Saturday, January 25, 2002
I was kind of groggy when we arose, and even two cups of hot chocolate didn’t really get me going. But we packed up and drove back up the upper keys and along the far outskirts of Miami thru Homestead Florida on our way over to our new campsite. We drove across the Everglades on Highway 41, and were impressed by the number of waterfowl alongside the road—an awful lot of egrets, ibises, and vultures with a Great Blue Heron every now and then. We stopped at the Visitor Center for the Big Cypress National Preserve, where we saw a passel of alligators sunning themselves in a nearby ditch.

We continued on to Collier-Seminole State Park where we set up camp, took a much-needed shower, and started washing our clothes. Monika worked on her autobiography for a couple hours and I enjoyed proofreading that. In the evening we heard Ranger Wendy give a slide show on the Florida Black Bear, a sub-species of the eastern black bear native to this area which is endangered. We heard about the pancake breakfast offered by Friends of the Park in the morning and decided to do that for a change from our own cooking.