I can’t remember why, but Dan and I went out one dark evening to get something. A lifetime that for one of them would soon be over. Their friendship dated back to the beginning of graduate school. In December 2016, Vlad’s best friend Dan came to visit. It looked much the same, though the picnic area seemed newer, and the giant trash can was gone. It was just after 8 AM and the park was empty. I turned, and… yes, the road was right there. Maybe the park was gone, eaten up by development, or demolished by the hurricane.
I’d tried several side roads and was on the verge of giving up. But I didn’t remember that I’d recorded the name, since we often didn’t do that to avoid publicizing semi-legal campsites.) (I could have just looked up my own blog post, which had the name. So on a whim, I drove down the main road, searching for the park. On the last day of our retreat I found myself with some extra time before my flight back. was that county park still there? Had it survived the hurricane that decimated parts of the Keys? My company had decided to hold our annual retreat at Key Largo.Īnd I wondered. And endless sun, wind, and waves.įast forward five years. Mangroves, mosquitoes, and sandy beaches. Only memories remained: sunrises and sunsets, jewel-eyed spiders and pitch-black darkness. As I wrote at the conclusion of the post:Īnd just like that, the trip was over. It was a fitting end to a wonderful adventure. We paddled for several hours in the deepening darkness, scanning the shoreline with our headlamps and occasionally asking passersby.įinally we reversed our route and went back along the shoreline we’d previously traversed. When we reached Key Largo, we managed to miss the park on the first try.
But Vlad remembered a small county park with a boat ramp… if we could find it. There was nothing available, we discovered. We’d neglected to take into consideration the fact that it was the busiest season of the year, between Christmas and New Years. Surely there’d be a motel room… or a campsite… or something. Instead, we planned to make straight for Key Largo and sort out lodging when we got there.
We had a camping permit for a site five miles offshore, but we decided that would be packing too much into the next morning: we had to break camp, paddle to Key Largo, and disassemble Vlad’s boat, all before noon, when our friend was planning to pick us up. In our third shakedown paddle for the 2014 Florida Everglades Challenge, we were headed across Florida Bay to Key Largo.
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