Sunday October 15th 2023

The weather is in transition. As the day went by the humidity went down and the wind increased. The temperature remained in the mid eighties. The high temperature tomorrow and Tuesday is forecast to be in the high seventies and the overnight low may be in the fifties. Fall is coming back for a few days.

I took a drive east today. This is the first time I’ve actually explored that area in tourist mode. I have only driven through the area on my way to and from this campground. The area starts out with the ranch land that surrounds the campground and transitions into a more crop oriented area. The big crop appears to be sugar cane. The crop lines both sides of the road in some areas. The community of Clewiston on the south shore of Lake Okeechobee has a number of things named for or related to sugar cane.

Lake Okeechobee is the big natural attraction in the area. It is a lake that has been substantially formed by dikes that traps the runoff of water from the Florida Peninsular on the east side of the central ridge that flows toward and into the Everglades mostly via the Kissimmee River. The dikes help the lake work as a flood control for the agricultural areas to the south and east. Hurricanes used to cause massive flooding and loss of life. To get to the lake you need to climb the dike from level ground. The water is actually above the level of the surrounding land.

I stopped at John Stretch Memorial Park, a Palm Beach county park. There was a cricket match on a purpose built pitch. I’ve seen similar cricket matches before, but I surely don’t understand the game. It looks like some bizarre combination of baseball, Crockett and badminton all rolled into one game to these uneducated eyes. I only watched a few minutes before climbing the nearby dike to get a look at Lake Okeechobee. The lake didn’t really impress, but the Lake Okeechobee Scenic trail (LOST) looked like a nice place to ride a bike along the race shore during a cooler time of year.

When I got back to my RV home the days departures had completed. I was surprised to see that most of the tent campers were not among the departures. Most of the departures were by RVs that had arrived during the week. It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.