St. Petersburg, Lake Wales Ridge State Forest, Bok Sanctuary, Lake Kissimmee State Park, Withlacoochee State Forest (Hog Island)
(posted from the East Hernando Library at Brooksville, FL)
(this post covers 16-22 March, 2007)
----------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, 22 March –
After a quiet night at Lake Kissimmee we departed to the northwest to go see the Withlacoochee State Forest. We followed FL60 west and then 39 North through Plant City and Dade City to Brooksville. There we stopped at the Forest office for a basic orientation. We then drove to Hog Island campground in the Croom tract, largely because it sits astride the Florida Trail. We picked a campsite ($12) and parked the van for the day at about 1500. Labashi took a break but I wanted a bit of a walk so I strolled the Hog Island Nature Trail. It’s interesting to see the difference in the woods here. Now we have no palms and only a palmetto or two under a high canopy of live oaks for the most part. After supper Labashi and I hiked four miles on the Florida Trail, heading south from the FT trailhead near our campsite toward River Junction. This section had a nice, wide trail of sand covered by innumerable brown live-oak leaves. It changed from an open large-tree woods to a scrub woods to a palmetto-scrub mix and then back again several times in our walk but alas, no wildlife. We returned to the van just before dark and had a Bailey’s to celebrate our walk then blogged and read the evening away. I can read my digital watch face clearly until 2000 but by 2005 it’s impossible. But what a wonderful thing Daylight Savings Time is--- it’s so great to have these longer evenings.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 21 March –
After heading north up FL17 from our campsite in the State Forest, we spent the main part of the day at the Bok Sanctuary, the grand estate and summer home of Edward Bok, former editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The estate sits on the highest point in peninsular Florida, the Lake Wales Ridge, and has a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. Orange groves fill the county and we had the heady perfume of orange blossoms to accompany us all day. The chief tourist attraction at the Bok is the bell-tower—a carillion—but the highlight for us was the surrounding garden. These gardens are understated; less showy than many but very relaxing. Our favorite flower here was the Nun’s Orchid.
After Bok we drove northeasterly to Lake Kissimmee State Park and parked the van in a campsite ($20). We set up the bikes and pedaled to the marina to see the boat launch and then to the Observation Tower to see Lake Kissimmee off in the distance. We also saw ten wild turkeys in the middle distance displaying the most amazing colors as the light changed. We biked back to Mocha Joe for supper but wanted more so we biked to the Cow Camp. The park has a weekend ‘Cow Camp’ where a re-enactor plays the part of an 1876 Florida cracker cowboy. The camp is closed today but we still enjoyed touring the area and imagining the cowboy at work. He lives in a thatch-roofed open-sided hut where he has a ten-by-ten-foot rough-hewn wooden platform on which there are two rope beds and rudimentary table. A hand-pump serves the corral and the cowboy’s drinking and washing-up needs.
As we went on through the camp following the two-track road, we came upon an armadillo and watched him at work for some time. Then we re-mounted the bikes and continued to an open field where we came upon a dozen wild turkeys, including a large gobbler strutting and fanning out his feathers to impress the ladies. A little further on we saw eight deer and three turkeys in the cattle field.
With less than a half-hour to go before sunset we rode back to the hard road and on to the Observation Tower. The afternoon’s turkeys were gone and we saw only one deer from there until darkness overtook us and we returned to the van for the night.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 20 March –
We spent today in the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest. This morning’s walk took us on another section of the Florida Trail, this one departing School Bus Road’s south end in the Arbuckle Tract. After donning hunter-orange in deference to the turkey hunters, we walked north on the Trail to a blue-blazed trail leading into Hidden Hammock and a primitive campsite--- and quite a beauty of a campsite it is. We were a little surprised to find no privy or water source like we expect to find at designated campsites back home and I’m curious to see what the Florida Trail Guide has to say about those two subjects in this area. We noticed the primitive campsites where we stay in Mocha Joe also do not provide a water source though they do provide a very clean and regularly-serviced porta-potty and a dumpster. I’m wondering if the state has decided there’s liability in providing well water at camp sites or perhaps they just gave up after repeated vandalism of the pumps in the drive-in campsites.
