Everglades: Getting there

Everglades National Park
Distance: 932 miles
Drive Time: 15 hours

Last year, we went to the extreme northern part of the continental United States. This time around, it was time to visit the extreme southern part. Where last year was incredibly cold for May, now we got to feel burning heat in March. The Everglades are on the very tip of Florida, and it was time to drive as far south as possible and still be in the United States. Amazingly, this trip is supposed to be shorter than our last one to Minnesota. But it sure felt longer. Maybe the problem was we decided to go to Florida in March. We checked the spring break schedules and the week we chose was the slowest, but it is still Florida in March.

The official website is always a useful place to start planning your trip, but what struck me was the lack of hiking trails. Oh, there were many trails, but most were less than a mile long. I didn't understand this at the time, but once there it became much more clear. Regardless, we found plenty to keep us busy for our week long vacation.

The vacation would start out with us driving to DeLand FL, a trip that Google says will take 10 hours, but don't forget time zones that add an hour. The actual drive took significantly longer as our trip took us through small country roads and left us without GPS for long stretches at a time. But while we thought we might be lost, we eventually found our way to I-75 shortly before the Florida border. Once on the Interstate we encountered the bane of our traveling existence: Spring Break Traffic. We rarely got to drive the speed limit while on the interstate, as we fought with thousands of other people looking for warm weather. Given its status as America's tourist destination, I shouldn't have been surprised at the first thing we saw in Florida: Visitor Centers. But these are not like the ones in every other state. These are privately run, where they entice you with $40 tickets to Disney, Universal, and anywhere else you might want to go. Once you are hooked with the free orange juice and baby alligators to pet, you are trapped with a pushy salesman and a 2 hour sales pitch for the good old timeshare.

We found a hotel in DeLand. Stacy had been kind enough to pack our suitcases so that we only needed to bring in 2 or 3 to the hotel. Making for a much easier day on Sunday. We went to church at Bible Baptist Church in DeLand. James Knox is a regular speaker at our church, so we knew that we would get good preaching there. Also, we got a chance to catch up with David & Kimberly Jacquet. They graciously invited us to their house for dinner after service. DeLand is a small town of 40,000 people in a county of 1/2 million. However, most of them are clustered by the beach area, where DeLand is on the western end of the county. So there is still some room left, the Jacquet's found one of those few areas. It was neat to see how we were both raising chickens & working a garden. I was also amazed that even though they were far inland, their ground was nothing but sand, requiring them to haul dirt for their garden.

After visiting for a while, we left for Homestead, FL. Our plan was to go to church at either Riverview Baptist Church in Fort Pierce or Emmanuel Baptist Church in West Palm Beach depending on where we were at 6:00pm. With the stop, this would put us getting to Homestead at around 10:00pm. Unfortunately, the traffic was so bad, we missed getting to either church and still arrived at Homestead well after 10:00pm. It was a long drive, but we were ready to start our vacation at the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States.