Last Week on the Prairie

We spent about 6 hours away from ‘home’ on Sunday. After church we toured the “Speckled Perch” festival grounds and vendors. Okeechobee has a 5 block grassed mall/park in the center of town. This is where they hold various outdoor activities. The “Speckled Perch” is actually a crappie - have no idea why they call them speckled perch. Apparently it was a very plentiful fishing the lake, before it began to dry. It’s up nearly 4 feet from where it was last year. Enjoyed a good lunch at a new BBQ place in town and did some grocery shopping. Stopped at the Goodwill store and picked up a ceramic bowl Judy needs for some sort of sour-dough bread starter she is working on. Monday will be the first day to pull from the starter and bake some bread.

Well this Monday in the park has been renamed “Stuck Monday.” First one of the rangers got his truck stuck in the south side of the park. Then the AmeriCore worker got his ATV and trailer stuck in a slough along the south fence line. Well, we joined the group too! On the way to the Audubon area (the east side of the park) we met up with Charlie on the road and he asked what we were doing. We told him we were putting in the new trail intersection markers and then going north to put in the final marker along the fence line. He said we “should have” no problems driving the road through Seven Mile Slough. He was wrong! We made it to within 150 yards of our goal when we hit it. The water was not the problem; it was the mud, swamp grass clumps and palmetto roots. We were finally ‘rescued’ after over an hour. Turns out that if we had been able to go another 25 feet we’d have made it. Oh yes, the bread was great.

These are the trail markers we have been installing.

Tuesday was spent checking out and cleaning up the 6X6 ranger. I now know more about a Polaris Ranger than I really need to know. The undercarriage was full of mud and grasses.

Amy came up in the afternoon and spent the night. With the last of our apples from home, we enjoyed an apple pie after cooking ‘brats’ over a fire. Wednesday we went to the big culverts and saw 13 ‘gators sunning. Amy said she had never seen that many gators in the wild before. We took a short hike and saw scat from what we think is a coyote, picked some oranges from the wild citrus trees in an old homestead hammock and spotted two deer.

Can you see Amy in her camouflage outfit?

The two deer we spotted were bucks lying in the high grass about 30 yards off the trail. One of the bucks is affectionately named “one horn” by the park staff, and you can see why. They just laid there and watched us move past them. Here they are.