Everyday Adventures: A Florida Outdoors Guide

The eighth of nine children, Terry Tomalin went on his first camping trip in the Adirondack Mountains of New York when he was six months old.His father, an advertising executive on Madison Avenue, loved the woods.So every summer, he would gather up his children and head to the wilderness.The family lived next to a 50-acre green space in suburban New Jersey, so the young Tomalin grew up building forts and climbing trees. His parents often worried about their son, who thought he was Tarzan, running through the woods in his underwear with a homemade spear.On the weekends he and his brother and sisters would head to a family cabin in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains where he learned to fish, follow game trails and tell one wicked ghost story.

During the summers, his father, known to friends and families as Les of the Woods, would head to the wilds of Maine, sometimes for three weeks at a time. Though raised in the North Woods, Tomalin longed to see The Tropics. In 1980, at age 19, he packed his scuba and fishing gear in his pickup truck and headed to Florida. While a student at the University of South Florida, he spent many a day and night in swamps surrounding the Hillsborough River, where he learned first hand about alligators, wild boar and the elusive Florida panther.

After graduation, Tomalin backpacked through Europe then returned to the Sunshine State to work for several small newspapers before joining the St. Petersburg Times in 1986. Tomalin worked the police beat for 18 months until he had saved enough money to head to New Zealand and Australia to hike, camp and flyfish.He returned a year later and after a brief stint covering government, because the Outdoors Editor.

Over the years, he has scuba dived the water-filled caves of North Florida, paddled a kayak from Georgia to the Florida Keys and crossed the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas in an outrigger canoe.

He has also been swimming with sharks, bungee jumping from bridges, skydiving from airplanes and surfing in hurricanes. An avid traveler, Tomalin has explored Mayan ruins in Mexico and lived with witch doctors in the Amazon.These days, the father of two spends most of his time leading his Cub Scout Pack on camping trips and recreating historic journeys in indigenous watercraft. Tomalin has a masters in Florid Studies from the University of South Florida and is a fellow of the prestigious Explorers Club in New York City.