By now I am several posts behind. I’m afraid that I’m enjoying myself a little too much! In the spirit of catching up a little, here’s where I was a month or so ago:
Ortona Lock and Dam campground is outside the little town of Labelle, FL. It’s a site built (and run) by the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps of Engineers maintains campgrounds all over the country, although they are less common in the western US. There are a lot (plethora, abundance, bunches, etc.) of canals in Florida. Most of these canals eventually reach the ocean. Thus, there are many boats traveling on these canals. Therefore lock systems are needed to assist the boats in getting around the dams on the canals, which is where the Corps of Engineers comes into the picture. They built the dam, they provide the way to get past the dam.
dam at Ortona
anhingas
canal
Every now and then the Corps puts a campground near one of the locks. Ortona is one of those places. (The state also has campgrounds near many of the boat launch sites on the canals, but they usually are pretty basic.) The Corps of Engineers campgrounds usually have electric hook-ups and a dump site and may also have water at each camp site. The state-run campgrounds might have a porta potty and some picnic tables and a trash can or five. They are also usually free, where the Corps campgrounds have a small fee (small if you have a national parks pass, anyway.)
I pulled into Ortona without a reservation and was lucky enough to get the last walk-up site available. While most sites can be reserved ahead of time, a small percentage of the sites are kept open for people who don’t want to plan that far ahead (like me!) Once you have a walk-up site you can stay for up to two weeks. So while there are walk-up sites available in theory, if everyone who has one wants to stay the full two weeks, they reality can be much different. But I got one, so life was good.
I site I got was on the canal side of the road, so the water was pretty much right outside my door. Sweet. There is also another water course that comes into the canal around the middle of the campground. There are a couple of families of river otters that live on that river. They were a delight to watch. I’m not sure who was more curious about whom. When the otters would see me walking Topper along the bank, they would rise up out of the water to watch, their sleek bodies moving to watch our progress. I wish I could have gotten a better picture of them. But it seemed like every time I saw them, the light was glinting off the water so brightly that it washed the details out. Oh well, at least I got to see them.
It was a lovely and peaceful place. Well maintained. And while I enjoy campgrounds like that, I also enjoy the more natural ones where you have to bring everything you need with you and the whole place isn’t covered with asphalt or concrete and manicured lawns and plantings.
green heron
I ended up spending five lovely days there before heading farther south. I spent most of my time wandering along the canal, watching boats going through the lock, looking for the otters and bird-watching. The last day I was there, I took my scooter for a spin through the countryside and wound up at a little Cuban barbecue place on some back road in the middle of pretty much nowhere. It smelled so good that I had to stop and have lunch. I was so glad that I did.
The food wasn’t fancy, but it sure was good. The ribs came in two styles American and Cuban. Neither had any kind of sauce on them. Instead they were rubbed with spices and slow-roasted. I found that I preferred the Cuban spice mixture to the “American” one. But it would have been nice to have a nice sweet/sticky/smokey sauce for the American style. Of course that would have made it hard to compare the spice mixtures. Whatever. It was a good meal and I didn’t need to cook dinner that night as I was still too full from lunch. I rode back out that winding little road and rolled back into camp one happy camper.
That evening turned quite cool, cold by Florida standards. While walking back to my site I found a little frog hunkered down on the gravel, too cold to move. He (she?) was a cute little thing, so I took its picture then carried it down to the canal. At that point the water was warmer than the air, so I set it in shallow water and left it to its own devices, allowing it to decide where it wanted to spend the night.
The next morning was clear and cool. Perfect for driving so off I went, heading for the Everglades.
slipstreamserendipity 