jan godown annino

Hullo park & preserve visitors.
I was just enjoying Chokoloskee & Everglades City in far, far South Florida. (I Know, I know - summer!)
So I would like to mention that I also send folks to other Florida national park sites in my book Scenic Driving Florida.

One such gem is in the far northeast roof of the state, straddling both sides of the long & historic St. Johns River. This is the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve.

I return to the Everglades/ Big Cypress, to tell, for children ages 8 & up, the picture book biography story of Seminole Leader Betty Mae Jumper, titled She Sang Promise, with an afterword directly written to children by Moses Jumper, Jr. It is out March 2010 from National Geographic.

Like many travelers, my husband & I are always drawn to the human stories along the routes in nature that we visit.

In Florida, with the Timucuans & Calusas, the Ais that fished at what we know as Canaveral National Seashore, & the Apalachee near the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in the Big Bend, that can be thinking about people who traveled in the region 10,000 years ago.

Like us, they enjoyed the shellfish, and piled the discarded oyster, clam & scallop shells up into heaps that became 1940s road fill. Some of the trash piles remain, such as Turtle Mound and also Seminole Rest in the Canaveral National Seashore on the state's east coast. Other mounds the early people created were burial sites & it is unfortunate that many of those were destroyed.