High and Dry in Central Florida

So, I've been looking for a piece of land to buy...2 or 3 acres somewhere near enough to Orlando to get to work within an hour, dry with a road. Yep. That's what I've been looking for.

The first piece lay south of Groveland which lies west of Orlando. The ad said, "park like acreage, wonderfully isolated rural land. Large mature tree canopy." The agent said that half of it was dry. So one morning, Rich and I had "an adventure." We drove out for over an hour, turned left on route 33 and drove another 15 miles, made a right on some little country road, made another right at the group of mailboxes, and drove VERY carefully over the dirt road whoopti-doos til we came to the FOR SALE sign.

Well, she was partly right. It was lovely. Big trees. And it would have been nice and dry if we were willing to bring in about 250 cubit yards of fill dirt for the house area. The creek on the right side of the property was the kind that drained the surrounding area into a larger swamp downstream. A good hurricane would leave us bogged down for weeks.

We explored another plot (in our price range) today. The owner said there was a hunting road that led to the property but that she'd never been there herself. Still, the aerial pictures looked promising. I could see individual trees and then paler green that I assumed were grassland (and we all know what ASS-U-ME means!!)

So, Rich and I had ANOTHER adventure. We found the entrance to the hunters' "road" tucked close to the HWY 50/HWY520 intersection. Rich parked the truck well on the shoulder of the road and we got out to see that the road was blocked by a welded steel gate with a nice lock on it. Didn't really matter. They did us a favor by preventing us from driving back there. I don't think our little Ford Ranger would have made it through the water on that "road." At any rate, we started walking. Figured we would walk about a mile in and find our land and it would be nice and dry with wild Florida grass pasture...Yep.

We did call the phone numbers on the gate to let the hunters know that we would be walking on the road (and please, don't shoot!) I got the answering service for both numbers though one was kind enough to call back. He just wanted us to know that he had killed a couple of wild boars back there and that there were also bear. Oh, and he'd recently killed a couple of pygmy rattlesnakes within the first few turns on the road. Just be careful, he warned. I looked at Rich and he said don't worry, all the animals slept during the heat of the day. Okay.

So armed only with my trusty camera, a half pint of water and my cell phone, we forged onward. After a half mile (and 10-12 "low spots" on the road where the land was about knee depth below the level of the standing water) the trees finally gave way and we saw what I thought was pasture....WRONG. It was sawgrass. Sawgrass grows in water. Water is NOT high and dry. Though we never got to the surveyed plot, we felt it pretty safe to turn around and go back. On the way back, Rich took the time to point out some animal tracks....raccoon, deer and, oh yes, wild boar! He did manage to bag one speciman of the wild while we were there...a mosquito about as big around as a quarter. You know, the kind that splats with YOUR blood when you hit it. They never bothered me at all.

I emailed the property owner and told her I didn't think this would serve our purposes.