Author: keelhauler

Click for trip plans and map

On the last few days of our two weeks at W.P. Franklin we did some more paddling near our campground and up Telegraph Creek again. This time we saw one small gator.

 

We really liked this campground, too bad it is so hard to get a reservation here. As we left on Sunday morning it started to rain. This was our first real rain since we got to FL in November. The further south we drove the harder it rained and even after all our shopping at Sam’s Club, Aldi’s and Walmart it was still raining when we got to the campground. We were able to fill our Propane tank right outside the campground.

This is the actual dredge they used 90 years ago to make a portion of the Tamiami Trail from Marco Island to Miami. The campground has been closed for the past year for remodeling. About the only thing they did was to build a new bathroom. There are too many small campsites without much separation between sites.

There are 3 things to do here, Canoe/kayaking the Blackwater River, Bicycling and Hiking. So on Monday we tried the 3-1/2 Mountain Bike trail about a mile down the road from the camp. There were no wildlife or birds, it was not difficult but hardly worth a second ride.Then on Tuesday I decided to see if I could find my way into the abandoned planned housing development that campers used to boondock in twenty years ago. I used the maintenance road in big hiking area to find it. There was only 1 mile of pavement. I remembered there were lots of paved interconnecting roads . Now it is a rough gravel road with big depressions in the road filled with water from our recent rain. I explored for about 3 miles and didn’t see a soul and then went back to camp since I never told Peggy how far I might go. Of course she was worrying about me.
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I checked the tide tables and saw that we would be mostly paddling at low tide and there was no chance to go into Mud Lake since there is no way to paddle through unless you are close to High tide,

We left at 9 AM on Wednesday so at least the tidal flow would be moving out from the boat launch to the outer bays making our paddle slightly easier.

We made good time and Peggy wanted to go all the way out into the big open bay after the narrow mangrove lined river. The bay was at low tide and there were lots of birds including a couple of pink birds we could not identify.

 

It turned out to be our longest paddle of our trip. We paddled 12 miles and it took 4-1/2 hours. Peggy was tired but not complaining. It was a nice cool sunny day and the early start helped a lot.

Click for FL trip plans and map

I decided to explore a little more in the old abandoned housing development. It is like riding on paved bike trails, but you won’t see any other bikers but you could see a bear or Florida Panther if you were lucky. Take a look at the map in my last blog. It is easy to reach these streets if you have my map. Peggy decided to rest today and I ended up peddling for 2 hours and covered 17 miles.

You start by taking a narrow soft shoulder on the Tamiami Trail for only 3/4 mile. Then you enter a designated hiking area. You stay on their service road as shown for 1-1/2 miles and pop through a gate onto a nice paved road. This road crosses another paved road which is about 5 miles long running due north.

 

But watch out, there are potholes all over the roads that are big enough to swallow a car tire.
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If you didn’t pay attention you could go head over heels on your bike or break an axel with a car.

The two East-West paved roads both end at a pretty canal, and then turn to crushed stone and sand, populated by huge depressions. The tire tracks show you that some trucks do a lot of weaving back and forth. I’m pretty sure cars can’t access this area anymore but I don’t think it is illegal to ride a bike. At least that’s how I interpret the signs.

So if you want to do more biking then just peddling around the campground, I think it is an easy way to get some good biking exercise, not meet another soul and possibly see some wildlife.

We left Collier-Seminole State Park early Sunday morning. We did a lot of food shopping and headed to Koreshan State Park where I had reservations for three nights. Our plan was to get a site and have a nice rest and paddle on Monday. First of all some of these FL parks are goofy. Even though the site is empty, until it has been cleaned you can’t sign in. They said we could park at the picnic ground until 3 PM. It was not even noon yet. When we drove to the picnic parking we saw the boat launch which was not near our campsite, so we had a great idea, drop the canoe off, lock it up and see if our site was empty, it was…. but wait we can’t sign in until 3 PM. So we parked in our camp site and enjoyed our rest and signed up after 3 PM. Go figure. The rules are the same in all FL parks, but everywhere else they say, if it’s empty go get it.

 

There are some river access spots closer to our actual campsite but this worked out better for us since we wouldn’t have to roll our canoe over there and it was already off the RV and we could get our antenna up to watch the Super Bowl. Great game!!

 

So, early Monday morning we peddled our bikes to the boat ramp and locked our bikes up in place of the canoe. We got an early start and hoped we could paddle 4 miles down the river to Estero Bay and then possibly paddle 3/4 mi in the bay to Mound Key Island State Park.

