Saturday, March 1, 2014

Curry Hammock State Park

March 2014


Coconut man processing the coconuts

Curry Hammock is one of the newer state parks having been completed in 2004. It is small with just 28 sites and set off the road...so you mostly don't hear the road from this park. With its composting toilets and solar heated shower water, it is green friendly!



Our waterfront campsite; if stood up and looked...
This year we were fortunate to get a site in the time period we were looking for; we spent eight days enjoying the park. Kayaking, walking the beach, and processing coconuts. I love coconut and we had purchased some from a roadside stand on the way down to the keys but I needed/wanted more!






Hard work making coconuts into puree...note my garden! I am
hoping that these plants will give me early tomatoes up in NY.
  David wouldn't climb one of the tall trees at Bahia for me so I asked the Curry campground hostie if they knew where I could get some.  She told me they had just trimmed the trees at the day use area and there was a pile of them. Off we went in the van (hey no tree climbing) and picked out about 12 of them. We brought them back to see what they had inside; we are kind of new at this.





Note the tools (especially the power tool)
 They were green and thus the coconut flavor was mild but HEY, they were free. After opening a few and cracking the nut, we got some pretty good coconut water and coconut meat. Being the frugal people we are...we drove back and got another 18 coconuts!!! We had pina coladas that night:) I had decided that the best way to store the most coconuts was to process them all over the time that we were down here.



Beach view of Curry Hammock State Park
 Processing involved taking out the coconut water and meat and putting them in the vitamix to make some pureed coconut...which could be used in smoothies, soups.  We spent the next week packing the coconut puree into our RV freezer (not an easy task).  Eureka, we hit the jackpot.  All things coconut!  By the way, DIYman became really FAST at processing coconuts...so fast I could not keep up with him.  My job was to remove the coconut meat from the nut/inner shell and whirl it in our vitamix.


Curry Hammock State Park
On day we came across a ray working really hard trying to bury himself in the sand.  He was maybe 24" across...not very big.  We also saw starfish here.







A sting ray trying to bury himself in the shallow beach waters


                       

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