Central Florida’s Lake Wales Ridge is made for exploration. It offers rolling hills, forests, streams, quaint small towns with lots of places for hiking, kayaking and camping.
Your drive down the Overseas Highway can be your own personal Florida Keys Road Trip for Animal Lovers. From endangered Key deer to colorful Key West chickens, here are eight places to delight in the animals and wildlife of the Florida Keys.
The Great Florida Birding and Wildlife Trail is a guide to 500+ places. It’s a great tool for discovery. I used it to find a colony of burrowing owls in an unlikely spot — a city park in the middle of overbuilt Broward County.
Five off-the-beaten-track things to do outdoors in the natural Florida in 2020, away from crowds. From rivers to bike trails to great places to camp. What’s on your bucket list?
2018 is an exceptional one for nesting birds in Everglades National Park. Two super colonies– more than 25,000 birds clustered together– are nesting in the park for the first time since the 1940s. We couldn’t resist a visit. And while you can’t reach the super colonies, there is much to see on a spring visit.
Three Rivers State Park ranks high on our list of Florida campgrounds. Perched on the shores of Lake Seminole at the Florida-Georgia line, there’s not a bad campsite in the park, and you are in the middle of nowhere. We loved it. So will you.
Encompassing more than 600 square miles in North Central Florida, Ocala National Forest is bursting with adventure. Hike the Florida Trail, camp in the deep woods, spend a lazy day at a cool, bubbling spring, ride the equestrian trails, paddle a spring run, a lake or a river.
Marineland was the original oceanarium and the first to discover you could train dolphins to perform. Now it offers popular interactive dolphin experiences.
A flock of flamingoes, a bird rarely spotted in Florida, has returned to western Palm Beach County for nine years, and scientists think the flamingo may be back in Florida for good. Flamingoes migrate to the site in spring, when the Audubon Society manages trips to see them.
The rare and endangered Florida panther makes its home in the wilds of the western Everglades and the Big Cypress Swamp, much of the area preserved in protected state and federal lands accessible to hikers.
EVERGLADES CITY — Whitewater paddling in the Everglades? Well, almost. The tides move in and out of the Ten Thousand Islands so quickly, the water rushes and ripples through the passes, so you need to catch the current going in the right direction if you want to make headway.