 

It has been 25 years since we paddled this river, which I had remembered  was similar to the Blackwater River at Collier Seminole, wrong. Lots of Houses, docks, power boats and it is not a scenic trip. We did see a Manatee, Heron’s, Egrets and Vultures. The only good thing was that it was not a weekend when all kinds of canoe/kayak livery paddlers would be all over the river, we saw a few as we returned, The bad part, as you got past the docks and Manatee zones all the powerboats flew past us at full throttle. You would think they would have a little respect for 2 old people in an open canoe. Four clowns on Jet Skis almost ran right into us and each other. We did make it to the bay but decided to paddle back to camp  rather than risk going the short distance in the bay to the island. Our advise, find some more scenic place to paddle.

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What is Koreshan Park about anyway? It is a historical site donated to the state in 1961 by a small communal religious settlement which started here in 1894. They conduct daily tours. Lots of tourists just come to visit the settlement which has been beautifully restored and worth the stop to discover how this small sect, similar to the Shakers, survived and thrived in the hot, jungle environment.

 

Walking/biking paths are all through the settlement which is well separated from the campground and canoe livery.

On Wednesday morning we will head back to Lithia Springs Park which is close to Tampa.

 

Click for trip plans and map

We got here about noon on Wednesday. We were surprised to find that only a few campsites were available. But, luckily we got the same site that we were in last month. Which is right across the camp ground road from the river. When we left Estero it did not rain but we were happy that they got 3/4” rain last night before we got here. The river has been running on the low side all winter due to lack of rain in FL. I checked the USGS gauge and the river had already come up from 80 to 100 CFS, we hoped that by Thursday it would come up even more. Now we needed to find a way to get our canoe to the Alderman’s Ford  to launch on Thursday.

So I biked around the campground and found a couple with a canoe on their pickup truck. They are paddlers from NC and were planning on paddling the river on Friday but offered to drop us and our canoe off at the put-in on Thursday morning, if I would bring their truck back from the put-in to the take-out on Friday. Of course I jumped at the deal and luckily for us the level came up to 130 CFS.

Last year we paddled the river twice, both times near 300 CFS, which made the 9.5 mile run much faster. But todays level was high enough that we never touched a rock even running over the 6-7 shallow class I rapids.  With our rest stop at Duck Landing it took us just over 3 hours. The river dropped to 100 CFS for our new friends run on Friday and they said it was passable but in their light weight Kevlar canoe they would not have wanted to paddle it any lower.

It was cool, low 70’s, but we still saw 3 gators, some feral hogs and a site we never saw before. A large Heron caught a big snake and when we went by he took off with the big snake dangling from his beak. I hope he shared it with his family.

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The other reason we like this campground is that there is access to the miles of concrete trails, shown in orange on the map, that go through all the natural areas of this huge housing development called Fish Hawk Ranch. Click for bigger picture.

The park has a bike/hike trail that runs near the river but it is for hardier souls.

We biked about 8 miles on Friday and about 10 miles on Sunday and went in two totally different areas. Not counting the sidewalks along the streets there has to be at least 25 miles of trails along the retention ponds and wild areas.

We were looking for a mailbox to mail our grandson Jeffery’s birthday card. No mail boxes or post office at all, we mailed it back at our campground.

We had a nice no traffic drive on back roads from Juniper Springs up to Ocean Pond campground in the Osceola National Forest. We had hoped to get a campsite with electricity but all were full.

It seems like la lot of campers like to take extended stays here since the cost is only $12/night for seniors. The only available sites had water hookups and were only $6/night.

We hoped with nice sunny skies my solar arrays could keep the batteries charged. However we had rain one morning and too much shade in our campsite to keep fully charged. We had to run the generator a few times to top off the batteries and to run our microwave, waffle iron & toaster. Our TV runs fine from the power inverter and doesn’t take that much battery power.

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We took a short ride each day past some of the rustic campgrounds in the forest. The first day was in the 80’s but after the rain & cold front came in it barely hit 70^o each day.

We were going to go up to the Okefenokee swamp and canoe when we left here on Sunday but we decided based on the weather in Cleveland and missing our families, maybe on Monday morning we should just start our drive heading home.

I think we will start on some back roads and stay off the interstate highways, at least until we reach I-77 in Columbia, SC.

Here are a few pictures from this year’s trip.

We got home a little earlier than planned. We both were getting a little homesick but the biggest factor was the weather. Near the end of our trip we like to head back to northern Florida and watch the weather forecasts closely. We look for at least two good weather days to drive and some warm weather to unpack. This usually occurs around mid-March.

Even though Cleveland’s weather was warm in February all the long term forecasts were pointing to a very cold March. When we were unpacking this Wednesday it was sunny and 60^oF. The next 60^o day is not forecast to occur until April and the weather will be below freezing until around the 19th of March.

