Early Detail

During our "Early Detail Duty" at Highlands Hammock State Park on Sunday we had an adventurous ride. We started off seeing a dead snake in the road - not my favorite thing to run into at 8am in the morning. I think it was a cotton mouth or something like that they said. Scooped him up and added him to the "bucket" -- shiver!! A little drive further we ran into an upside down turtle. Poor little guy looked like he had a rough night, so we flipped him over and hoped he would be ok. One of the best parts of the ride in the mornings is typically the "canal", it proved to be true again. First greeted by a deer off to the side that gave us many glamor shots. She sat there and looked at us as if she knew we were wanting a picture. We were happy for the moment. Looking further ahead it looked a log in the road and I had the crazy thought that if it were an alligator what would we do...an alligator it was. But as we neared he slithered right into the canal - this is one time we were thankful he did not hang around for a photo session. Typically on this ride we have this old bridge that the old buzzards hang around on but not this time they were further ahead and we stopped on the bridge and on one side was a turtle in the water swimming off a limb and on the other side a little island area with about 8 baby gators in a pile. Cool we had not seen them there before. Up further were our old buzzards hanging around on the road and fence. All so far in about 15 minutes of this trail. Riding the rest of the route we spotted several larger gators, "big daddy", and several groupings of smaller ones. Our regular grouping of little ones were on their normal log too. While enjoying all the notables we were blessed with pretty birds and colorful flowers along the way. The most adventurous ride so far.

Thank goodness for the enjoyable part of "early detail" because the duties also include many garbage pick ups and ending the shift with bathroom duty. Cleaning the bathrooms in general just aren't a bad deal - but geez some people are just amazing and have no concept of