January 2022 - John and Carol Visit - Part 1 (Enchanted Forest Hike)

In January 2022, my brother, John, and his wife, Carol, came down to Florida for a visit. The last few times down they have rented a condo in Cape Canaveral, which is about 40 minutes north of where we live. In previous years, I had been working, of course, so the time I had to spend with them was limited. Thus year, however, being retired, I had a pretty wide open schedule so I could spend a lot of time with them. Their condo is convenient for visiting the adjacent beach, watching rocket launches or walking to nearby Jetty Park.

Cape Canaveral beach behind John and Carol's condo

View from Jetty Park

Last battle of the Revolutionary War was fought off

Cape Canaveral

John had always been into hiking but, since he retired, he started doing more of it and even started writing a weekly hiking column for the Providence Journal--the newspaper for which he used to work. When he came to Florida this time, he asked me to look into some local hikes we could do together. I was excited about the idea, but 30+ years of working in an office as a software engineer (and my general laziness, as I’ve discussed) had left me in pretty bad physical shape. Some of the pictures below will bear out my lack of fitness when I retired.

In any case, hike we did—3 times, in fact. I had even made a somewhat futile effort to get in shape before they got here.

Enchanted Forest

Our first hike was in a 470-acre county preserve called the Enchanted Forest which contains a variety of wet and dry habitats. The property was the first purchase made by our county’s Environmentally Endangered Lands program and the acquisition literally prevented it from being bulldozed.

Turns out, this was a pretty good one to start on because a lot of the trails had boardwalks and were pretty easy to navigate. I think we walked between 2 and 3 miles at a leisurely pace and I felt surprisingly OK afterward.


Enchanted Forest	Trail through Enchanted Forest	Enchanted Forest

We didn’t see a whole lot of wildlife that day (apparently other people did, based on the white board outside the nature center), although there was a wild boar drinking from a stream (that I just missed getting a picture of) and a coral snake. At the time, I couldn’t quite remember the rhyme that lets you identify whether the snake is poisonous or not by its coloration. Afterwards, I found it goes something like: “red touches black, friend of Jack, black touches yellow can kill a fellow.” You can see from the picture that this little guy definitely has yellow stripes next to the black bands so he was poisonous. Luckily, we didn’t get bit.