12/20/06 (Wednesday): Ho Ho Ho! Wiley and I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year. We've been enjoying our great adventure so much that we've been ignoring our blog. I hope you'll all forgive once you've read this (probably very lengthy) post.

The way you know Christmas is coming in this part of the world is that they start picking the citrus. It's been very interesting to see the trees all loaded down with ripening oranges. If you look very closely in this orange grove (click on the picture to enlarge it), you'll see some turkeys running fast to escape my truck! We see a lot of wildlife in this area. Do you suppose these oranges are the "pot of gold" at the end of this rainbow?!














Shortly after the grapefruit and oranges started getting ripe, we began seeing trucks parked beside the groves and ladders leaning against the trees. Most of the citrus is picked by migrants from Mexico. It looks like a pleasant job--the weather is nice right now and there are very few bugs--but I'm sure the bags hung from their shoulders get heavy and the days are long for very little pay. I chatted for a bit with this worker (with my very basic Spanish). He seemed happy to take a break and was quite friendly with me.

After the pickers empty their bags into the tubs (like the one in the picture), the tubs are emptied into large crates. Eventually, a small vehicle called a "goat" empties the tubs into crates (or sometimes directly into a truck). The trucks are on all the roads lately, and the oranges and grapefruit that fall out of them lie rotting on the sides of most of the local roads. This truck was stopped at a little diner where we stopped for breakfast one morning.

The trucks are mostly bound for orange juice processing plants. Most Florida orange are juice oranges, while most California oranges are eating oranges. We've seen the trucks parked at several of the local processing plants.

At the plant, the oranges are sorted and washed and taken into the plant on conveyor belts. We took this picture at a plant right beside Rt. 17. This particular conveyor belt appeared to be taking freshly washed oranges and grapefruits out of a building and they were dropping into trucks. That seems like the reverse of the process for juice oranges, so it may have been a packing plant for fresh fruit. We stood and watched this process through the fence for a while because it was interesting to see it up so close.


There's a Florida's Natural Orange Juice Processing plant on Rt. 27 very near us. They're processing juice right now, and the smell is quite nice--very sweet. They have a visitor's center and gift shop across the street from the plant which we visited. There's a very informative museum about this history of oranges and orange juice processing in Florida. There were posters describing how oranges are processed into juice. This is an extractor that reams out the inside of the orange.






In addition to the interesting orange industry, Wiley and I have been touring the area to see the small towns and check out the parks and hiking trails. Frostproof (our closest town) bills itself as "The Friendly City," and it really is. But I think it also has some residents with a great sense of humor. This "plane crash" at the mailbox of one house just outside town is ample evidence of that!


We drove back roads all the way to Avon Park and then Sebring, stopping to look at whatever caught our fancy along the way. We're definitely planning to go back and explore Arbuckle Creek some more--maybe even with our canoe. It was a very typical deep south creek, with its shores lined with cypress hung with Spanish moss. We could almost feel the eyes of the alligators sizing us up for lunch. Even though there was not much traffic, we gave these turkeys the right of way. They just kept running down the road ahead of us, not even trying to fly!



The little town of Avon Park was all decked out for Christmas. I'm not sure what cows have to do with Christmas (or Avon Park, for that matter), but they were really cute decorations. I poked around in a couple little shops while Wiley went metal detecting by the lake. There are lots of lakes in this area, and most of them have parks on their shores. They're very pleasant places to take a picnic lunch and a good book and just relax.


This tropical looking lake with two palm trees growing right in the water has an unpronounceable Indian name that means "Walk-in-Water."

We've also driven to the Peace River (about an hour from here) and went canoeing and fossil hunting. I was surprised at how well my wrist and thumb did with loading the canoe onto the truck and paddling it.

We put up a tiny Christmas tree in the trailer and hung a garland and some lights from the patio awning. They're very festive! I made Christmas presents for our Nature Conservancy friends--the ingredients for Farmhouse Soup layered in a decorated jar with the recipe attached.



That's all for tonight--I'm tired, and I have to get up early tomorrow for a physical therapy appointment. Then I'm going to "work." The assignment for tomorrow is to go with the biologist and monitor the scrub jays. Have I mentioned lately that I love my live?!

Have a wonderful holiday!