Everglades National Park and the Florida Keys

Everglades NP, at the southern tip of Florida, is a 100-mile-long sub-tropical wilderness of sawgrass prairie, jungle-like hammock and mangrove swamp.  The wilderness has two reasonably civilised campgrounds in the park.  The mosquitoes and little bitey creatures are pretty bad even though this is just after the end of the Florida winter.

Cypress forest

Nikki cycling on an Everglades trail

The Florida keys is a series of sandbanks over some 150 kms, with some expensive housing with water on both sides of the road.  Key West is the furthermost key and it is the southernmost part of the US.  We chose not go down that far - just too long a drive for little profit we thought.  

One of the two lovely little beaches at John Pennekamp State Park at Key Largo where we were very lucky to get in without a reservation.  The state parks became more expensive the further down the Florida coast. This one was $43 a day, the most expensive one so far.  But RV parks are much more expensive than state parks.  

This area also contains the third largest coral reef in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and one off the Honduras coastline.  We went out on a glass bottom boat to have a look.

The coral is not nearly as colourful as on the Great Barrier Reef.

Starfish - not often seen, we understand.

Coffee at the beachside along the keys.