Travels in a Tin Can

park, though considering the fact we had pre-booked the note seemed a little
harsh. Next, our breakfast croissants were too salty - disaster, may as well go
back to bed! Going back to bed was not an option however as we urgently
needed to book campsites for the last leg of our journey, the Florida Keys. It
would be peak season by the time we reached the Keys and, seeing as we
had already been turned away from some of the mainland campsites
reservations seemed a good plan.
What should have been a relatively easy exercise ended up taking half
a day which would have been better spent enjoying the park, or even pulling
out our own fingernails. The first complication was that the nearest public
phone was the only one for miles around. We had to wait a while to use it, got
nowhere with the first few calls, and then felt too pressured to try more sites
due to the long queue that formed round us like a lynch mob. Part of the
problem was that sites were too busy to answer the phone, but also every call
took an age while we entered the 90 digit code for our phone card, and then
the pin number and telephone number. After we gave up, and once we had
finished freaking out along the lines of 'we'll have to sleep in lay-bys forever!',
we had lunch. This consisted of brie on stale bread, overripe melon and stale
cookies. And it improved our mood no end.
We then drove to the Ernest F Coe Visitor centre, the main one for the
whole park, and spent another stressful hour or so on the phone. At least they
had more than one telephone and the end result of this hard labour was that
we had booked camps for almost every remaining night of our travels, and
with minimum alterations to our intended itinerary. To celebrate we looked
round the visitor centre - not that great and a little run down. The Everglades