My Rum Luck: Shark Valley

On Wednesday I took myself on a little solo Everglades trip to a place called Shark Valley. Shark Valley is one of the entrances to Everglades National Park, located right along Tamiami Trail, about 40 miles directly west of Miami. It has a small visitor center and a 15 mile paved trail that loops 7 miles south to an observation tower and 8 miles back to the main parking lot. You can either walk the trail, bike it, or take a tram. Since Jake got me my shiny new beach cruiser for Valentine's Day, I chose to bike it. I've been wanting to come and do this ever since last year, when we stopped by Shark Valley on our way back home from visiting Granddad and Gigi in Naples (we had taken the LONG way back to Orlando so that we could drive the entire length of the Tamiami Trail). Since it was my Spring Break last week, I decided to devote my day to hanging out in the Everglades with the gators and hopefully take some cool pictures.

On the way to the tower I kept my regular lens on the camera, with the intent to capture bigger images during the first part of the ride and then switch to my zoom lens for the return trip to try and get some details and close-ups.

For most of the day I was on the trail alone, passing the occasional biker(s) or the occasional biker(s) passing me. Sometimes the tram came by, loaded up with people, and I would have to pull over so they wouldn't run me over. But mostly my view looked like this.

looking back in the direction from where I had come

There was a shallow canal on one side of me and the wide-open grasses on the other. I tried several times to stop and take pictures of the few gators I saw in the water, but the bees were everywhere and on high alert today. Every time I stopped they would buzz at me and dive-bomb me like they were guarding the gators. Well no thanks, so I quickly learned to stay away. So here's my view of the sawgrass prairies and marshes. It (frustratingly) doesn't look like much in the pictures, as there was no way to fully capture the vastness of everything around me. An ultra-wide angle lens is on my Christmas list for next year. ;)

The tiny observation tower sticking up at the very end of the trail on the horizon. It's kind of hard to see.

Unfortunately you couldn't go all the way up to the top for some reason; they had it all boarded up. Where that guy is standing was as far up as you could go.

There was a big pond right below the tower with a bunch of pretty huge hungry-looking gators in it.

Here are a couple panoramas I took from the tower with my iPhone, as well as some shots taken with the camera. It was just me and two French-speaking guys up there and they offered to take my picture. I wanted to attempt to speak to them in French but somehow restrained myself. After they left, it was just me again and it was really cool to be up there all by myself. As I was walking back down the ramp to leave, a tram had just pulled up with a bunch of people, so I made it out of there just in time. Again, the pictures cannot even begin to show the magnitude of the huge and wide open expanse all around me.

If you look closely, you can see part of the trail back to the entrance in the distance.

So this is a little off-topic, but it's been 5 days and I STILL can't get over this. I had brought an apple with me in my little basket, and sometime during the 10-15 minutes I was up in the tower, someone totally up and swiped my apple!!! I didn't even realize it was missing until I got back to my car and wanted to eat it. The only time I was away from my bike was when I was up in the tower. What the H-E-double-hockeysticks?! I mean, seriously, who does that?! The only people I encountered that day were a bunch of French tourists and several teenage Asian tour groups. SOMEBODY took it and I'm still mad about it.

ANYWAY, the 8 mile path back to the visitor center was much more windy (in both senses of the word), but with smaller ponds (some obviously man-made) and more wide open spaces on both sides.