-- Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

I took all these with my crappy cell phone camera, but here's a tiny taste of Merritt Island:


We never got caught in rain -- turns out lots of thunderstorms fizzle out over the Banana River so even though the lightning looked pretty fierce, it never reached us. Swarms of mosquitos did though; the number of welts on my body has grown exponentially.

Merritt Island shares land with Kennedy Space Center but is run by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The wildlife refuge is heavily managed -- before the 1950s, the saltmarsh mosquito thrived there and could produce a million mosquitoes per square yard in one day (!). Engineers divided it up to control water levels and salinity and thus the mosquito. We were basically mobbed by mosquitos at dusk so I can't imagine how many there'd be if this wasn't controlled. The air would be opaque with the bodies of the biting insects.

More information about Merritt Island:

• Merritt Island's creation.


• What to do in Merritt Island (including links for kayaking, etc.)