Years ago when I was young, I was a teen from England hitchhiking the world...

I always took back roads to see the real people and places instead of tourist stuff.

 

One evening I was dropped off on a road just the same as the one pictured in the florida swamp.

As the driver was turning off the paved road into a dirt road, he dropped me off in the middle of nowhere with the warning " Watch out for dem 'gators boy! They like the warmth of the pavement as the night cools.

And with that he took off leaving me on this road through the swamps just as the sun was going down.

It was really spooky with all the cobwebs or vines or whatever hanging off the trees, mist over the swampy grass, funny 'jungle' sounds and hundreds of alligators just a few yards away.

 

As the last of the twilght turned to inky blackness I was literally stepping around them as they came up onto the road.

 

My saviours were a pickup trunk with 4 young guys - all drunk. They spoke to me in their strange southern black accents and I think it meant get in the back. I did and spent 20 harrowing minutes bouncing around alligators, hitting some while the botlle was passed from the driver out the window to me -I pretended to drink - and passed the bottle to the right side passenger, and around it went again.

They stopped at a real down-home shack and a woman came out and gave me some stew and bread and I spent the night sleeping in the back of that pickup.

In the morning I continued my 'adventure'.