Big Cypress National Preserve

Posted by Puck on April 25, 2009 in Thoughts

LiLi, Thom and I flew in and out of Miami therefore on Monday we headed back to Miami to spend the night and fly out the next morning. We had taken rte 41 on the way there and it took us forever to get out of Miami so we decided we would head back on Rte 75 but after being on the road for about 30 minutes, I realized that Thom was not going to make it all the away across without losing his mind so we decided to take the cut down to Rte 41. Driving along this road, we saw a bunch of people on the left side of the road looking over a walking bridge. Of course, our over exhausted LiLi was napping but when we stopped the car just for one of us to go and check it out, she immediately woke up and we found a river with a whole bunch of alligators hanging out. According to the ranger, they were alligators around 5-6 years of age so they were not fully grown. This ranger told us about this gravel/dirt loop road off of 41 which “looped” back onto the road around everglade national park and how there were a lot of alligators. We decided to give it a try since our 3 year old has a fascination with alligators and other wildlife. Well, at the first stop where we had been told there would be alligators, Thom pulled over to the side of the road and I peeked out of my window to see 2 alligators sitting about 4 feet away on the bank. Needless to say, we did not get out of the car at that point although LiLi was very happy to look at them out the window. Well, we continued along this road stopping frequently to look at the wildlife either getting out of the car and walking around or looking out the window. We saw so many alligators that we became blase about them, we also saw 2 snakes(one in the water and one on the road), a barred owl, a spoonbill, many other birds, 2 turtles and many fish in the water because the level was low enough that you could see them.
LiLi seemed to enjoy this trip very much. She was sitting in her car seat talking about what she had seen and she announced “this is fun, I love this” and you know we did, too. We highly recommend this trip although everyone seemed quite amazed that the road was not wet although the rain level is extremely low right now so maybe the road is often really difficult to drive on.

Alligator on side of road(taken from inside the car