The Boggy Creek Edge: Where Meadow Woods Meets Wild Florida
North of the subdivisions, the houses stop and the Everglades headwaters begin — creek, swamp, ballfields at Southport, and an airboat run a short drive south.
3 minute read
Every suburb has a direction where the houses stop. In Meadow Woods, that direction is Boggy Creek. North of the subdivisions lies the Boggy Creek neighborhood of Orlando proper, and threaded through the community’s eastern side runs Boggy Creek Road — airport country on one hand, and on the other, the creek, its swamp and the wetlands that drain south toward East Lake Tohopekaliga. This green edge is Meadow Woods’ secret amenity: wild Florida, minutes from the school run. Trace it from the Meadow Woods hub and the Orlando Top Spots Map.
The creek itself
Boggy Creek is a real waterway, not a subdivision name that wandered off a plat map. Boggy Creek Swamp sits in Orange County just northeast of the community, and the creek system feeds the chain of lakes at the headwaters of the Everglades — the vast, shallow watershed that begins, improbably, in Orlando’s suburbs and ends in Florida Bay. Standing at the edge of it, Meadow Woods’ geography snaps into focus: this community was built on the rim of that watershed, between the airport’s runways and the water.
Lunch on Boggy Creek Road
The edge feeds people before it entertains them. At 11780 Boggy Creek Road, Cele Y Sus Muchachas serves the daytime Puerto Rican table — frituras, mofongo, natural juices and frappés — to a road that carries airport workers, school traffic and half the south side’s errands. It is the eastern anchor of the eating map we draw in Where to Eat in Meadow Woods, and proof that the community’s food culture reaches every corridor it has, not just the famous western one.
The airboat run, labeled nearby
Plainly labeled as the nearby trip it is: Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures sits at 2001 East Southport Road in Kissimmee, on Lake Tohopekaliga — a short drive south of Meadow Woods, outside the community, and the classic way to see its watershed from the water. The operation runs airboat tours of thirty minutes to an hour, plus sunset and night options, with U.S. Coast Guard–certified captains crossing the lake at speed and slowing for wildlife — alligators, turtles and bald eagles among the regularly reported sightings, none of them guaranteed, because this is a wild lake and not a ride. The site adds the family apparatus around the boats: a gem mine, wildlife viewing and food on the grounds. Book ahead, arrive early as the operator instructs, and take the morning slot in summer, when afternoon thunderstorms do what they do.
How to do the edge well
Treat the Boggy Creek side as the weekend’s second half. Morning at the recreation center and Meadow Woods Park — the gym, fields, playground and dog park we profile in Meadow Woods Recreation Center: The Community’s Living Room — then lunch on Boggy Creek Road, and south to the lake for the boat. You will pass, in twenty minutes, from subdivision streets to open marsh, and you will understand Meadow Woods better for the contrast: a community of 43,000 people that ends, quite suddenly and quite beautifully, in the headwaters of the Everglades.
Southport: the ballfield green
The green edge has a manicured side, too. Toward the community’s southeast, Southport Park at 3500 Barnstable Place — a City of Orlando park at Meadow Woods’ edge, labeled as such — covers 52 acres that began as a Navy recreation area and were developed into baseball and softball fields, picnic and playground areas and walking paths. The South Orlando Babe Ruth tradition, a youth baseball and softball program with more than 35 years in south Orlando and hundreds of young players, has played in this Southport orbit. Between the creek, the swamp and the ballfields, the pattern is clear: Meadow Woods’ edges were kept green — some of it wild, some of it mowed for Saturday games — and the community is better for both.
Photo: Anthony Clark, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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