Florida scenery3/7/2023 ![]() ![]() Windmills from former ranchlands, their blades long gone, towered above cattle pastures.Īlong tracks of sand, grass and sections difficult with holes, I drove toward the Kissimmee River. Midsummer breezes danced across fields of wildflowers. A great blue heron lazily lofted itself above spatterdock lilies.Īt Seven-Mile Slough, gators, spooked, submerged in palls of turbidity. Even without binoculars I sighted crested caracara, deer, gopher tortoises, rabbits, red-shouldered hawks and wading birds. Twenty-five miles northwest of Okeechobee off CR 724, I drove across the largest remaining expanse of Florida dry prairie, the 54,000 acres of the Kissimmee Prairie Preserve. Down-home restaurants along these forgotten shores today induce small talk over platters of catfish and crab. Still others supply weekend party sites.īefore trains and cars, when settlers explored south on riverboats, the backs of today's shore towns were their fronts. Springs empty for miles down pencil narrow paddling streams others run for just yards and harbor manatees in winter. Because its descent barely exceeds an inch a mile, sometimes the river flows backward, seasonally filling Lake George a hundred miles upstream with shrimp sought by netters from everywhere. Its 310 north-flowing miles reach from shallowest marsh west of Vero Beach to the Atlantic east of Jacksonville. Though the river has its issues, the way to its embrace is playfully. On other nearby islands, you can step from a kayak onto isles of whitest sand and walk to the ends of old bridges, now fishing pier, or horses for hire will carry you beside the sea. Low causeways cross creeks once poled across by islanders. In Little Talbot Island State Park, on the north end, driftwood pruned by wind and salt lay about like elk antlers left hopelessly entangled after battle. Johns on the car ferry named for Jean Ribault, leader of the French expedition. History abides, too, in ways of getting around. On Fort George Island, the restored Kingsley Plantation is the oldest still standing plantation home. Augustine, where Jacques Le Moyne's drawings leave us first impressions of Native Americans. They call the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve "Jacksonville's Central Park." Its 46,000 acres of creeks, rivers, marsh, wetlands and islands exceed New York's great park by more than five times.Īlmost a half-millennium of history abides here in re-constructed Fort Caroline, a settlement attempted two years before St. Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve The entire area is one of the most scenic places in Florida to visit. At the western end of Santa Rosa Island, Fort Pickens, one of three forts that once guarded Pensacola Bay, forms an outdoors museum. Coreopsis and goldenrod yellow the roadsides.Įast of Gulf Breeze, remnant live oaks in a section once used for shaping the hulls of early American sailing ships stand preserved, known as the Naval Live Oaks Reservation Area. Waves crash, their wake pecked by sandpipers. They were 30 feet off shore, then 20, whipping their tails, chopping away, rising up supremely!īeneath the sun the sea becomes a sequined image. One spring, I stared at the sea when a pod of dolphins suddenly barraged into a school of food fish. ![]() On such long beaches, we experience the joy of walking just to lose ourselves. Families enjoy some last swims before winter. Children mimic the monarchs' caprice, jumping with winged animation. The air flaunts orange and black tattoos against white sand and emerald waters. For a lot more maps, check out YSUpload's scenery section.In fall, the migration of monarch butterflies from Mexico pauses along the Gulf Islands National Seashore near Pensacola. This page gives a list of available maps that are included by default with YSFlight. There are ground attack maps, civilian airports, airshow locations, and much more. The amount of scenery in YSFlight is almost endless, with new maps being created every month. Some prominent ones are modifications of stock ones, like PMNV's or Griffon's Hawaii, or completely original ones, like York Valley, Saipan, Syria, Canary Islands, just to name a few. There have been thousands of additional community-made maps released to the public. As with many aspects of YSFlight, maps are highly modificable with a specific program called Scenery Editor. There is a wide out-of-the-box selection of maps, 16 in total, ranging from Hawaii, one of the most popular maps in the western YSF community, to more original ones like Slapstick. As in many games, scenery is an essential part of YSFlight, and it needs one to provide players with a place to fly over, drive on, targets to attack and runways to land on. ![]()
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