"Turkey Day" in the Swamp

(NOTE: View a larger picture by clicking on the photo(s) above.)

As I write this, it is raining. It has been raining all day. We need the rain. The Swamp and the Suwannee River are getting pretty low. It is the last day of the month of November. The last day of the Thanksgiving week-end. The campground has been full of campers. We didn’t realize that this many people went camping over the holiday week-end. It appears that this is a new tradition for many families.

We hope that you and yours had a good holiday. As for us, we did the usual by ourselves. By the usual we mean the cooking and eating that we always do. The traditional meal. We have plenty of food and people keep giving us more. A couple week-ends ago, a Church group from Jacksonville, FL filled the campground. The leader of the group brought a number of hams to share with the Park personnel. We were lucky enough to receive a nice 8.5 pound, spiral cut, sugar cured ham out of the gifts. One of the Park Clerk’s husband has bee hives and produces and sells honey. She gave us two pint jars of delicious honey. We shared a little salt with another camper and they brought us a bunch of fresh turnip greens, complete with the turnips. I helped a camper, inexperienced at backing his trailer, get placed into his campsite and he brought us a ten pound bag of apples from North Carolina. I guess you could call this the “perks” of hosting.

Up until today, the weather has been great for the Thanksgiving Holiday. Mid to upper 70’s during the day and in the 60’s at night. Today is when the majority of campers are leaving. Not a fun experience to break-down the campsite and move in pouring rain, as it is doing right now.

Speaking of perks, I may have told you that we not only get a free campsite with all utilities, and the use of all other services they offer, like boating, but we also receive free laundry. Free use of the washer and dryer, which are pay machines. But here they have a different way of providing it free. At Fort Yargo, we had a key that allowed us to unlock and start the machines without quarters. Here, we have to mark our quarters with initials, and when the machines are emptied each week, we receive our quarters back to use again, and again.

We have been here for two months now. Carolyn is still going to the Suwannee River Visitors Center one day a week. She only has three more times to do that before we leave here. I am still giving boat tours. I am now proficient in using all three of the tour boats (24 foot Pontoon, 21 foot Skiff and 17 foot Skiff). It is interesting how people on the tours keep wanting to give me tips after it is over. Of course, I don’t accept them. I don’t know whether it is because they enjoyed my tour, or they are grateful just to get back alive.

People from everywhere have been on the tours. Many States and many countries, from Australia to Europe. On one tour I had people from Ecuador, South America. At the start of the tour, I usually ask people where they are from. When I found that one old gentleman was from Ecuador (many of you know we used to live in Ecuador) we started speaking in Spanish, which surprised him a great deal. I had to go back to English for the benefit of the other passengers, so his daughter interpreted for him. When we returned to the dock, he wanted to know my name, where we had lived in Ecuador, and had his daughter take a photo of us together on the boat. Now I am the famous “Swamp Guide.”

In the first picture above is a view of the virgin Cypress Forest in the Swamp. The trees here have never been logged. They are between 200 and 300 years old. The cypress is a very slow growing tree. They grow only about one to one and a half inches in diameter every 15 to 20 years. Many of the trees logged out of here by the Hebard Lumber Company, between 1909 and 1927, were 1,000 plus years old. The company took out 500 million board feet of cypress from the Swamp.

In the second picture is a lazy gator on a log out in the Swamp, accompanied by a Red Bellied Slider Turtle keeping watch. Remember the tip I gave you last time about how to estimate the length of a gator?, if not, go back and read it. This fellow seems to be over eight feet long. Alligators will eat turtles, but we have seen turles lying beside gators and even riding on their backs.

The third picture is of two gators sneaking around the grass and Lillie pads. You can just see the eyes of the second gator on the right. When I took this picture, we (Carolyn and I) were in a small Jon boat only about six feet from them. There are some 400,000 visitors to the Swamp each year. They mainly come to see the alligators and the cypress.

Among all the wild life we have here at the Park, the deer is the most ubiquitous. We see them at every turn. The last picture was taken out the back window of our trailer of a buck looking in to see what we were about. The picture was taken hurriedly, and is not the best quality, but you get the idea. We have not spotted any bears as yet. Maybe soon.

That’s it for his month. It is still raining and the campground is about empty now. We are going to take another little trip out of the Swamp on Friday. We are going down to Florida to look over another Park to see if we might like it for future hosting. Since we will be out, we will have to stop by Wal-Mart as well. What would we do without them? We will let you know how the Swamp is fairing next month, and where we will end up next. Until then, take charge of your life and live to the fullest!