Oceanic Wilderness

This entry will be less heavy on photos as this is where our SD card went on the fritz. Instead I will try to paint a majestic picture with my words. Or not. I’ll let you decide. After leaving our stealth site at John Stretch Park we ascended the Lake Okeechobee dike. We’d originally planned to go around the east side of the lake even though it is a few miles longer, mostly because it had an extra city or two for food. Yeah, we plan for food. But when Shamrock Steve told us about the dike being closed on that side we altered our plans and went west. This…

So, the Florida Trail….before we started we spent four days in crowded civilization called South Florida. Having exited the state of Florida a year ago to hike the AT it was going to be fun to see some old sights and see friends. Our first stop was to Bass Pro Shop to purchase backpacker meals, fuel and some other essentials as well as to eat at the really yummy Islamorada Fish House for lunch. After lunch we drove an hour south to see our friend Christine who was leisurely working that afternoon. We chatted for a good while about all sorts of things from hiking to local geocaching gossip before…

We are home in Texas. We finished the Florida trail on Thursday around lunch time. It was very anti-climactic. There was no wooden sign, no three hour-4K foot climb, just the last blaze painted on a piece of wood and a three sided display board about the Florida Trail. Nothing to say we were done. We stood at the edge of the parking lot looking for a stray blaze, seeing if perhaps it would take us to the top of the Fort or maybe the water, but when I looked at the little paper on the board that outlined the mileage for the section it stated that mile 0.0 was…

So many things to write about. I blog in my head often but I never get around to writing it, being at a computer once every two weeks! A few days ago we hit 3,000 miles of hiking this year. We’ll wrap up the trail in about 11 days, or 220 miles left for the year. Shortly after it will be a year since we started this crazy hiking adventure on Springer Mountain. How can it be a year already? Since White Springs we have had beautiful weather. It’s supposed to stay nice until the end of the week and then it looks like a few rain days may be…

Rain. *bleeping* rain. So, yesterday was a day reminiscent of the day we stayed under the bridge with Cubbie and Dilly Dally in Pennsylvania. Cold, cold, miserable rain. There are practically no shelters on this trail, however there are a couple in this section and thankfully we ended up at one yesterday for lunch where we could actually eat lunch instead of stopping for five minutes to shove a few bars down our throat and continuing on with our heads down. If we hadn’t been close to town it would’ve been a place we’d of holed up in for the day. And then we white blazed into down. That’s kinda…

We are one month in and half way done with the Florida Trail. We haven’t seen the sun since Tuesday evening. Blech. This is supposed to be the Sunshine State, but I think we are too close to Georgia. Tomorrow we shall cross under I-10 and in a few days cross under I-75 and then I think we go under I-10 again at some point as we walk west towards Pensacola. In the passed week since we left suburban Orlando we finally entered the forest again. We got into Seminole State Forest before lunch last Friday and saw a controlled burn in the distance. Eventually the trail almost came next…