Another great decision I made was to stay off the interstate highways until we got to Columbia, SC. See the map in our last blog. We basically took US-301 which passes through lots of little towns and has speed limits of about 60 mph. Comparing it to our drive last year was like night and day. The miles were the same but we actually made it 20 minutes faster and there was virtually no traffic. We had good scenery and the drive was very relaxing. I-95/I-26 has hundreds of trucks along with cars trying to pass everybody at 75 mph. It is bumper to bumper white knuckle driving for a motorhome that only wants to go 65 mph.

It was around 1 PM when we got to I-77 so we kept on going past Columbia, and Charlotte and stopped near Statesville for the night at 3 PM. It was a good time to go through these cities with all the road construction and traffic tie-ups.

It was still a dry drive until we reached the WV Turnpike. It was not heavy or windy and the rain stopped when we left the pike. We got home at 3:30 PM and decided to wait until Wednesday to unpack in the nice warm weather. I did have to winterize the RV after I saw that a real cold spell was coming.

Our Trip by the Numbers

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We drove 3200 miles, averaging about 9 mpg.
Our average camp cost was about $18/night.
We paid as high as $46/night at Fort Desoto County Park in St. Petersburg.
We paid as low as $6/night at Ocean Pond National Forest Campground with no electric hookup.
We canoed on 11 different rivers for a total of about 120 miles.
We biked a total of over 250 miles, mostly on bike trails.

Most of all we both stayed healthy and didn’t even get a cold this winter.

I posted 30 blogs this season. This is our last Blog until next fall.

If this is the first time that you are visiting our 2016-17 Florida Blog you may want to click this to read about our trip in Chronological Order rather than going backwards (As all Blogs do) from today to the start of the trip.

We decided to head back to Florida again this fall & winter. We will bring our new lightweight Mad River canoe and our new Burley Tandem Bicycle. We hope to do some Rails-to-Trails in VA, NC and GA on our way south. The root is cultivated in Wisconsin ginseng farmunder extremely favorable conditions using advanced farming methods. viagra overnight shipping In present scenario, there are a number of people that cannot afford taking the pills back to back and also do not want to compromise http://www.learningworksca.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/CAAESkillsReport-5.pdf viagra sample free with the effects. so for such people who cannot afford the medicine there is one solution and that is they block the blood sand does not let it pass ahead which is why the problem of erectile dysfunction to respond to. Since its introduction, an amazing 133 million tadalafil in uk prescriptions were written more than a million doctors in about 120 countries around the world. Moreover, the person may experience drowsiness as a common male disease, partly because the over frequency of sexual lives. 20mg tadalafil prices All of our plans can change depending on the weather, but we hope to visit Greg & Sandy in SC and end up in Orlando to fly home to CLE to spend Christmas with our big family. Here are some maps showing our route planning up to Christmas.

1 Home, 2 Galax, VA, 3 Va Creeper Trl, 4 New River, NC, 5 Blue Ridge Pkwy, 6 Greg in SC, 7 Augusta, GA, 8 Laura Walker State Park, 9 Okefenokee, GA, 10 Ocean Pond –  Nat’l Forest, 11 Palatka Trail, FL, 12 Juniper Springs, 13 Silver Lake, 14 Wekiva Springs, 15 Store RV in Orlando

Any friends that care to join us along the way, now is the time to let us know. On all of our campsites we can share a second vehicle, since we don’t pull a car with us.

We had a warm spell to get all packed and ready to go. We should have left last week but we had our annual early Thanksgiving dinner with all our family. It’s getting to be a tradition since we head south in early November. Our last blog post shows where we expect to travel this year but plans often change.

To keep from reinjuring my back, we bought a Kevlar canoe that is 20 lbs. lighter the our old ABS canoe.

To keep Peggy peddling on all the bike trails, we bought a really cool used Burley Tandem bike. What I thought of as a comfortable sitting position could have led me to get notification and I will see that hey, for example, someone just made a post on his blog about something that I did as an internet marketing consultant or as an search engine optimization spe side effects of tadalafilt. If achat cialis cipla some males were able to get harder and satisfactory erections with the help of Eriacta.3.The drug helps in prolonged erections for the men during the sexual intercourse.4.They are very safe and have almost no side effects. The mice were divided into 3 groups; the 1st group was given a standard diet., the 2nd group a high fat, high calorie diet and have soft tabs cialis a lower incidence of heart disease and live long healthy lives. Alone, it’s commonly available viagra canada sales in liquid, powder or capsule form. We practiced with it all summer and she loves it. It looks like we can double the mileage we normally peddle in a day on the Rails to Trails bike paths that we love.

I had to change my hitch to move the bikes 5” higher so as not to block my tail lights. The tandem is 8’ long so needed to have a local canvas company make a custom cover to keep the dirt off when we travel. It turned out he only lived a mile from our home so he dropped over to measure and then deliver the beautiful cover.

I will provide our blog with a option to read in the order of our travels as well as in standard blog format with latest news on top.