Missile Site IN Everglades National Park?

We had never been to Florida Keys before. We decided to do a hotel-mini vacation for four days. My journal entries, from where this blog comes from, has a lot of words. HAHA So, I will break this down into a post-a day.

Day 1: The day was drizzling and overcast. We had rain while driving south but it wasn’t too bad. Going through Clewison we knew this area grew a lot of sugar cane. How? Sugar Realty, Cane Field Stadium and a lot of other businesses with the name “sugar” in it. 🙂 From there we saw so many fields with fruit and veggies planted. Corn, squash, berries, avocados, and other things we couldn’t identify. Plus a lot of fields of huge varieties of plants and flowers. Whole nurseries of them. We got to Everglades National Park and went to the visitor center. We watched the video and thankfully it was captioned. (I am deaf.) We left there and went farther into the park. This area of the park wasn’t the swampland we both thought of for the Everglades.

We went to Nike Missile Site – a missile site RIGHT IN Everglades National Park! It is the most fully resorted Nike missile site in the country. This site was set after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The nuclear-capable Nikes were medium range antiaircraft missiles and could shoot down planes traveling at two to three times the speed of sound. This place also used dogs to enhance security. There were two volunteers here who knew an incredible amount about this site. It was fun to watch them as their passion for this place really came through in their body language. Thankfully, a Nike missile never had to be fired. This place was top secret the entire time…in a National Park! Blows my mind. 🙂

Water In Everglades Is A River And Very Clear, Everglades NP, Homestead, FL 01/24

Royal Palm is a stop in Everglades NP. The volunteer lady at the visitor center said this has all the areas of the park. We read a sign that said in winter this area, southern Florida, is “desert-like” and we about choked with laughter!! What? Obviously the writer had never been to a desert! The humidity is so thick and intense, even in this “winter”. HA 

We decided to walk the short Anhinga Trail that goes around water.  I literally walked down the center of the asphalt path watching both sides for another creepy-crawly! On one side were thick trees and bushes with water at the bottom. On the other side was a small-ish lake/pond with seagrass, and lots of lily pads. Yep, soon enough, we saw people pointing and taking pictures at…an alligator. It wasn’t moving and we joked that it was fake, like the mountain sheep in Canada. (Remember, Heather?) HAHAHA But we are sure the National Park service wouldn’t do something like that.  We walked the circle and came back. I had Kevin take some funny pictures of me laughing but looking horrified and pointing at the alligator. Pretty funny.

Kevin got a text that our room at Hilton Garden Inn in Homestead was ready. We went there and checked in. The hotel seems newer and is very nice! This will be a nice home away from home for four days. 

Biscayne NP, Very Rainy day, Biscayne NP, Homestead, FL 01/24

Next we drove to Biscayne National Park. We knew this park is mostly underwater coral reef stuff but we wanted to get the National Park passport stamp and check it out. We watched a video – the volunteer had told Kevin it wasn’t captioned but thankfully it is! And we did learn something that really helped us the rest of the trip. We learned that while islands are made from volcano eruptions, sediment deposition and glacial retreats the keys are from ancient coral reef. When we were at Everglades NP, it was cloudy and a bit windy. When we got to Biscayne NP, it was raining hard. The rain was warm so that helped when we walked to the visitor center and back.

As we drove to the hotel, I saw an Olive Garden and thought that sounded good. It goes against our “eat local” so I didn’t say anything. Soon Kevin piped up that Olive Garden sounded so good to him. HA We went there for dinner and at 5:00pm the place was pretty empty. 

Back at the hotel we discovered the closed caption didn’t work on the TV. We took the remote down to the front desk and the nice lady traded it for another one. Kevin told me he didn’t think that would work. And he was right, it didn’t. The lady had said he can call her, we didn’t need to walk to the front desk. He called her and she said she would move us to another room but would take some time to make sure the captioned worked. So nice. Soon she called back and said there wasn’t any room available that had captions working. She would call maintenance and they would come to our room tomorrow. Glad for the follow through. 

Launch Panel, Nike Missile Site, Everglades NP, Homestead, FL 01/24

Next blog: Day 2…How Far South Can You Go? 😃