Koreshan State Park

Well, we are all settled into our new "home" for the next two weeks. We are at Koreshan State Park, which is in the southern edge of Fort Myers (in Estero, to be exact). It's a really nice park, with a boat ramp right into the Estero River, a very nice little hiking trail along the river, and an interesting historic collection of buildings that used to house the Koreshan Unity Settlement. This was a religious group (shall we say "cult") formed in 1880 in upstate New York. The group believed that the entire universe existed within a giant hollow sphere - oh boy!!!! The 200 followers moved to this location in 1894, where they flourished until 1908 when the leader, Dr. Cyrus Teed, died. In 1961, the final FOUR members of the group deeded the property to the Sate of Florida for a park and memorial. We haven't toured the buildings yet, but the nature trail ends at the settlement. There are a couple of pretty little footbridges that cross over a shallow ravine and go into the community, where about a dozen buildings stand and can be explored via a guided ranger-led tour or simply on a self-guided tour. We'll do this within the next few days, for for now we've just walked the trails and gone on our first kayak ride of the trip. The trail goes through a really cool stand of bamboo.... "trees"? I know they aren't relaly trees, but these bamboo plants are HUGE - they have to be 50, 60 feet tall at least. And when they sway back and forth in the wind, they make this beautiful sound almost like wind chimes - very unique - we've really never seen anything quite like these things before.

The river itself is very pretty; if you launch and go to the right you are headed upriver and the river gets narrower and really beautiful with lots of overhanging trees and tropical growth. If you go to the left you are headed out toward the Estero Bay. For today, we went upriver on a slow, easy paddle. We were about 30 minutes into our ride when Dave spotted a fishing lure hanging from a branch (this makes him VERY happy!) so he HAD to go over and try to retrieve it. Unfortunately the lure was slightly higher than he could reach while sitting in the kayak, so he climebed OUT of the kayak and pushed it over to me to "hold on to". OK, I'm a decent kayaker, but holding onto his paddle, his kayak and trying to paddle backwards against the (admittedly light) current DIDN'T work too well! So there we were - Dave is standing in the water (with his new lure!) and I'm trying to get myself and HIS kayak back to him, when three young guys came out to the river's edge from the outfitter that we just happened to be doing all this in front of. One guy looked at Dave standing in the water, smiled and said "Man, you did SOMETHING wrong, didn't you?" I explained to the kid that this was NOT about making a kayaking mistake-this was ALL about retrieving a fishing lure. Well, the kids TOTALLY got it then - apparently anything is acceptable while in pursuit of a free lure - so they snagged me, pulled me over to them, gave Dave's kayak a big push to shoot it over to him - he crawled back in, everyone was happy, and we kept going. Oh boy...our first adventure :-)

So anyway, everyone is happy - I've been taking Brandi out for a nice walk every morning and night, and our spoiled-rotten-cat Dickens is loving hanging out in his kitty-castle. Yep, we brought it along and he thinks he is "the man" now - he can hang out over the edge of his little box-in-the-sky and watch us mere mortals going on about our business. Vixen never seems to know where she is or what's going on, so she's perfectly content anyplace, especially if she can lay on TOP of the computer, where it's nice and warm and making that wonderful humming sound.

The only fly in the ointment so far has been that of COURSE we've run into our first "technology" problem already. Last year we bought a nice new HD TV for the RV and upgraded our Direct TV service to HD, which meant we got a new dish-one with 3 of the "prongs" or whatever they are. Well, when we got down here and got set up and went to get the satellite dish out of the trunk of the car, we found that we had packed the wrong one - the non-HD dish - so I had to call Direct TV and schedule a service call for them to bring us another new dish and get it all installed. Good grief! The guy is coming tomorrow morning so HOPEFULLY we'll be all set after that - it seems like there are always, ALWAYS, technology problems for us on each trip.

But the weather is gorgeous - the 10 day outlook is sunny every day with temps in the 70's to low 80's. Gorgeous! So thus begins another trip-life is good.

So, anyway, using my newly-developed map-pasting skill, this is where we are now:


View Koreshan State Park in a larger map