Vintage Florida: Lake Kissimmee
By Steve Raymond/For The Tampa Tribune

Area camping

LAKE WALES - We're now 65 miles from Lake Placid, in the lake country of Central Florida and will spend 10 days or so at Lake Kissimmee State Park.

This park is vintage Florida, roughed up a little by hordes of campers, but it still retains the primitive beauty our early settlers found so appealing.

On two different occasions we heard wild turkeys talking; we saw a flock of half a dozen once and a gobbler in the camp area.

While sitting under our canopy we watched a doe and fawn nibbling shower-tipped grass 20 yards away.

I saw three pileated woodpeckers that are on the endangered species list playing on a oak near a sliver of a creek. These are huge birds, similar to a crow in size with a 19-inch wingspan, a thin neck and a brilliant red cockade on top of a head equipped with a major hole maker. You don't compare a pileated woodpecker with the little critters that hang upside down on an oak limb or utility pole and bang away like baby jackhammers at anything from wood to tin to asphalt.

One of the majestic pileated woodpeckers left the tree and flew down to the edge of the creek to bathe. One watched at the top of the creek bank for predators while the third stayed on the tree.

Coincidence perhaps, but it looked planned and it is easy for us to attribute to animals our own attitudes and reactions.

Armadillos wandered through our campsite at will, but they never crept up on us like the skunks did at Tappan Lake in southeastern Ohio several years ago, so it wasn't necessary for us to be frozen granite when they were around.

You hear them coming. They step on the downed, brittle saw palmetto fronds and suggest something monstrous is approaching.

Most of the armadillos we saw were small, little tanks with fuzz sneaking out from under their protective covering, anteater noses and warthog ears and the tail of some prehistoric monster. And don't believe they can't hear; they give this impression because they are so intent on the continuous hunt for food. But when they realize they are close to humans, they jump, then scurry away.

Another time we saw a fox squirrel on the edge of the road.

And at the park's registration office we saw quails with coveys of tiny babies on several occasions being fed by the park attendants to keep scrub jays from picking them off.

A pair of sandhill cranes showed up at the park entrance gate almost every morning, too, for a handout.

The park's literature clearly says don't feed the wildlife so one gets the impression that ``do as I say, not as I do'' is the order of the day.

We were about as successful at fishing from the banks and boat basin docks at Lake Kissimmee State Park as we've been elsewhere; we drowned two cans of worms and caught so few the humane thing to do was return them to the water. We opted to feed them to the homesteading great blue heron a few feet away.

Others caught fish, through by accident or design wasn't all that clear. One man caught what looked to be a 10-pound bass with a cane pole from one of the floating docks and a husband-wife team caught enough catfish and panfish for a couple of meals.

There is one major drawback to staying at Lake Kissimmee State Park; you're inundated by airboat noise. The continuous thunder is even more pronounced and prolonged than at Lake Okeechobee.

They ran all day long and half the night on Lake Okeechobee when we camped at Okee-Tantie; they, strut and fill the air with their deep-throated throbbing on Lake Kissimmee and Lake Rosalie all night long too.

There was never a moment on weekends when you couldn't hear an airboat's throaty growl.

Lord help those living around Camp Rosalie, Camp Mack and Camp Lester. They need storm windows and air conditioning to muffle the continuous roar. Camp Mack has facilities for a number of camping rigs from self-contained RVs to pop-ups like ours, while Camp Lester can accommodate only self-contained rigs.

AREA CAMPING

Polk County has established three thoroughly adequate county parks aimed at campers:


Four other fish camps or resorts in the Lake Wales area also are outstanding: