3/2/22: With our route all planned out, and camping reservations made for the next week, we knew we weren’t going super far on day one. This was intentional, since we needed to load all the last minute stuff, do the final house check to be gone for several weeks, and get the trailer all hooked up to go. As one of the guys on my favorite off-road TV show (Dirt Every Day) says, “Let’s Peel Out!” And yes, Henry does peel out because he has a zillion pounds of torque, but I give Kenny the “mom look” when he does it. 🤨 I think we pulled out onto the road around 11:00, and even at that, I had to text our neighbor and ask them to please turn our water off. Oops! 🤷♀️. Oh well. If that’s all we forgot, we’re doing good. We’ll be back in a month or so when it’s time to take Island Girl to Fort Lauderdale for her Panama Canal cruise.
Kenny said that Henry is really easy to drive. The Ford 10 speed Super Duty diesel doesn’t downshift every time we go over an overpass or up a slight incline, nor does it get blown around by big trucks like Mr. Lincoln did. Henry is like a sled dog. He likes to go and do his job! (Pipe in sound effects *URR-URR-URR* from Tim the Toolman.)
Our first stop on this trip was at O’Leno State Park, near Alachua (a-LATCH-oo-uh) Florida. It’s actually where we bought Henry! We went right past the dealership, and we did not see Mr. Lincoln on the lot. Hopefully he got a nice new home with somebody who doesn’t make him work too hard.
Just up the road a piece from the dealership was the state park.
It’s a quiet place out in the woods, and we had power & water at our site. Unfortunately, when making a reservation, you can’t tell what the entire picture and approach looks like. Dang – there was a fence right where the driver’s side of the truck needs to go when backing a trailer into this spot. On the fortunate side, Kenny is a great driver, and getting around the tree and avoiding the fence did not prevent him from putting the trailer right where he wanted it.
The site was long enough that we could get off of the road and still have enough room to open the back door and get Kawi out.
We still had a few things to do inside the trailer, once Kawi got out of the way. I’m still trying to figure out where to store everything efficiently, so I had brought along some cargo nets for the open shelves that Kenny installed. Storage is very limited in here!
The park has some interesting things to see, but we did not go exploring. It would be a lot easier to do if we had our bikes, but they take up WAY too much room. Besides, they’re going with Island Girl on the ocean cruise. There’s even a swinging suspension bridge!
We have some toasty days ahead… but by the time we get to New Mexico, we’ll have some lows in the 20’s at night!! 🥶 I’m glad we have propane heat, since we’ll be camping without being plugged into ‘shore power’.
This was a beautiful quiet forested park. We stayed in the Magnolia section, and true to the name, there were lots of magnolia trees- just none in bloom yet. On the way out, we went past the Dogwood Loop, and true to it’s name, there were lots and lots of dogwood trees in full beautiful bloom. So pretty.
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3/3/22: Yesterday was just over 200 miles and took us just to a place not too far off the path to stay one night. Today was just under 200 miles, and took us to a place that I wanted to see and we planned to stay two nights. Florida Caverns State Park is just west of Tallahassee.
What?! Caverns in Florida that aren’t under water? We’re gonna scope it out!
The park property is huge, with several trails and places to explore. The front gate ranger was super nice, cheerful and welcoming! We drove into the park about three miles and found the campground. Nice level, gravel sites, in full sun with picnic tables, power, water, and sewer. Notice how sparse the trees are?
Check out this Google picture. If you zoom in, you’ll see that there are trees laying everywhere. This was major destruction from Hurricane Michael in 2018. I circled our spot.
But now, it’s all cleaned up and is a nice place to chillax.
One feature in the park is the Blue Hole swimmin hole, which was near our campground. I wandered over to scope it out.
It was very pretty, but I’m not sure I’d want to swim here. It is still Florida! 🐊. But apparently it is a popular place in warmer weather.
I captured a bit of color on my walk. So much of the area is brown and dry since Florida is several inches behind on rainfall this year.
These caught my eye – they looked like wild violets just growing everywhere in the grass!
The sunset from our patio was pretty. The park staff has been doing some controlled burning of underbrush, so that added a bit of haze and color to the setting sun. See the bare branch tree on the right?? There are thousands of those everywhere, where the storm ripped the branches and broke out the tops of the trees.
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3/4/22 – We are in the Central time zone, and the sun comes up WAY early here!! And it was blasting through our side windows at 6:00. 😳. Oh well. I lazed around then finally got up to make some coffee. I wanted to be sure to take Henry to the Visitor’s Center at 8:30 to get our Cavern Tour Tickets for later today. They can sell out early, so I figured I’d just bomb on over there and get them as soon as they opened. While waiting for them to open, I saw this sign which explained about Hurricane Michael. It hit this part of the Florida panhandle on October 10, 2018, about one month before we transited along the intracoastal waterway in Island Girl on our first Great Loop trip. I remember the devastation that we saw our near the coast was unimaginable. But, I had no idea that the impact was so huge this far inland. It was a Category 5 storm, with 140 mph sustained winds here at the park. It was the 4th strongest hurricane to impact mainland U.S.
