We were only about 15 feet away. Enough to get the hair raising on the back of my neck. Our encounter was very brief. I already had my camera in hand because of birds I was photographing, so I just snapped and then we hightailed it out of there!
We had to walk past that area about 2 hours later to get to our car. The big gator was gone but there was a smaller one about 3 feet in the same place. He kept crawling out farther onto the road!! We were in the car by that time but there were other people getting really close! Yikes.