Thursday April 6th 2023

It was another hot day setting records for high temperatures in some nearby areas. Overall, not the best day for traveling to a new location. I got very damp from sweat preparing for travel this morning and again setting up this afternoon. The air conditioning in the cab of my motorhome kept it comfortable on the road.

I departed Colt Creek State Park at 12:30 after getting the toad vehicle connected and emptying the holding tanks at the dump station. Traffic going south to Interstate 4 wasn’t bad. I even managed to make it through a few of the traffic lights without stopping. Once on I-4 I found heavy traffic, but it only slowed into the forties a few times. Traffic never came to a stop. Everything changed once I reached Interstate 75 and turned south. Traffic slowed to a crawl at every exit. At a few it even came to a complete stop. Drivers just don’t plan ahead. They decide it is time to exit at the last minute and cut from the far left lane to the exiting lane very quickly. Everyone has to hit the brakes to accommodate the reckless driver.

As I got closer to my destination in the Bradenton Sarasota area traffic got worse. The overall speed came down and the number of stops increased. My last 2.5 miles on I-75 took a half an hour of stop and go driving to complete. The eight miles traveling west from the interstate to Myakka River State Park was a little more relaxing, but the state has completed a couple of construction projects in the last year. They have added two traffic circles to control traffic without adding traffic lights. Traffic circles are not my favorites. The “A” post at the side of my windshield is right in the line of sight for seeing ahead as you go around the darn circles. The result is I’m half blind to what is in front of me.

I arrived at Myakka River State Park after 104 miles and two hours and forty five minutes. This is my first visit since last April. Hurricane Ian has changed a lot of things since then. The first thing you notice is more visibility thru the trees. Either big trees have been removed or something else happened to remove the underlying brush. I noticed this characteristic on my way to the campground and in the campground.

After I got setup and had some lunch I set out to explore some of the park. My primary goal was to look for obvious hurricane damage, but I also wanted to check for alligators and other animals at the bridge over the river. As I walked along the road I saw plenty of big trees that had been uprooted. Some took other trees with them as they came down. The trees that impacted the road have been cut up and removed producing open space. The trees back in the woods away from the road are still there.

At the bridge over the Myakka River most of the alligators were in the water with only there eyes and snout visible. I saw one gator on the bank with its mouth open maybe to cool off. There were a few birds, but most were far enough away to make them hard to identify. However, I did see a new animal that I knew was around, but hadn’t seen before. A few hundred yards south of the bridge in the grassy area exposed by the low water level there were three big feral hogs along with a couple of young ones. I’m glad they were a long way away. I really don’t want to deal with a protective mother. To get a better picture I went down the trail along the river about half way to the hogs. I still took the picture at maximum zoom on my camera.