Monday 2/27/12.     

Trying to pick out which pictures to put on the blog from yesterday’s visit to Mudge Ranch kept me busy most of the day.  There was so much to see and capture on video that I could have had ten pages of nothing but pictures of the ranch and animals.

Thank you to Patty and Tim for sharing your day with us.  The visit with you has been one of the highlights of this adventure and will live in our memories forever. 

In the evening Casey and Barbra came over to TwoGether for pizza and Rummikub.  I believe we have become addicted to this game.  We played until midnight.

Tuesday 2/28/12.     Today we will start provisioning for the return trip home.  The process began with a trip to BJs and a trunk load of food and junk food. 

Linda has wanted to go back to the Shell Factory to see the Nature and Dinosaur Park.  When we arrived the lady at the ticket booth told us to check out the baby goats in the petting zoo.  There are several aviaries you can walk into and get up close to the birds.  They have a large alligator pit and the dinosaur walk would be a hit for kids of all ages.  Inside the Shell Factory there are millions of shells and other critters of the sea available to buy.  There is a Christmas Store a Pirate’s Cave and a Museum of Natural History displaying mounted animals of Africa and the Americas.

Then we took Publix market by storm returning with another trunk full of real food.

Sunday 2/26/12.      Casey and Barb picked us up at 10:15A and drove us to the ranch of his sister Patty and her husband Tim.  We haven’t seen them for 40 years.  At that time they were crabbers on Pine Island. 

For the last 15 years they have been ranchers outside Labelle, FL.  Their ranch covers an entire section (that’s a square with each side a mile long). 

Along with the cattle, Patty has a blueberry patch.  “Patty’s Patch” as it is known, has 7,000 blueberry bushes and yields over 20,000 pounds of berries each season.  Plans are in the making to expand to 10,000 plants.  She sells the berries commercially and has U-pick for the public.  We had some of the berries at Casey’s house and they were the largest and sweetest blueberries we have ever had.  They grow to the size of a grape! 

 Much of what tourists see of Florida is the exotic beach fronts and man-made gardens. They are beautiful to look at but… Mudge Ranch is “Real Florida”.   Patty took us for a tour of the ranch in one of their Ranger 4X4s, while Casey and Barb followed along in the other.

In the 647 acres there are 200 acres of swamp, a hundred of acres of palmetto, pine and sable palm forest, huge grazing pastures and fields of Bahia grass for hay.  Along the edges, between the forest and the swamp, there is wild Iris blooming. Wildlife on the ranch includes bobcat, wild pigs, deer, bear, alligator and almost every kind of water fowl.  

We stopped to see Patty and Tim’s son, Chad. He is working on a project making a machine that will cut, lift and mulch an entire citrus tree when thinning out a grove.  He showed us his proto-type and is now planning a larger version. 

While we were there Linda met Chad's daughter and she let Linda hold one of her baby bunnies.  She raises rabbits for food.  There was also a litter of bunnies that were only two hours old.  They were all snuggled up in a nest of their mother’s fur.

 

 

After the tour we went to Labelle to see the last half of the youth rodeo.  Patty’s husband, Tim, was there working the rodeo chutes and corrals.  It was a blast watching the young cowboys working the calves in the Calf Decorating Event.  It was a timed event where each team of five cowboys waited at the chute in anticipation of the calf being released. The calf, that had a rope around its horns, would make a bee-line into the arena and the cowboys had to catch the calf, and then tie a bright orange ribbon to its tail, remove the rope, and all of the team members return back to the chute before time ran out. There are some tough young cowboys there.

“Meanwhile…Back at the Ranch, while the Lone Ranger was chasing Black Bart the outlaw”...

“Back at the ranch” we followed Patty as she tended to the horses and an orphaned calf.Then we had a catch up conversation with Tim and Patty about where life has taken them.It was easy to see they are very happy working hard and living on Mudge Ranch.

On the way home it was decided the evening would include another trip to Sonny’s Bar-b-que.