South Bound- January in Florida

While Florida may not be our favorite destination we decided to begin our winter travels by visiting with our numerous relatives and friends that are scattered around the state.

We started out at one of our favorite Florida State Parks, Anastasia State Park.

This St. Augustine park puts us about 30 minutes from Shelly’s sister Andrea and brother in-law Jeff.

What we love about this park is the easy access to its undeveloped five mile shoreline. It’s a great beach for walking and at low tide bike riding.

As beautiful as this stretch of undeveloped shoreline is, it has not been safe from development. Ron DiSantis, the governor, has proposed building a lodge, high rise condos and a golf course here. So far, local residents have rallied enough support to beat back this plan.

Florida weather in January can be iffy. This January it’s been colder than we remember from past visits. Biking and walking the beach have been a chilly affair. We decided to do a side trip Palatka and checkout the Ravine Gardens State Park.

This 152 acre park contains steelhead ravines surrounding a spring fed stream. Unlike ravines that are created by surface erosion, steelhead ravines are the result of seeping underground water which undercuts the sandy slopes and causing them to collapse.

In 1933 the city of Palatka decided to turn the ravines into a formal garden. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) got to work transforming the ravines into formal gardens.

The slopes of the ravines were heavy planted with over 40,000 azalea plants and two suspension bridges were built for viewing the plantings.

The city of St. Augustine has an interesting history and is always a fun place to wander. We started our wandering in the historically black neighborhood of Lincolnville.

The museum focuses on the vibrant African American community that thrived in St. Augustine. Definitely worth a visit if you find yourself in St. Augustine. (They don’t allow photography in the museum.)

The centerpiece of the college is the former luxury hotel Ponce de Leon. The hotel was built in 1888 by railroad magnate Henry Flagler and is now listed as a National Historic Landmark.

Adjacent to the state park is the St. Augustine Amphitheater. The parking lot of the amphitheater hosts a popular Saturday Farmer’s Market. Whenever we are camping we check the market out. During this visit we were greeted with a large red, white and blue striped tent.

It turned out that a circus was in town. We love the circus and snagged a couple of seats for their final performance.

We enjoyed all the performers; the clown, the juggling, the Ring Master, acrobatics and feats of strength, but “Lady Beast” had a unique act that got our attention.

Camping at Anastasia State Park is always a pleasure but we were ready to continue south on the Florida peninsula.

We moved to Wickham Park in Melbourne Florida. This was just a place holder for us while we went to visit our friends Bill and Sandy in Vero Beach.

From Melbourne we travelled further south to Jupiter and Johnathan Dickinson State Park.

Johnathan Dickinson is Florida’s largest state park in Southeast Florida. The park offers a variety of activities from hiking, biking or paddling along the Loxahatchee River which runs through the park.

We shared the trails with some of the local residents.

One of Pat’s high school friends, Lynne, lives in Jupiter and stopped by to spend the day. In addition, Bill and Sandy brought ther camper to the park to spend a few days. We booked a boat tour of the Loxahatchee River. The weather was cold and windy so we had the boat to ourselves.

We left Jupiter and headed north toward Ormond Beach and Tomoka River State Park hoping for warmer weather.

We lucked out with the weather during a beach visit with Pat’s brother Mike and his wife Donna.

Unfortunately, that warm weather was short lived, replaced with colder temperatures and rain. In between rain showers we managed to get out on our bikes and do some hiking.

Tomoka Point was the location of the Timucua Indian village of Nocoroco. It was the first Indian Village south of St Augustine encountered by the Spanish in 1605. At the time of European contact the Timucua population in Florida was in the tens of thousands. By 1698 exposure to European diseases reduced those numbers to less than 1000. The last known Timucuan died in 1767.

While the weather wasn’t great we enjoyed our time in the park. We then headed to the Gainesville area, a place we’ve never visited. We booked a spot at a private park, Santa Fe River Palms RV Resort. Private parks aren’t our first choice but this one was conveniently located.

The weather in Gainesville did not cooperate during our stay. We needed to disconnect our water for three consecutive nights to avoid damaging our water lines. One morning we awoke to 25 degrees~not the weather we had hoped for. The cold temperatures had us searching for some interesting indoor activities.

The Florida Museum of Natural History is located on the campus of the University of Florida and has an extensive collection of mammalian fossils. The above Mammoth skeleton was uncovered in the Florida panhandle and dates back 10-12,000 years.

Interestingly no land dinosaur bones can be found in Florida. Why? During the time of Dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, Florida was under water.

Next to the Natural History Museum is the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. The museum’s ten galleries opened in 1990.

Even though the weather conditions were not ideal we decided to wander the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens. This 68 acre facility has 24 major collections that are visually accessible along 1 1/2 mile paved walkway. This includes the state’s largest public display of bamboos as well as the largest herb garden in the Southeast.

Once we decided to get outside and do some hiking and biking regardless of the temperature; we chose Paynes Prairie and headed out.

The prairie in Paynes Prairie is a large Floridian highlands freshwater marsh. The park’s 22,000 acres has 270 species of birds, a herd of bison and wild horses descended from horses brought to Florida by early Spanish explorers. The park also has eight trails for hiking and biking.

Pat’s mother, Betty, visited Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park and was quite taken with the experience. Her experience motivated us to visit. This old Florida homestead was MK Rawlings home in the 1930’s where she wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The “Yearling”. The park consists of her home, farmyard and trails.

On our last day in Gainesville we made a quick trip to Devil’s Millhopper Geological State Park. The park consists of a 120 foot deep sinkhole with 132 stairs leading to an observation platform. While sinkholes are common in Florida, Devil’s Millhopper is unique in that it exposes 100 feet of rock layers for study.

We enjoyed our stay in Gainesville in spite of the cold temperatures. There is plenty we missed and would return on our next visit to Florida.