Swamp Walk

The swamp can be a daunting place for so many reasons. There's all kinds of poisonous snakes, spiders, frogs and things of that nature. This means you're in danger pretty much the whole time you're in there lol. There is also a really beautiful and remarkable aspect to it! It looks freaking beautiful, at least to me!

We recently took a nice family trip to the sunny and warm climes of Florida and were really soaking in the many sights and sounds of it. It was great to be in some hot temps before it gets too hot and unruly, to get some vitamin D and exposure to the actual outside for once :D. We had found a place near the hotel to do some fun family stuff, an amusement park, and this was definitely one of my favorite attractions there!

Walking around the park, which obviously had quite a few alligators, you got lots of great info and exposure to the history of swamps instead of just what we see in movies. Swamps are a crucial part of Florida and the worlds ecosystems. It does so many things, like filtering water for one! We take this stuff for granted for sure, with such a focus on "technology" above all else. Well nature here is technology enough to do quite a bit of cleaning of our water! Not enough to drink from it of course, but enough to remove a considerable amount of the shit in it!

When you're walking on this bridge in the middle of the swamp, I got this really great sense of calm and tranquility. The sound of people around diminished considerably, given the amount of trees between us, as did the noise of cars on the freeway that was relatively close, but far enough away to separate us. This was a beautiful place to be indeed!

Thankfully there also wasn't an insane amount of bugs like mosquitoes flying around lol I think they keep them at bay, hopefully through non-toxic methods like bats and other ways, so that it reduces health issues and also keeps it from being annoying, getting bit by those little shits sucks.

What I was not thrilled about was that I didn't get to see any of the wildlife they were trying to protect and warn me from! Lol. We did see some snapping turtles which was cool and all but I really wanted to see a snake or something! Lol. My wife wanted nothing to do with going on the swamp walk with us, with the threat of getting a snake dropping down on you. Alas, we had none of that.

In seriousness though, I didn't want a snake to drop onto me but I would have loved to see one basking on a downed limb or something! I was really searching through the trees to find one lol but I also had to keep up with my son who was going through it fairly quickly.

Always on the lookout for critters, that one! We were trying to find anything in the water, someone earlier had told us they saw a snapping turtle so the little man here is on the hunt!

We saw a pretty crazy amount of spiders and spider webs though, so that can certainly count as the dangerous ass things you'll get exposed to if you try to walk through Florida swamps lol.

What was crazy to me as well, is people used to leave the swamps like this and run their cattle through! There were cattle ranchers trudging through the swamps of Florida to fetch their cows. That's something that you definitely don't hear about if you're not from Florida. We typically think of cowboys as the dudes on horseback in the desert. Frankly, the cowboys in Florida were quite a bit more badass, having to deal with all that deadly shit! Yeah there are rattlesnakes in the midwest and shit, but in Florida you have to deal with watersnakes, cottonmouth, diamondback and all kinds of nasty spiders! I think they have them beat. Granted it's not a sexy look, and it does look cooler to have the old midwest town with saloon and bales of grass rolling on by. But the Florida cowboys were definitely more badass in dealing with the swamp!

Among all that swamp stuff, you see quite a bit of growth but not a lot of flowers! Loved seeing the flowers, it was a really nice break in the expanse of the swamp.