On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
? frosty has submitted several posts from his road trip this spring, and I had been saving them for a week or two of On the Road After Dark. But submissions to On the Road have slowed considerably, so we will have three of frosty’s trips this week.
For several months we had so many submissions that there were enough for morning OTR and After Dark, and people still had to wait 3 or 4 weeks before their photo sets could go up!
Are we running out of photos because travel has been almost nonexistent because of Covid? Or maybe lack of interest? Or is this just a lull in the conversation because we couldn’t go anywhere? Let us know what you think in the comments.
frosty
I’ve mentioned in a few comments that we’re on the road again. This is our 7th Annual Snowbird Road Trip / 2nd Annual COVID/National Park Challenge. We’re going to try to see the parks we missed last year … and looking at the map I’ve added a few more. The itinerary will get us to at least 13 National Parks and 3 National Monuments, along with state parks in Florida, Mississipi, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and points east as yet undefined. We already hit the big parks years ago, and we’re working on what I’d call the second tier: less popular but still great. I’ll post more parks to OTR as we go.
When we made our plans last year we thought the pandemic would be less of an issue. Hah! Cases now are higher than when we bailed last year in April. Nevertheless, we’ve got a routine we think will keep us safe. As one commenter earlier said, paraphrasing George Carlin: “Anyone who takes more precautions than you is an idiot, anyone who takes less is a maniac.”
That being said, here are some pictures from our first park this year: Everglades. There are nine different ecosystems in the park, we took two days and saw seven of them. The two we missed were Coastal Marsh, which in inaccessible by land, and Coastal Prairie, which took a longer hike than we were prepared for.
A few inches of elevation here is all it takes to make the land just a little drier to change the whole ecosystem.
Our first day was a drive along the park road, stopping at trails and overlooks. For the second day, we drove to the Flamingo Visitor Center and took a boat tour into the park a few miles up the Wilderness Waterway to Whitewater Bay. Besides birds, we saw a manatee (notoriously difficult for me to photograph) and both a gator and an American Crocodile, which is unusual, because gators live in freshwater and crocs in saltwater.
Freshwater Slough. Our first stop was at Royal Palm, where we walked along the (boardwalk) Anhinga Trail over the Taylor Slough.
Pineland. A little farther down the road was a short walk in Pinelands near the Long Pine Key campground. This is one of the ecosystems that requires prescribed burning to mimic natural wildfires and keep the pines as the dominant species.
On the way we crossed the divide between the Taylor Slough and Shark Valley Slough. I think someone in the Park Service has a sense of humor.
The access road to this overlook crossed two ecosystems: Cypress, Freshwater Prairie, and ended on another Hardwood Hammock. All three are visible in this picture.
Cypress
Freshwater Prairie, also called the River of Grass.
Mangrove. This was one of the waterways on the boat tour. All of them were bordered by mangroves, as were the islands in Whitewater Bay.
American Crocodile. I’ve seen dozens of gators over the years, one much too close while canoeing on the Wild and Scenic Loxahatchee, but this was my first croc.
Rob
It’s wonderful to see these photos. I so want to go back to the Everglades.
JeanneT
That was a change of pace from my spring drives through west Michigan! Now I have to go look up the differences between alligators and crocodiles.
Mustang Bobby
I’m about fifteen miles to the east of the Everglades here in Palmetto Bay, and I go over there whenever I can. I cherish a memory of spending Christmas 2001 with my parents down in Flamingo and staying at the little motel (since lost to a couple of hurricanes) and bird-watching as well as gator-sighting and mosquito swatting. Thanks for the great pictures.
Benw
Nice. The Everglades rule. I’m surprised anywhere there gets 3 ft above sea level!
Laura Too
How fun! I haven’t been out much but I absolutely adore living vicariously through everyone OTR.
arrieve
Another place I’ve never been. And why I love On the Road.
I’ve been waiting for the semester to finish before putting together a submission. I don’t remember seeing much from the Galapagos, and I have a LOT of pictures. Probably at least a week’s worth.
There go two miscreants
I was going to make a snarky comment that “a few inches of elevation” is all that’s available, and then I saw the Rock Reef Pass photo! LOL! Will send that one to my brother who works for the Park Service.
cope
Thank you for representing the state in which I currently live. We haven’t been to the Everglades but we have been able to visit each of the ecosystems you showcase. Our house for instance sits in the Pineland type of environment.
As for picture submissions, I have a couple of projects on the table but they both involve scanning old slides and prints. I will get back to scanning the good stuff as soon as I move the scanner to our newer computer which I swapped with my wife for our older one that won’t run the right software. I’ve been distracted lately by some home projects, medical stuff (eyes, heart and I still need to go to the dentist) and, until yesterday, taxes. However, I hope to unleash my creative demons shortly. Promise. I may even come up with a sparse Garden Chat set of pictures.
TomatoQueen
My swamp! Thank you, frosty.
JanieM
Nice pics of a landscape that is very different from anything I’ve lived near. Also, nice touch with the elevation sign.
As to OTR — I have more China submissions almost ready, and like Cope I have a lot of old travel pictures if only I could get time to scan them (Grand Canyon, various other US backpacking destinations). Brussels, Amsterdam, and a London/York/Edinburgh trip are other possible subjects.
Plus, I tend to forget that we don’t always have travel pictures as such — viewed in that light, I would love to send a pictures in more regularly. I miss OTR After Dark and I’m not sure what I would do to wake up in the morning without OTR!
TheOtherHank
Definite interest here. For both looking at other peoples pictures and submitting my own. Time to dive into the photo library.
frosty
For any of you who have hundreds of pictures, negatives, and slides waiting to be scanned, there are services that will do it for you. I had good results from scancafe.
frosty
Thanks for the comments! Editing Everglades (and any National Park, really) down to eight pictures is not an easy task!
TomatoQueen
@frosty: Another thank you. I have just inherited 20 or so U-Haul standard small boxes of 35 mm slides, duplicate 4×6 prints, partially winnowed down but I haven’t the courage to face the last six, even to open them, so will look into scancafe.
J R in WV
I have a couple batches of spring photos on my data card in the camera, and am scanning really old photos and tintypes from a family collection, and so will have several OTR segments in the not-to-distant future. Have more been passively surfing, will try to be more active editing and organizing.
Pond photos of tadpoles also too, not up to previous spring seasons, but still, tadpoles in spring. The actual frogs are so quick and evasive, easier to photo the birbs than the frogs.
Frosty, great swamp photo set, love it, thanks!! If you have more photos, do another set, we will all appreciate it.
way2blue
Frosty. Thanks for introducing me to national parks in a part of the country I’ve never traveled. My father loved national parks, so we visited a lot of the western ones when I was a kid, in between guest ranches…
WaterGirl. I love OTR. Perhaps submissions have slowed because Juicers aren’t so cooped up. Me, I recently discovered—when I merged photo libraries—that many of the photos are just the 27KB thumbnails. Ack. And now I need to track down the originals…