More Florida

We had a long driving day and found a free place to stay for the night through the Harvest Hosts app, which led us to a sweet little island west of Ft. Myers.

The host was a palm (and other tropical tree) farm/nursery, located on Pine Island in a village called Bokeelia. It was breezy, but it was starting to feel like we’d left the chill behind us finally and were seeing more signs that we were getting closer to tropical!

It was peaceful, the host was really welcoming and gave us several ideas of where to go for a bike ride, drinks & sunset watching, breakfast the next day, etc. We parked in a pretty spot, took the bikes down and rode to a place called the Lazy Flamingo for a beer.

The next morning, we packed up, had good coffee and breakfast at the recommended hole in the wall, then set off south towards Naples, where we shopped for groceries before heading into Big Cypress National Preserve.

One thing that we’ve really been noticing all throughout Florida has been the plethora of churches. They’ve ranged from tiny one room shacks off the side of the road, to the full on mega churches with lit up billboards. The most remarkable and irritating thing I saw though, was when we were leaving Naples on a pretty substantial road, and a sheriff had stopped public road traffic and was waving a hundred cars coming out of one of the mega churches.

As we left the populated areas behind us, we looked forward to the church of Mother Nature and getting to our destination of Big Cypress and the Everglades.