TwoGether

Friday 2/10/12.         

This was quite a busy day.  We left Key Largo around 10:00A and headed back for the mainland.  As you leave Key Largo there is a sign that reads “Leaving Key Largo…Back to Reality”.   Much of the highway is only two lanes but everybody keeps moving at a decent pace.  However we came upon a sign that would be a joke at home, but this is an official FL state sign.

While thoughts of FL seem to gravitate toward the beach or swamps, it’s easy to forget that FL’s second highest money maker is agriculture.  Just north of the Keys and west of Miami there are miles and miles of fields full of tomatoes, corn, peppers. It’s not unusual to see fields that are a mile square or more.  Another thing that caught Linda’s eye was several huge tree farms…Not Christmas tree farms like around home but Palm Tree farms.  We saw row after perfectly straight row of palm trees.  We guess the landscapers have to get them somewhere.

 Once we reached the Tamiami Trail and started west the next stop was to be at a Seminole Indian village.  The Miccosukee (mik-ko-sue-key) Tribe has a village, restaurant, casino and airboat ride to an ancient village site.  While sharing the same ancestry as other members of the Seminole Nation they have one distinction.  They went to Fidel Castro in Cuba for recognition as a sovereign nation within the confines of the US. This gave them international recognition as a sovereign nation.  This is an interesting subject for web-searching.  The Seminole Nation is the only Native Americans to never sign a peace treaty with the US.  They were granted sovereignty in 1959.  A fact they’re quite proud of….Rightly so.

The village is set up to show how the Chickee or huts are laid out.  They are open air with usually either a dirt floor or a floor of logs raised off the ground.  There are usually separate chickees for cooking, eating and sleeping.  The tables in the sleeping chickees are used as work tables during the day and for sleeping at night.  The babies are put in cloth hammocks with a stick frame and suspended from the cross braces in the roof.  This keeps them safely off the ground.  There is a museum explaining their culture and history. 

They also have an “Alligator Show” where one of the Miccosukee men explains many facts about alligators and holds the upper jaw under his chin.  After the show everybody is given the opportunity to hold a baby alligator.  That was cool.

For lunch Linda and I went to the Miccosukee Restaurant and tried their sampler #2.  This consisted of alligator bites (think chicken tenders from the swamp), frog legs, hush puppies and fry bread.  Alligator is best explained as a chewy white meat similar to chicken breast.  Frog legs are much the same as gator except less chewy.

After lunch we took an airboat ride to an ancient Miccosukee village. The airboat scooted right out over the saw grass at about 40 mph and after about 15 minutes we were at the village.

 The village was active up until 1978 when the pollution from sugar cane fields and other sources rendered the waters unfit.  During the ride Linda had a big grin on her face the whole time.  That girl sure likes her boat rides! 

On the way back our guide Elvis (he said his dad liked rock and roll so he named his brother Fabian) found a momma alligator and her eight week old babies.  That was a real treat for everybody.

Another sign we saw along the Tamiami Trail was a warning about Panthers.  A subspecies of the cougar there are believed to be only about 100 left in the wild.  I saw one in our neighborhood when in my teens and it showed up one afternoon trying to find a way into my Dad’s dove pen.

On our way to the Keys Linda noticed this Post Office.  On the way back we stopped to take a look.  The original general store/post office burnt down in 1953.  The post master pressed this storage shed into service and it remains today as the smallest post office in the US.

We arrived back at the boat, in Ft. Myers, around 5:30P.  This has been quite a week!