Wanderung 1

Key West or Bust

Holts Take Time in Toyota Truck to Tramp Together in Tepid Temperatures!

January-February 2003

Thursday, January 30, 2003
Since Monika still wasn’t feeling 100%, we decided to do the nearby Venice walk and drove over to the start/finish at an Eckherd drug store to sign in. The Venice Volksmarch proceeds over a rather narrow bridge, with a rusty grate section for the center of the drawbridge, to the town proper. The grate was so rusty that sections had given way and been patched with new grating which looked slightly stronger than chicken wire. I avoided stepping on those sections because it was along way down to the surface of the Intracoastal Waterway!

In Venice we zigzagged to the south and west thru some nice neighborhoods to reach the beach at the shore of the gulf. One historic building that intrigued us was a large hotel-like building build by the Locomotive Engineers Union in the late 1920s. Apparently the built other buildings in Venice and were trying to systematically develop it for their membership. I wonder what happened to that experiment—currently the building is an assisted-care facility and still looks very nice.

The directions give you the choice of walking on the beach or on an esplanade that is 1 block to the east of the beach. We chose the beach and would recommend it to others. The beach was fun because besides looking for the normal set of shells, on this particular beach you can look for fossilized shark’s teeth. We tried to look for these along the surf line, but the tide was coming in so we kept having to dance out of the way of the waves to keep our feet dry. I imagine we looked like a pair of funny tourists doing this curious dance, and eventually of course we both got our feet wet.

We turned around at the jetty beside the inlet for Venice, and on the way back along the beach Monika decided to jettison her socks and shoes and get into the surf to look for those shark’s teeth in earnest. I carried her shoes and socks while she plunged into the surf and grabbed handfuls of shells to sort thru. It was an act of desperation, but it worked! She came up with a very nice specimen of a shark’s tooth.

We talked with some of the other shark took seekers on the beach, and they could even tell you what species of shark the tooth had come from! Some of them were so serious that they had special wire-grid scoops on long handles for grabbing mounds of shells to sort thru. If you want to search for shark’s teeth on this walk, bring sandals to walk in the surf and a kitchen strainer to scoop up handfuls of shells. When you sort thru the shells, look for something that is jet black, glossy with an enamel-like sheen, and triangular in shape. If you get a good one, you will see the striations from the roots of the teeth to the tip and given that it is millions of years old, that’s pretty impressive.

We re-entered the town where Venice Avenue meets the beach and walked back along Venice Avenue. That was a particularly pleasant walk. For much of the way there is a path that meanders down the center of the parkway in the middle of the street. There were memorials, old Banyan trees, and some other tree that had a multitude of flowers with a strong, rose-like scent. We found it charming. The later section of the parkway had shops on the south side of the street, and we found a nice restaurant named Sandy’s where we could eat lunch outside. I had broiled grouper and Monika had a turkey Reuben, and they were both excellent. However, eating outside in balmy weather with palm trees overhead and flowers blooming in the median of the street might have helped the aesthetic nature of the experience. Further along were other restaurants and a couple of ice cream shops, so there’s no excuse to starve on this walk! The non-food shops were boutiques of different kinds that were in generally good taste and had interesting wares.

The ambience of the entire city was pleasant, not hoity-toity like Palm Beach or tacky like Ocean City. We thought the city’s atmosphere struck a happy medium and would suit us very well. One final grace note was a concert in the park that started as we walked by. The group was a brass ensemble playing blues and jazz, and they were only mediocre but they were free! We finished up the walk returning over the old bridge (avoiding the patches in the grate) to our car. We both agreed that this walk was the most pleasant of the southwest Florida walks, partly because it allowed us to walk on the beach the most. In contrast, the Sanibel walk was the most disappointing because altho the Sanibel beaches are reputed to have many shells, we had no section of the walk directly on the beach!

Click on the film reel to view a 15 second video.
If you can't view the video go to http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/ to download the free QuickTime viewer.

For the afternoon, we just relaxed, wrote, showered, planned our final weeks of staying in the Florida parks, and made phone reservations (this can also be done on the Web, but the interface is poorly designed and confusing). We called from our campsite--amazing the ways a cell phone can be used! This is so much less stress than trying to find a pay phone and have enough change to use it, or just winging it and driving to the campground hoping to get a site for the night. On the down side there is the initial hassle factor of learning to use the system, and you have to realize that many of the more popular campgrounds in Florida are booked well in advance. Campgrounds in the Florida Keys are booked 11 months in advance, which is the maximum, while parks in the middle like Oscar Scherer are booked 8 months in advance for February, their busiest month, according to the ranger.

In our travels during January and February we found that for all parks except the Keys, reserving sites in the middle of the week is generally possible with just a couple weeks advance notice. The weekends are a problem apparently because many Floridians make use of their parks on the weekends, and you really can’t blame them. So the trick is to either plan it all out well in advance, or if you wing it you should resign yourself to parking in primitive campsites, overflow areas, private campgrounds, or a motel on Friday and Saturday nights.

Copyright 2002 by Robert W. Holt
Prolog
January 2003
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031
February 2003
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728

Return to the Wanderungs Homepage.
Sign the Guestbook or Read the Guestbook.
Comments about this site? Email the Webmaster.
Contact Bob and Monika at bob_monika@hotmail.com.