September 13th, 2021

I thought I'd start out this week by writing about last week's Photo Safari.   I'm calling it the High Water Hike because, well, the water was pretty darned high.  Which makes it a good/bad thing.  Bad because the trails were mostly underwater.  We manage to get out of the car a few times but mostly we were faced with trails that looked like this:

The good part was that everything in the park was so flooded that we could just open the car windows to take pictures of nearly everything.  Also being in the car means that it was an air conditioned hike.  And honestly I returned home cleaner than I ever have before  from a hike.

Photographable things were so close that the photo at the top of the page is a reflection of a dragonfly in the water.  Dragonflies are pretty small so to get a picture of it's reflection from the car?  Crazy! There were times when the water was just about lapping at the tires.  The water was so so high that alligators were swimming right alongside the car.  You think I'm joking?

We went to Myakka State Park.   It is such a beautiful place and as a bonus, there is a road running right through it.  Usually we just park the car and hike all over the place. This time, mostly, as I said, we just stayed in the car.  Lazy hiking. But we saw Awesome Stuff.

It is an exceptionally beautiful drive through the park with a gorgeous canopy nearly the entire way:

Because of the high water there were deer everywhere!  Poor little things were wading through the water at times and having to risk crossing the road to find slightly dryer ground.  So Joy drove slowly and carefully.

We saw birds as we almost always do. Maybe not the usual wide variety, but still birds iz birds. And we love taking photos of them :) You will notice a great many photographs of white birds of various sorts this time.

There were a stunning  number of dragonflies. I know they all look  like the exact same dragonfly but I promise you they are not.  There is also one wasp, one lady bug, one lizard and a few squirrel photos.

And of course the beautiful Mayakka River and Park itself.  On a high water day like this, it's hard to tell the difference between the river and the park. They kind of run together:

It was a different sort of hike. I suppose technically it was a non-hike.  I guess it was more of a drive.  BUT a drive with gorgeous scenery and beautiful things to take pictures of.  Maybe the next hike will be an actual hike?  Who knows?

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