G.A.S.P.

On the morning of February 23, the big news in south Florida was the tanker truck crash that closed I-75 (Alligator Alley) in the northern everglades.  It was really big news for me because that meant all of the I-75 traffic that chose to not wait for the highway to re-open would now be on my road, U.S. 41.  The section of Rt. 41 in Monroe County (about 32 miles) is bad under the best of circumstances – no shoulder on a flat, straight (fast-track) highway, but with lots of extra truck traffic today, especially truck traffic that was already running late, it was downright hazardous to a bicyclist.  I lived through it, although I had a few choice words and gestures for some of my fellow travelers.  Once I got into Dade County, there was a shoulder on the road, so I could finally breathe again.

Actually, I stopped several times during the day to takes some breaks from the traffic.  One of those breaks was at the Big Cypress National Preserve, a unit of the National Park Service.  There are lots of cypress trees here, but most are of the dwarf pond variety.  There used to be many big cypress trees, but most ended up as gutters, coffins, stadium seats, pickle barrels and the hulls of WWII PT Boats.  Big now refers to the size of the swamp – about 2400 square miles of subtropical Florida.  It’s much more than just a swamp, as it’s full of sandy islands of slash pine, mixed hardwood hammocks, wet prairies, dry prairies, marshes and estuarine mangrove forests.  It’s also home to Black bears, alligators (I saw tons of them), a large variety of wading birds and an occasional Florida panther (although these are now very rare).

It turned out to be a good thing that I rode the additional miles the day before, because the Chekika campground was marked “Closed” as I rode by (due to high water as I found out later).  Hey, I could have found some small plot of high and dry ground, but then I probably would have had to share it with a couple of alligators and about 400 snakes.