FLORIDA CAVERNS

So, even though the trip started off shaky, we stuck to our plans and stayed the night in Marianna, FL, and the next morning we went to Florida Caverns State Park. FYI, even though it opens at 8:00am, the tours don't start until 9:00am (so sleep-in that extra hour and save yourself some frustration). They also happened to be one tour guide short that day, so the first tour didn't get started until after 9:30am. To pass the time, we went up to the Blue Hole swimming area (yeah right, like I'd ever get in that opaque gator pit) and walked around.

This snake (we think it's a Florida Pine Snake) was being attacked by a Mississippi Kite and a Red-shouldered Hawk (at the same time!), but we inadvertently scared them off.

On the other side of the pond, we saw this Cottonmouth curled up at the base of a Cypress. Jay walked within striking distance, then turned to point at a nearby caterpillar when I looked at him like he was crazy (he's Captain Obervant, so I figured he had seen the snake).

The caverns themselves were pretty cool (65 degrees, he he)... if you aren't someone who lived at Carlsbad Caverns National Park for 8 months! The tour was short (45 minutes, maybe a quarter mile long) and shallow (most of the caverns are at 30ft, though they go as deep as 50ft below the "wedding cake") with far too much lighting (they had algae growing everywhere)! The tour guide was OK... he knew his stuff, but he kept it really basic and left a LOT of silence hanging around. Anyway, here are a few photos from down under (and we'll do another blog later with some of our better pictures from Carlsbad, so you can see what a REAL impressive limestone cave is all about).

One cool, unique aspect to this cave was the number of shells and fossils we could see.

This bullfrog, who took up residence at the "South America pond" about 6 months ago, was pretty unique too. The rangers say he must be happy eating cave crickets...