It drizzled/misted all night long, ending only when the coffee was brewing Monday morning. The temperature also went up slowly all night, so it was 64° when we got out of bed. We didn’t hurry to get packed up and as we finished it started to rain a bit again, so we had to pause for awhile until it let up. It was 11:30 by the time we got away but we knew the next park was only about 70 miles away, east of Tampa Bay, so it didn’t really matter. As we drove down I75 a whooping crane, with its distinctive black-tipped wings that we had learned about in Texas, flew over our truck! We found the County Park without any trouble and were happy to learn we had a big choice of campsites. We picked #21, at the end of the first loop. There are no campsites behind, across, or to one side of us, and on the other side there are two empty campsites before our first neighbor, so we have a lot of privacy. After a late (2:45) lunch, we rode our bikes around the picnic area and to the spring, about 1½ miles. It had cleared off but was very humid and the temperature was in the mid-eighties, so it felt pretty hot! I took a shower and washed my hair before we made chili dogs for our late dinner, which we ate outside. Then we watched some PBS, including “The Blues at the White House”, before going to bed with the temperature still in the 70s.
Tuesday we took the kayak to the Alafia River that runs through the park. One can put in at the canoe landing and go either upstream or downstream from there. But the Ranger told us that it gets a little tricky below the landing so we chose to start paddling upstream, into a bit of a wind. It’s a typical Florida black water river that becomes brackish downstream as it approaches Tampa Bay. Up here it is slow moving and goes through Cyprus and palms, mostly. We saw an ibis, a cormorant, lots of big turtles and many big fish, but no alligators. We got to a shallow area near a bridge and the Ranger had told us that it gets more and more shallow, the further you go, so we chose to turn around at that point. We passed a couple from California who put in their ocean kayak soon after we did, but they could go further than we were able in our inflatable because they are more maneuverable. After lunch we put on our swim suits and rode our bikes to the spring. Like the river, the spring is obviously very low right now. But it is a large area with a shallow end that is now only about ankle deep, and a deep end that is 8 feet where the spring comes bubbling up. Like all the other springs in Florida, the water is a constant 72°, which felt very refreshing since it was in the upper eighties and sunny out. There were a few other people swimming but they slowly left until we and the couple we met on the river were the only ones there. We had a good time talking to them and learning about other good parks to visit in Florida. We left the spring about 6:00, changed, and drove to a Beef O’Brady’s to watch MSU lose at Indiana. L We were pretty sad about that, since it puts so much pressure on the last game of the season on Sunday, against OSU, but luckily, at Breslin Center. We got back to the camper in time to watch the second hour of the excellent PBS American Experience show on The Amish.
We had a bit of an adventure on Wednesday without doing much planning. We started the day, as has become our habit, by drinking our coffee while each reading the Lansing State Journal articles of interest (sports and local news, usually), me on my phone and Marv on his IPod. Then I made hearty vegetable/cheese/salami scrambled eggs, Marv put the bikes in the truck, and we drove off to find the Fort Fraser Trail, a Rail-to-Trail that I had read about that was near Lakeland. The directions were pretty sketchy but, since it was near Lakeland, we thought we could visit Tiger Town, where the Detroit Tigers have Spring Training camp, and then find the trail. It was easy to find Tiger Town and we could go into Joker Marchant stadium and look around because the games don’t start until Mar. 2. Branden Inge was being interviewed on the field and a couple of others were being interviewed over to the side, but there wasn’t much else happening. We asked at the Box Office if anything would be going on today and she told us they do their practices from 10:00 to 1:00 on the “back fields”. It was 12:45 but we figured we should go over since we were there. There was a small crowd of people by the fence and, as we went through the gate to join them, a man told us to hurry because Prince was signing autographs. Prince, we knew, meant the new Tigers phenom, purchased for an unbelievable amount, and Cecil Fielder’s son. Sure enough, he was there patiently signing paraphernalia for everyone. We didn’t have anything cool for him to sign so we settled for taking some photos, much to the chagrin of our niece, Linda Filcek, a giant Tiger fan. When we left, we tried to find the Trail, but it seemed to be farther away than we had realized. Marv saw the nearby Lake Bonney Park and thought that might be an access point for it. We went there and saw that there were bike paths along the lake shore so we ate our lunch, got out the bikes, and started riding. There were families of ibis, and ospreys were nesting on top of the tall light poles around the baseball fields. But we found that the bike path didn’t go around the lake or indeed anyplace else. It was a giant figure 8 on which we rode about 2 miles before loading the bikes back into the truck. We had gone far enough now that we figured we must be near to the trail and we started to see roads with the names of the two trailheads. We were close enough that we did indeed find it from the shaky online directions and got the bikes out for the second time. It’s a nice idea, but it runs right along very busy Highway US98 and the road noise was relentless. We rode south, thinking it was into the wind, but realized that it was actually a west wind so we would have to deal with it both directions. It was 88° and very sunny. The map at the trailhead showed a side trail through a reserve that was proposed for 2007, so we thought if we could get to it, that would be more enjoyable. But we should have found it about 2½ miles down the Trail and didn’t come to it. So at 3 miles we turned around and went back. It’s funny how an 18 mile bike ride around a lake with lots to see can seem so much shorter and pleasurable than a 6 mile, hot ride along a highway! On our way back to the campground we stopped to wash the truck and have ice cream. Marv made nice salads and we warmed up the fajita chicken to have on couscous, and then started to do some packing up to leave tomorrow.
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