A Week of Moving Around

We did get to take a nice paddle with our canoe up the Caloosahatchee River and then up the little Hickey Creek. It is much bigger than Telegraph Creek and gets more wilderness like after the Park 2 miles up river. We didn’t see much wildlife, it was a nice 7-1/2 mi. paddle. This turned to be the only time we have paddled since January 6th..

We did a little more biking through the neighborhood streets and left early on Monday 1/11 to do a big grocery shopping trip in Ft Myers before heading North to Pioneer County Park  in Zolfo Springs on the Peace River.    

We paddled here two years ago but the cool windy weather stopped us from paddling this year. We decided to stay in the very pretty camp sites along the river for two nights. They are spread out but have no electric power. But for two nights it was fine. We took a short bike ride through the little town. This campground is not very well kept. It’s too bad since it is a nice setting except for some reason hundreds of vultures decide to roost here.

We left early Wednesday morning to head to Myakka State Park. We had reservations here of two nights and hoped to paddle to Deep Hole early in the morning to see all the huge gators. But we found out that no canoeing was allowed since they were flying around in helicopters with rifles shooting the wild invasive Boars that are tearing up everything in the park.

So we had two more days of biking up and down the roads in the park. The roads have light traffic and lots of campers bike here. He biked another 21 mi over the two days.

Our next destination where we have reservations for 8 days is Ortona Lock on the Caloosahatchee River, however we had one day to find a place to spend the night on Friday. We selected the big Walmart in Arcadia and by the way it was my birthday. Somehow I seem to end up in a Walmart parking lot on many birthdays.

You can see our 5 campsites, shown in the order we stayed there on this map of SW Florida. All or our drives were short. In our next blog I will describe Ortona Corps of Engineer campground.