Here is the difference between Florida and Michigan—at 8:00 on Monday it was 36°. By 11:00, it was in the mid-seventies. That doesn’t happen in Michigan! After very hearty whole wheat pancakes for breakfast we got on our bikes and explored this large, campus-like park. The roads are all paved and led us first to the Carillion Tower in the center of a green which chimes the quarter hours from 8:00 until 6:00 with Westminster Chimes, and plays a fifteen minute medley of Stephen Foster melodies at 10:00, 12:00, 2:00, & 4:00. We can hear it clearly at our campsite. It’s very pleasant. There is a bit of a museum at the base of the tower, which was installed in the fifties. The museum shows all about the vertical bells and the paper rolls which play them. There are also some dioramas there illustrating some of Stephen Foster’s more famous songs. We learned that he was from Philadelphia and never actually saw the Suwannee River—he was looking for a more romantic sounding name than the “Pedie River” about which he originally wrote the song. His brother found the Suwannee in an atlas and Stephen shortened it to “Swannee” to make the meter fit the melody better. “Way Down Upon the Swannee River” is the state song for Florida, and Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home” is Kentucky’s state song. We spent some time chatting with a couple from Virginia (now) and Long Island (previously). He was wearing a shirt from the Auburn-Cord-Duisenberg Museum and I mentioned it. They are old car Nuts (and collectors) and they told us about two museums in Michigan that we should visit. When we left the Tower we rode on to the craft village, a collection of 6 or 7 little cabins in which they have artisans demonstrating their local crafts such as pottery, blacksmithing, jewelry making, weaving, cane syrup making, etc. There was only a jewelry maker on duty today but she seemed surprised to find herself alone and thought there would be more people on Tuesday. We visited the Gift Shop and picked up a few things before riding on to a river overlook and then to the Ranger Station, which was closed when we arrived. The woods are full of azaleas and dogwood which are in full bloom and quite lovely. The area is having their annual Azalea Festival in two weeks and we’re wondering if the beautiful blooms will last that long. After checking in at the Ranger Station we went to the Stephen Foster Museum where we watched a video on his life and saw some artifacts and more dioramas. I also saw a collage of pictures from Elderhostel 2008 which included Rick & Jan Bernsten so I took a picture of it to send them. By the time we got back to the campsite we had ridden 3-4 miles, all on paved roads. We shared a sandwich and then drove to “Historic White Springs”. It is really just outside the gates of the park and we could have ridden our bikes there but we wanted to do a little grocery shopping while we were in town. White Springs was thriving in the late 1800s-early 1900s because of the 4-tiered bathhouse that was built surrounding a sulfur spring that people visited, coming from far away to “take the waters”. The foundation and upper tier are still there but the spring was wiped out by flooding in 1978. The town is pretty much wiped out as well, with only one of the original 12 fancy hotels remaining and, as we found out, there is no grocery store. We got a couple of things at a gas station store and decided we could make it through on what we had. Marv did find some corn bread mix that he made up when we got back to the camper and we enjoyed with our dinner. The temperature took a dive and it ended up getting down to 39° overnight, but we stayed toasty.
Tuesday turned out better than we could have planned. We were going to ride the 7.5 mile bike trail that the Suwannee River Bike Association had established just last October. We had read that it was an intermediate trail and the Ranger on Monday had told us he had just talked with a biker who said it had given him a good workout. Since we had a map that showed several short cuts and cut-offs we thought we could take the day and not push ourselves and manage. We could even pick it up right next to our campsite! But we were surprised to find an orange cone there in the morning with a sign saying the trails were all closed because of a prescribed burn. Marv hopped on his bike to ride up to the Ranger Station to get more information, and found out that they never know when the trails will close; they just got word that a burn planned in another location had been canceled because of the high winds so they moved it to here. Marv voiced his displeasure, since we would have done the trail on Monday if we had known. He came back to the campsite and we decided to go to Big Shoals Natural Area and try biking or hiking there. It was only 3 miles away, but the county road that took us there had no shoulder so it was just as well that we drive the bikes in the truck, rather than biking there. When we got there we went in the Little Shoals entrance and found that there was a 3.4 mile paved trail through the hammock to Big Shoals. It is apparently not a rail-to-trail because it winds through the area and has some elevation changes and shade. Marv would like more challenge, I think, but I loved it because I could look around and enjoy the scenery rather than worrying about watching the trail so carefully. At Big Shoals there were several trails off of a large picnic area so we locked the bikes and hiked the Big Shoals trail along the Suwannee River to…Big Shoals, of course. When the river is high the water running over the limestone formation there forms Florida’s only Class 3 rapids. It is very picturesque and we enjoyed eating our lunch sitting on a bench overlooking the shoals. We saw a volunteer hiking the path on our way back and met one other couple but otherwise had the place entirely to ourselves. When we got back to our bikes we had hiked 2.6 miles. We tried to take two more bike trails at that end but found they were not maintained and therefore were impassable. Instead we biked back to the truck and loaded the bikes up before driving two two-track roads to the Little Shoals hiking trail. It was a shorter trail into the Little Shoals but the path through an old growth hardwood hammock was very interesting—there was more elevation change and sometimes the forest floor was clear and you could see a long ways, and sometimes it was totally full of palmettos. At the shoals we saw a large turtle and a Great Blue Heron. It was a 1.26 mile hike bringing our total to almost 4 miles hiking for the day with 8.1 miles biking. We relaxed at the campsite before we both showered and then enjoyed the vegetarian chili I had left cooking in the Crockpot and the rest of Marv’s corn bread. In many ways, this felt like the last day of our Winter Trip because most of our time now will be spent either on the road or in homes with family, even though we’ll spend two more nights sleeping in the Camper.
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