The Visitor’s center is a really neat old block building, built in the 1930’s.
Ooooo look! They have Minion helmets!!
Of course I had to try one on. 😁
I went back to camp and enjoyed sitting outside for a bit, then we headed back for our 11:30am tour. This was a great sign at the entrance to the cave. “This glory of nature awaits you, hid in the depth of the earth. Take care of God’s awesome handiwork and preserve for others its worth. G.W. Hoover, Sr.”
This is the tour entrance to the caverns.
“The land that comprises a large part of Florida Caverns State Park was acquired on October 11, 1935. Development began on the property before it was established as a state park. Work on the tour cave and structures within the park were completed by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Projects Administration. Both groups emerged from President Roosevelt’s New Deal, established in 1933 to provide jobs to men during the Great Depression. Tireless hours of work went into the development of the park, which included many aspects beyond the cave. Progress continued on the park until 1942, when the United States joined World War II and funding was cut to the CCC and Works Progress Administration programs. Florida Caverns State Park was officially opened to the public in 1942.” Copied from the Park’s website.
There were so many different kind of formations, and everything was so cool! Stalactites and stalagmites, columns where they joined each other, curtains, waves, and on it goes.
This ribbon one was neat.
There were some really large rooms, and there were some places where we had to crouch down and walk through hallways that were only four feet tall.
The lighting is kept dim, so I didn’t always hold my phone still for long enough for my pics to not be blurry. Oh well – we probably look better a little blurry. 🤭
Some of the formations are just kind of crazy, and there was a variety of colors.
Another big room with a bit lower ceiling.
I didn’t really care for the green lighting, but it was kind of cool to see that this goes back quite a ways.
This didn’t turn out as good as I hoped. In the center of the picture, it just looks like a big pile of ramen noodles.
This was just to show that there are sea shells in the ceiling. And we’re about 60 miles as the crow flies to the Gulf of Mexico.
This was really cool, and I should have had somebody in the picture to show the scale. These terraces look like something you’d see in Peru or something, but each level held a pool of water. So cool!
I was trying to get a shot that showed some depth, but cameras just can’t capture it very well.
This was a skinny spot where we had to squeeze through. We saw lots of places that have not been ‘excavated’ to be part of the tour. Our guide showed us how dimly lit it was in the 1930’s when the crew only had lanterns to see what they were doing. It was a very neat tour. The caverns are much larger than I expected, for being in FLORIDA! It just seems like with the high water table in this state, that these would be flooded caves. They do get water in some sections during the rainy season and from storms, but eventually the water drains back out.
After the tour, we took a nature trail back around to the visitor’s center. The trail was clear, but there was SO much timber down and lots of really large trees just broken or uprooted. We were amazed at the destruction.
After our humid tour – it was 68 degrees and 100% humidity in the caverns – and our toasty little walk, I twisted Kenny’s arm to drive to the next town to scope out a brewery. Oh darn. It was about 20 miles to Campbellton and the Southern Fields Brewing.
It was a neat old building that has been restored and repurposed.
It seemed like it was kind of out in the middle of nowhere among the rolling farmland and fields, but they had at least twenty of their own beers on tap. They had a great variety, from lager to IPA, barleywine, porter, sour…. a great selection.
We got here at about 1:30 and discovered that since it was Friday, they would have live music outside at 5:30. AND a BBQ food truck! Bummer….we didn’t figure we’d last that long, but here is the fun back yard.
Since we needed to eat SOMETHING and couldn’t wait until 5:30, I asked about food but they didn’t have anything. However, they did have a menu for a BBQ joint that was just across the street. YAY! So I ordered us up some ribs and pulled pork with some standard sides, and walked over to Square R BBQ. It was a po-dunk kind of ramshackle little place, but you know that often times they are the best. Oooooh it was good!
We had a great time talking with one of the brewers, and we learned all about Lager. You know…. like Bud Light? They actually had a lager on the menu for the people who come in and want something like Bud Light. We learned that a lot of craft brewers don’t make lagers because they take so much time. They have to sit undisturbed in cold storage for a loooong time to get all the residual yeast to fall, in order to result in the super clear beer. Most craft brewers don’t want to tie up the equipment that long, when they could be brewing other things. He was a really nice guy, and we enjoyed learning about the area, the brewery, the brewing process, etc.
Then – back to the town of Marianna to fill Henry up with diesel at the WalMart gas station. It had the cheapest that we’ve seen, at $4.19, but it wasn’t a place that we could get into with the trailer behind us. All filled up, we headed back to the campground for a relaxing evening. We’ll wake up early with the sun tomorrow 🤨 but we don’t want to break camp too early since we do need to be considerate of the neighbors. However, we have nearly 400 miles to go tomorrow, so we don’t want to dillydally.