A Walkabout At the Park

Location: Avon Park, FL (High 82, Low 62)

One of the places in the area that I’ve been looking forward to seeing is Highlands Hammock State Park. We’ve been waiting for a nice warm day so we might have a chance of seeing some wildlife, especially alligators!

 

Yesterday finally seemed like a good day to go check it out. I packed a lunch and after a leisurely start to the morning, we drove the short distance over to the park. (We are about 15 minutes away.)

 

Once you drive into the park, there is a main road loop with a number of trails coming off the road. Most of the trails are short loops. There are a couple that are more straight paths and connect up with each other. We only did three of the trails yesterday.

There were many people biking along the mail road. Next to each trailhead there is a bike rack where you can park your bike and walk the trail. I think that is the best way to get to all the trails and we are going to go back another day and do that.

We saw a number of birds and enjoyed each trail. But our main agenda and hope was to finally see an alligator. We wanted to see an alligator last year also when we went on that swamp boat ride in Louisiana, but it was too cold. We were on our third trail and starting to think we would have to try again another day when we looked across the water to see….

Finally!! It was very cool.

By that time it was almost 1 and we were getting hungry so we went over to the picnic area, which we almost had to ourselves. At least at the beginning.

 

We were just finishing up our lunch and thinking about trying one more trail when two vanloads of teens arrived. They were doing the typical teen thing, having a good time and very loudly, and headed down the very trail we were planning to take. So we gave up on the idea of seeing any more wildlife and decided to leave the rest for another day. Next time we’ll bring our bikes.