Hike Bike Paddle Camp Florida with authors Sandra Friend and John Keatley as your guides
For more than two centuries, Florida’s natural attractions have wowed visitors who love nature.
Set in a 60-acre cypress dome on the Big Cypress Seminole Reservation, the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum of Seminole culture provides an introduction to the tropical outdoors of natural South Florida’s swamps in which the Seminole Tribe has lived for more than a century.
When getting to know wolves means sitting among them, it’s a bit intimidating. But being among the wolf packs of Seacrest Wolf Preserve near Chipley will open your eyes as to why wolves are well worth protecting.
With airboat and swamp buggy rides as well as interpretation of native species, Billie Swamp Safari is an attraction providing immersion into the Big Cypress Swamp, ancestral home of the Seminole Tribe since the 1800s..
Atop one of the highest hills in the Florida Peninsula, Bok Tower Gardens is one of Florida’s most spectacular landscaped gardens, “something to appeal to both man and animal, a meditative place,” as envisioned by Edward William Bok in the 1920s.
Butterflies are the main attraction at this complex of natural wonders inside Tradewinds Park, but the flowers also put on a show at Butterfly World, with a maze of passionflower vines said to be the world’s largest collection of its kind.
A private nature retreat north of Milton, Coldwater Gardens is a study in serenity, melding camping, gardening, and enjoyment of natural habitats along the Coldwater Creek basin.
You’ll find Florida’s best and most extensive boardwalk hike at Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary, meandering 2.3 miles through an old-growth cypress forest.
Part native, part cultivated, Crane Point Hammock is 63 acres of tropical hardwood hammock in the heart of Marathon. Preserved from development in 1989 by the Florida Keys Land Trust, it is the largest tropical hammock in the Middle Keys.
Grab a spatula and start flipping pancakes! Once a Florida roadside attraction, De Leon Springs State Park still draws big crowds for its unique make-your-own-pancake restaurant with griddle top tables, set inside a historic sugar mill.
Tropical gardens from the 1920s grow lavishly around the historic winter homes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford at the Edison & Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, their centerpiece one of the biggest banyan trees in the United States.
Eureka Springs Park includes what remains of a tropical botanical garden established in 1938 around springs that fed a lush floodplain forest along Six Mile Creek.
Established in 1938 as one of the world’s largest collections of tropical plants, Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden is an integral part of the history of Florida botany and of Coral Gables.
