There was a loud thunderstorm and heavy rain for much of the night. But it ended before we arose Saturday morning and slowly cleared up. We weren’t completely dry, but dry enough to pack up and be on our way without hurrying. Coincidently, we stopped at the same rest stop on I75 to enjoy our picnic lunch and got to Oscar Scherer, just south of Sarasota and east of Siesta Key. It may be our favorite park of the whole trip. We are just minutes from the famous sugar-sand beaches on the Gulf. The park’s 100+ campsites are stretched along the bank of South Creek on the outside of a long skinny loop road. Ours is very wide and private with lots of green stuff growing between us and our neighbors, with no one behind or across from us. There is hiking, biking, canoeing/kayaking, free WiFi, laundry facilities, a Nature Center, and lots of in-park activities. We set-up quickly and took a bike ride around the campground to look things over. Then we drove to the nearby Morgan’s Restaurant, where we sat outside, sweatshirts and jackets on, at their Tiki Bar to eat dinner and watch MSU beat OSU, breaking OSU’s second-in-the-nation’s home winning streak!!
Sunday we went to St. Andrew’s UCC about 6 miles north of the park. We think it may be the church Louise Sternberg enjoys when she is here. We had the dubious luck of being there on a day when they collected and dedicated pledges AND when new members joined (a process which included long, informative introductions of each person) AND when their search committee reported on and introduced the supply pastor who will fill in for three months for the senior pastor who is going on Sabbatical. The sermon was only about 5 minutes long as they tried to tie together scripture and the events in the church. After some grocery shopping and lunch we rode our bikes about half a mile to the Nature Center to take the longest trail in the park, the Yellow Trail. It had gotten down to 40 degrees over night and struggled to get into the low fifties during the day, so even with mostly sunny skies, it seemed a good day to take our 6 mile hike. The mostly level, sandy trail passes through pine flatwoods, prairie hammocks, and scrubby flatwoods. Right at the beginning two beautiful scrub jays flew in to check us out, one of which actually landed briefly ON each of our heads! That was about it for wild life until we were around half way through, when a juvenile bald eagle flew in over our heads and circled behind us to disappear into the pines. We also saw many deer tracks and some diving ducks on the nearly hidden “Big Lake”. With stops at benches along the way, it was a pleasant hike but became a little tedious towards the end as we walked in the soft sand. While resting up in our camper we had a surprise visit from a couple who wanted to know how we liked our Trailmanor. They have a 25yr old TM that he has done a lot of work to restore. They just wanted to see what newer models are like. It was a very pleasant conversation. Leftover pork mixed in with baked beans tasted pretty good for dinner, and then we spent a quiet evening trying to plan for the final two weeks of our trip and work on this blog and pictures from the day. Monday wasn’t too exciting. We fussed around in Venice, trying to find Verizon to find out why my phone’s hot spot was no longer working. When we finally found them, we found we had forgotten Ken’s cardinal rule: When all else fails, pull the battery for a few seconds. It took two times but then we were back in business. Back at the campground we had hot soup for lunch—it sounded good for the first time on the trip as the temperatures that had gotten down to the mid-thirties warmed only to the mid-sixties all day. We went down to Archer and Jim’s old Trailmanor to have a look at it and had another very pleasant conversation. Afterwards we rode our bikes about a mile to the picnic area where we combined the Lester Finley hiking trail with the South Creek trail for a 2¼ mile hike, both along the “blackwater” (fresh and salt water combining along the way) stream. It is all in hardwood hammock so it was shady and peaceful. We read in the sunshine for the rest of the afternoon until it cooled off into the mid-fifties. Marv built a fire and we roasted hot dogs before retiring to the camper to do some computing and more reading.
Tuesday was just about the best Valentine’s Day EVER!! We started at the Coffee Social at the Nature Center, where we talked to a couple from Missouri and learned about the Stephen Foster State Park. They inspired us to make a reservation there instead of going into southern Georgia on our way home. I also talked to two volunteers who encouraged us to bike the green trail, half of which is closed because of nesting Bald Eagles. It was a pretty easy 2 mile bike ride although there was some loose sand for a while so we had to walk that part. Halfway around there is a table set up, blocking the path but with a board telling about Bald Eagles, and a post that points to the clearly visible nest in the distance. We could see an adult and two babies and enjoyed watching them for a while. After eating lunch at our picnic table we packed up books, chairs, and drinks and drove to Caspersen Beach, which is known as a good place to find shark teeth. It was a lovely day--sunny, breezy, and mid-70s. We read, enjoyed the waves and looked for shark teeth, without much luck. We left about 5:00 and had showers before we went searching for a good place to have a Valentine dinner. We happened upon the Beckham on the Trail Bar & Grill, where we had a really tasty dinner. It had been a great day!
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