent reviews? (true story) Do any of our next couple of lodgings provide onsite laundry, or do we need to find a laundromat?

Sorting through photos is also taking up quite a bit of time (we both take a lot of photos). This was true for our weekend adventures in our previous life, but now we have new pictures to process almost every day. I now understand why photographers need assistants. Between all of this, we’re ending up with surprisingly little down time. We’ve started intentionally making time for management of the trip instead of just slipping it in here and there.

This weekend, we swung by our storage unit for a planned exchange of items, now that we have a somewhat better sense of what we actually want with us. We forgot a couple of things, but mainly we put gear back into storage. It was really convenient that our particular path wound down Florida and then back up so that we could easily include a return visit. Opening our storage unit door now, it looks like so much stuff, despite having gotten rid of almost all of our furniture and a good chunk of the rest of our belongings. We’re now much more aware of what it takes to carry what we have with us in and out of each place we stay at. While we’re nowhere near ultralight, we’ve slimmed down to things that have a planned purpose, nothing obnoxiously bulky (full-sized Scrabble) or that we have multiple versions of (five USB 3 cables?!). We also didn’t leave ourselves any time to pack our traveling gear properly when we were busy moving out of our previous home. Hopefully now we’re better organized, with our less frequently used items stashed out of the way.

So, we agree with all of the travel advice, bring only the the things you need, and you probably need way less than you think you do.

The conditions must have been good for prescribed burns in the last few days, because another of the parks we visited was partially closed due to burning. We arrived early at Hickory Lake Scrub to find smoke drifting through the trees and across the road. The second entrance, that we’ve never walked around and wanted to try out, was closed due to the burn, so we took the smokey but open short loop that we walked a year or two ago. It was too early and cool to see any scrub lizards, but there were many birds flitting around. The scrub is an interesting, desert-like habitat, identified by “the absence of a tree canopy; the absence of a continuous vegetative ground cover; and the absence of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris), wiregrass (Aristida beyrichiana), and turkey oak…. Most scrubs occur on white sand and patches of bare sand with or without scattered clumps of ground lichens.” (pdf) (by quoderat)

There are lots of prickly pear along this trail, with all of their spines intact. (by zanna)

Continuing on to Lake June-in-Winter Scrub State Park, we found a lovely, but short nature trail that crosses a small creek. While there was some scrub oak away from the lake and creek, the parts we walked weren’t what I associate as true scrub. (by zanna)

Near the stream, we found an ebony jewelwings (by quoderat)

And a frog (also by quoderat)

We first visited Highlands Hammock State Park a year or two ago. We returned briefly yesterday for a picnic lunch and a walk at our favorite spot from last time, the Cypress Swamp boardwalk. The water level was lower this time than last, with this visit farther into the drier season than before.

The popular boardwalk, after a lovely wide section with angled benches, loses much of its width and one of its side rails. This makes the swamp seem much more intimate, without that mental barrier between you and the alligators. (We saw two.) (by quoderat)

Besides the alligators, we saw a large spider and a small flock of ibis (both by zanna)

Florida Hikes reports that they enjoyed a wild orange milkshake, picked from trees in the park that are descendents from an earlier use of the land as an orchard, but we are zero for two for having the concession stand open in the first place. We did however stroll through the small Civilian Conservation Corps Museum. My favorite part was probably a map with pins for all of the work camps across the country.

By September 1935 over 500,000 young men had lived in CCC camps, most staying from six months to a year. The work focused on soil conservation and reforestation. Most important, the men planted millions of trees on land made barren from fires, natural erosion, or lumbering—in fact, the CCC was responsible for over half the reforestation, public and private, done in the nation’s history. Corpsmen also dug canals and ditches, built over thirty thousand wildlife shelters, stocked rivers and lakes with nearly a billion fish, restored historic battlefields, and cleared beaches and campgrounds.

In less than 10 years, the Civilian Conservation Corps built more than 800 parks and planted nearly 3 billion trees nationwide. [history.com]

Taken from the Old Bahia Honda Bridge looking back at the southwest tip of Bahia Honda Key.

We were both feeling lazy today. We chose to go to the hiking trail at nearby Curry Hammock State Park. After a short walk along the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage State Trail, it winds for a mile and a half through hardwood hammock and some mangroves, with two bay-side overlooks (key and crab by zanna).

Quoderat photographed a kind of spider we’ve not seen before, looks like a Silver Argiope.

Great southern white butterfly (by zanna)