Ever since we visited Everglades NP several years ago and I found out there’s a campground 38 miles from the entrance, I’ve wanted to go. I finally got my wish! I was able to book a site with electric for 5 nights.
Let me start by saying that the drive to the campground was nothing like I thought! My only memory of the roads were of the smaller side roads…I completely forgot that the main park road is paved. Plus, once you leave the main entrance area and start on the 38 mile trip to Flamingo, the speed limit goes up to 55!
I have visions of driving 38 miles down a typical campground road….
One of the things I was worried about was the lack of water hook ups. We’ve camped with no sewage hookup and have a portable sewage tank in case we need to empty our black and/or gray tanks. However, using our potable water tank is something we’ve never done. In fact, the only time it had water in it was when Hurricane Irma was heading towards us and we filled it to weigh the camper down a bit and to have fresh water if we needed it. We didn’t, Irma was barely a category I when she got to us. The other concern was food…I was not interested in leaving the park to go grocery shopping (although we did….)! We (7 of us, 4 adults and 3 teenagers) were there for 5 nights and we didn’t run out of milk (that’s huge in our house!). We also didn’t run out of water. We filled our tank when we got to the campground and it lasted us the whole week (we actually had water leftover). We had bottled water for drinking and cooking so the potable water was mostly for washing dishes/hands and flushing the toilet. There were cold showers at the campground so we used those.
The campground itself was great! The sites were huge and it was peaceful being so far from civilization! We stayed in the T-Loop, which has electric in some sites. We have Verizon Wireless and we lost service about 9 miles from the campground. That was fine – we knew beforehand that cell service was iffy and we warned our teenagers!
One day, we decided to hike to the ghost town of Flamingo. According to what we’d read, it was about 4 miles from the campground and there was a trail…one that isn’t currently maintained (which we didn’t know ahead of time).
The hike there really wasn’t too bad. The path started out fairly wide.
Then it narrowed down and stayed this way for most of the hike.
We hiked out until we found the survey marker. Some place out there is a flag pole and some old walls, but we were ready to head back!
On the way back, the sun was out and had dried all the dew. These plants (picklewort?) seemed soft on the way, but on the way back the constant brushing against our legs got to be painful!
We also discovered that the campground used to be much bigger! Currently there are two loops – A and T plus a tent camping area near the bay. There was also a B and C loop at one time prior to a hurricane (I’m not sure which one). They are pretty overgrown now although you can still see the roads and the bath houses are still there.
There was so much to do there! We checked out the visitor’s center, hiked almost all the trails, and kind of wished we had brought our kayaks (I’m iffy about kayaking with gators, and there’s crocs in the Everglades!).
We went on the Nike missile base tour one afternoon. It’s history brought to life!
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