Florida
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10 Years Ago – Ocean to Lake Trail Hike
It suddenly hit me about a month ago that we’re wrapping up a decade here in a few weeks. To be honest, and I’ll elaborate more on it in my end-of-decade post later in December, my brain is still stuck somewhere in 2014-2016. It hasn’t caught up to 2019 yet. And then I realized that this Thanksgiving week is our 10th anniversary of our hike of the Ocean to Lake Trail, a side trail of the Florida Trail. Typically most people start on the eastern shore of Lake Okeechobee and then walk to the Atlantic Ocean on Jupiter Island at Hobe Sound Beach. We did this as a prep for…
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Coconut Point Sanctuary | Melbourne Beach, FL
It’s July 11, 2009, my 29th birthday. At this point we are already full throttle into planning our Appalachian Trail thru-hike. I mean, in the fact that we are pretty sure we are going to quit our jobs and pack away our things in early 2010 and head out on our thru-hike, pending on what our bank account looks like towards the end of the year of course. With that in mind we are kind of on a roll to hit up a lot of places in Florida that we may not see for a while after we move out of the state, including a trip back to the Melbourne…
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The Last Green Thread | FL Wildlife Corridor
If you’ve got 17 minutes today, hit play and watch. I have a lot of thoughts about this that I’ll have to expand on another day so I’ll leave it at this.
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Seep Loop Trail | Davis Mountains State Park
As with the Limpia Creek Trail, this trail in the state park is on the north side of the highway. I should have mentioned in the post yesterday that you will have to get the combination to the lock to open the gate over there and check in and out of the trail at the park office when you go for your hike. This trail is not on the trail map for the park but it is on the general facility map for the park and is about 1.25 miles round trip. It is very easy going, sloping gently down to Limpia Creek where it crosses/kind of follows the creek.…
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Juniper and Fern Hammock Springs
*Lots of photos, write-up and videos at the end!* #*(&#$*(& Air potato Palamedes swallowtails After our paddle on the Juniper Run, we had nothing else on the agenda so we opted to hang out at the Juniper Springs pool itself and take a walk over to its sister spring, Fern Hammock springs. I had forgotten to stow my bathing suit in the car that morning so I opted not to jump in and swim, which was probably a good thing because Chris said the water was rather chilly. He and Forest splashed around while I sprawled out on the ground next to the spring to relax a bit. Forest made…
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Paddling Juniper Run
One of the items on our list to do before we moved away from Florida was to paddle the Juniper Run in Ocala National Forest. Chris and I did paddle that run in 2009 and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s within the Juniper Prairie Wilderness so it doesn’t take much for you to feel as if you are in a very remote location. It rivals the feeling of being in areas of Big Cypress National Preserve or paddling the Turner River in Big Cypress/Everglades. The next time we’re in SW Florida I think we need to revisit the Turner River again. When we began planning out our limited time on our…
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Silver Springs State Park
After we left the Ocala National Forest, we drove towards Ocala and made a stop at Silver Springs State Park. It’s taken me some time to rack my brain and then look at Google Maps, but Chris and I had been here before in maybe 2007 or 2008. I recall a trip to Potts Preserve to look for orchids and maybe geocache and then a driving up to Ocala to geocache and I feel like we did something else in Ocala but maybe not. But, I did remember being somewhere near the town of Silver Springs because when we arrived there in June I definitely remembered the area. A quick…
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The 88 Store & The Florida Trail
After we left Astor Park and from visiting the Bartram Tree we continued west down SR 40 through Ocala National Forest. We had thought about going down to Alexander Springs at first but with the rain showers it didn’t seem like an ideal thing to do. Instead, Chris looked at the GPS and opted to head north on SR 19 towards Salt Springs into a part of the of the forest we hadn’t driven through before. Well, we’d been on a bit of it before, when we’d been transported from the end of the Juniper Springs Run at the Juniper Take-Out in 2009 when we’d paddled the Juniper Run. And…
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William Bartram Tree in Volusia County
After our visit to Deleon Springs, we headed west down SR40 towards Ocala National Forest. As we approached the town of Astor and the St. Johns River, I noticed a large live oak on the side of the road with a historical marker. Because we had nowhere specific to be, Chris pulled over and the three of us got out to see what made this tree interesting. The rain had mostly stopped at that point, maybe to drizzle, so a photo op was merited. William Bartram and his father John, were noted botanists and naturalists in the 1700s. They explored a large part of the eastern US during those early…
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DeLeon Springs State Park & Old Spanish Sugar Mill Restaurant
*Note: if you view this via email or a feed reader, I don’t think the last post loaded correctly, the Forest Friday post. There’s a video in it and it wasn’t automatically syncing to play unless you went to the website to read. I do recommend going back and clicking through to watch the video because Forest is super cute as he explains his drawing.* Before our trip to Florida I saw Florida Hikes post about the Old Spanish Sugar Mill restaurant in DeLeon Springs State Park. Since Chris had wanted to visit some of the springs in the state during our time before Disney, I thought this sounded like…