At 6:50 on Sunday morning, with the coffee done and the kids zipped into every layer they owned, I turned the key in the Pilot and got nothing. No crank, no dash lights, just a faint click and then the kind of quiet that makes your stomach drop. We were at Long Pine Key, in the Everglades pinelands, about 45 miles from home and a bar and a half of cell service from anyone.
The battery was dead because of me. On Saturday night after dinner, I put the food bin back in the Pilot (raccoons stole our bread here on our very first trip, and we learned) and flipped on the cargo light to find the bag of rolls. I closed the tailgate. I did not switch off the light. It glowed back there for nine hours while we slept.
Saturday: the front and the first real night in the new tent
This was our MLK weekend trip, two nights, Saturday to Monday, and our third time at Long Pine Key. A cold front had come through Friday, and by Saturday morning the sky was that hard, clean blue you only get in South Florida after a front. We stopped at Robert Is Here in Homestead for milkshakes, because that's the rule, filled up in Florida City and pulled into the campground just after noon.
Shade, bugs, bathroom: that's my check at any site. Long Pine Key is slash pine and saw palmetto, so the shade is thin, but in January that's fine. Bugs were close to zero, which is the whole reason to come in winter. The bathroom was a short walk, close enough for Nico to make it in time and far enough that we didn't hear the door all night.
The new dome tent went up in 14 minutes, which after our backyard practice felt like a small win. Maya set up her sleeping area like a hotel room, Nico gathered a pile of pine twigs in his role as kindling manager, and Dana walked the loop and came back with the campground news: two travel trailers of retirees from up north and a tent full of college students.
We walked the Pineland Trail in the afternoon, cooked hot dogs and canned chili over the fire, and watched the temperature on my phone drop like a stone. It hit 47 degrees overnight. I'll write a separate post about how we kept two Miami kids warm, because it took real planning. The short version: nobody cried, and Dana wore two hats.
Sunday: the click
The plan for Sunday was an early drive to the Anhinga Trail to catch the birds before the crowds. Instead I stood next to the Pilot holding my phone up toward the pines like that would help. The call to roadside assistance dropped twice before it connected, and when it did, the wait was "about two hours."
Dana, who is calmer than me in every situation involving machines, said, "Go ask the trailers."
Two sites down, a retired man named Walt from Ohio was already outside in a fleece jacket with his own coffee. He had jumper cables in a milk crate in the bed of his truck, labeled. He pulled the truck around, hooked us up, and the Pilot started on the second try, maybe ten minutes after I'd walked over. I cancelled the roadside call. Walt wouldn't take money. He did take a café con leche from the cafetera, in one of our white enamel mugs, and said it was the best coffee he'd had in Florida, which Dana has decided to believe.
Then I drove around for 30 minutes to put some charge back in, with two kids in the back who thought this was a bonus outing, and we made it to the Anhinga Trail by late morning anyway. The birds were still there. So was an alligator lying on the bank about ten feet below the boardwalk, which Nico narrated for everyone within earshot.
What it cost, from the trip log
- Campsite, 2 nights at $25: $50
- Gas: $28
- Groceries: $34
- Robert Is Here: $28
- Ice: $9
- Cat sitter (Isabela next door, 2 visits): $30
Total: $179 for two nights and four people. In January, with no mosquitoes to fight and no heat to escape, Long Pine Key is about the best deal we know.
Sunday night was warmer, around 55, and quiet. The frogs that sing here on warm nights were silent in the cold, so the only sounds were wind in the pines and Nico talking in his sleep about jumper cables. On Monday morning I checked the cargo light switch four times before we left. I've also been reading about small jump starters all week, and one of them is about to move into our glove box.
