Adventures in unemployed-land

Due to lots of free time on our hands, we've taken to dreaming up local cheap adventures. Today we decided to see Lake Okeechobee. Just for you fun fact junkies, uki = big, chubi = water, in Seminole Indian speak, so you get ukichubi, or big water. Or the Americanized version (which is usually the phonetic version for us simple Americans) Okeechobee. It's the second largest freshwater lake in the lower 48, next to Lake Michigan. Certainly warrants a visit, don't you think? We drove to the closest point, about an hour away, in Clewiston, Florida. Lovely Clewiston. Don't-blink-you'll-miss-it-Clewiston.

After the drive across 80 we stopped at the CVS so I could load up on allergy meds as breathing was a challenge today. In the parking lot we came across this. No idea what the story is, but I like to think sliced bread is hard to come by in these parts and he's an importer, or better yet, it's the bread black market. And yes, they were exchanging cash and looking at us a bit nervously.


We drove a few more minutes, past the ubiquitous Walmart, and followed a sign pointing to Lake Okeechobee Scenic Path or something similar. Now I had read ahead of time that the Army Corps of Engineers decided to ruin all prospect of people capitalizing upon a decent view of the large lake and they built a 30-foot tall berm around the entire thing. Mmmm hmmm, them are good tax dollars at work. Anyway. It probably serves some purpose I can't think of and is terribly helpful. So I was warned, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. I expected to see a break in the berm, a place to enjoy a vista or something wonderful. This is what we saw.


There's your lake for ya.

Determined to see water, we followed every possible sign that mentioned the lake. We first followed some official-looking brown signs that pointed to the Army Corps headquarters for the area. We really liked the vintage-looking font on the front of the building.

There was an arrow pointing to the front yard of a house with a sign that said "Lake Okeechobee Parking", but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to do for us. We weren't about to park in someone's front lawn and walk a half-mile to this:


(Did I mention it was like 90 degrees and humid today? Definitely felt like an oven, and I wasn't leaving air conditioning unless I was guaranteed my vista.)

We decided to drive cooly past the Army building, through the "Official Vehicles Only" gate to get closer to this ramp. Because what if what was over that hump was amazing? I couldn't pass that up. We parked off to the side and walked up the road. This is what we saw when we got to the top:


Psst-- message to the Army: it's not technically a lake unless it's ALL water. This would be classified as a marsh. Just so you know.

Ok, I will admit that if we strained our eyes we could see water far off in the distance. That was enough hope to encourage us to keep looking. We decided to follow one more sign as a last ditch effort for a vista. It was a sign pointing to Joe's Fish Camp. Fish = Water, right? We followed the road to nowhere and kept going. We could see the berm in the distance, rising above the sugarcane. Never seen sugarcane growing in the wild like this-- more fields of sugarcane than corn in Indiana, almost. Apparently about 10 percent of the country's sugar is produced in Clewiston. It looks like big grass.


So we got to Joe's Fish Camp and didn't stop at the stop sign where we were supposed to ring the bell on the double-wide. We drove up the little ramp to the top of the berm and saw this:

We could see that the water level is crazy low as these little docks are supposed to be floating. And we could see evidence of a lake in the far off distance.

And then we drove home. For our next adventure we're considering driving over to Titusville, FL, to see the Atlantis launch on Friday night.