What to do in Big Cypress... - Our Traveling Tribe

We have toured lots of Big Cypress so far, and a little of the Everglades – well, all the stuff we’ve gone to has be along the few roads. The vast majority of the parks are accessible only by foot (some areas by swamp buggies or airboats). Both parks have hundreds of thousands of acres, and only a very few roads (the Everglades only has one!).

We drove over to the east, gulf coast visitor’s center for the Everglades. It was very small and the majority of the stuff here is private, commercial. The rangers here were super nice though! We caught the very end of a ranger led program, but then the ranger showed the kids all the stuff he had just done the talk on, including a big python skin (we are really hoping to see one of these down here!). The visitor’s center here had some interesting displays,and several hands-on things for the kids to do… their touch table had some fun shells on it. The littles really liked the magnifying machine, and the microscope – thinking that we really need to get a microscope now 🙂 outside, there is a telescope; while we didn’t get to see any manatee here, the kids did get to see some dolphins. Afterwards, on our drive home, when we took a dirt road that made a scenic loop through part of Big Cypress, we stopped to check out all the beautiful flowers down here…I’m not sure that this one was a flower – looked like a unique piece of grass…

this is the beginning of the dry season down here. I can’t imagine how many flowers there are, and how beautiful it must be during their wet season…Orchids flourish down here in the preserve. These flowers are some of my favorites so far…

Back at the campground…

The kids are still having fun fishing…Tho they really haven’t caught anything worth keeping (which is fine, we still have tons of TX catfish in the freezer! LOL!).

There is quite a bit of competition for the fish in our little pond… 😉

On Friday, we took a drive down to the Coe visitor’s center, on the east side of the Everglades. It was a drive of a little over 2 hours! There is construction on about 30 miles of 41 on the east side of the preserve, with lots of stops for flaggers. The drive is a bummer, so I don’t know how much of the Everglades or the keys we will visit this trip. We went to check out the campground that is by the eastern entrance to the Everglades, but their sites designed to fit 38-45 foot RVs, aren’t really designed to fit OUR 38-45 foot RV. We had really hoped to pull the camper down there base camp out of, but the campground isn’t really very big rig friendly (whoever designed it had never RVd! LOL!) We checked out the Coe v.c. while we were there tho! It is a nice center, with some interesting displays, and a short film about the park.The littles liked the telescopes that showed a film of wading birds through them… There was a big panoramic display that shows many of the native species. This painting is also offered as a postcard in the gift shops at the parks. We decided not to take the rv through the incredibly time-consuming construction zone (their rumble strips really rumble around here!), so we won’t be camping in the Everglades this year. I’m really OK with that, tho it’s a bummer that we won’t get to explore the Everglades as much as we would have liked. We will still take a day trip out to Biscayne, and will pop by the Coe visitor’s center again to turn in Jr. Ranger books. And we haven’t decided if we will take a day trip down to the keys to spend a day on the beach yet.