After our two-mile warmup walk we had an early lunch and then drove to the wildlife check station. As we drove up we noticed a hunter taking a turkey out of his trunk to report in. This was excellent timing for us. Mac, the check-station monitor, weighed the turkey in (19 and a half pounds), measured his beard (ten inches), and spurs (1 and seven-eighths inches), examined it for indications of disease (none present) and took a picture of hunter and bird. Today is the opener of the season here at Lake Wales Ridge and there were two turkeys killed, the 19-1/2 pounder and a 12-pounder. This is a quota area, meaning that hunters line up (in their cars) at the check station sometime before 0430 to get one of today’s ten permits from Mac. But today it was easy—there were only five hunters requesting permits. The hunters then depart for their selected hunting area and enter the woods in the pre-dawn darkness and set up to await daylight, now between 0630 and 0700. The hunters may hunt until 1300 and then must check out at the same check-station. They are permitted one turkey per day, two per season. The Spring season is in two sessions of three days each.
After Mac finished checking the hunter out, we talked with him for an hour or so. He gave us a tour of the old cabin now used to store some of their gear and walked the property with us pointing out old cow pens and the well pump and watering trough which had been used here prior to the land becoming a state forest. Mac is a good-ol-Southern-boy and told us as he gets older his plannin’ gets longer and his doin’ gets shorter. In fact sometimes his plannin’ is so good, he has figgered out the doin’ doesn’t really need to be done atall.
Behind the cabin lies a mile-long nature trail so Labashi and I took that on. This one introduced us to cut-throat seeps, which are becoming rare in Florida. A cut-throat seep is grassy area of widely-separated pines and palms in a meadow of cut-throat grass. This is possible only in areas where water seeps from a nearby marshy area and provides just the right conditions for this type of area to grow.
The trail then took us on to ‘ecotones’ (edges) of Flatwoods, Flatwood Marsh, and Pine Scrub ecological zones.
We then drove to Lake Godwin, a small, very remote-feeling lake at the end of a sandy two-track trail. After checking out the lake we relaxed in the van, reading and blogging. I finished the excellent ‘West with the Night’ and am looking forward to some Randy Wayne White novels about south Florida given to us by our St. Pete friends.
At 1700 we drove to the trailhead of a blue-blaze trail which would intersect the Florida Trail just before it turns toward Lake Arbuckle. That walk took us through lush palmetto and slash pine to the lake. There we met a young couple enjoying a backwoods picnic at the lake and we chatted for a few minutes about the gators they had seen nearby on earlier walks in this area. We continued north along the trail to the lake’s edge but saw no alligators. The wind had come up and the beautiful lake had small whitecaps, giving the lakeside trail a wild feel. Palmetto crowded the trail close to the water and it was easy to imagine the alligators hiding in wait for us in the deep bush. But they don’t do that. And if they do, they’re very good at not leaving tracks in the sandy trail between the water and the palmettos. I should know—I looked very closely for those tracks!
We returned to the van by 1900 and drove to our campsite at Reedy Creek where we had a late dinner and then read and blogged the evening away.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 19 March –
In yesterday’s email we learned from our neighbor back home that our mailbox had been hit and knocked off its mount sometime Saturday. Everything had been normal when the neighbor departed for work Saturday morning (after the previous day’s 8-1/2 inches of snow) but when he returned that evening our mailbox lay in the snow and large truck-size tire marks ran close to the pole. I thought it might have been the snowplow but the neighbor doesn’t think so because of the curve of the track—it appeared to be a turn-in right at the box.
Whoever it was must have departed with significant damage to his front end if it wasn’t the snow plow. The 3 x 3 steel arm he broke off surely would have left a mark. Anyway, this morning I called home to our post office, to our township police department and to our neighbor to get it reported and to thank the neighbor for taking the mailbox to his house until we get home.
We said a reluctant goodbye to St Petersburg and headed back inland away from the city and back to the forest. We drove east for a few hours to the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest near Frostproof. We checked at the local State Forest office and found we can indeed stay in the primitive campgrounds and there are several hiking trails to choose from, including a section of the Florida Trail. We do have to be careful in the south tract where turkey hunting season starts again tomorrow but hunting is not allowed in the north tract and it has several hiking trails. And if we really want to do a trail in the south tract we need only wait until the turkey hunters quit hunting by the 1300 deadline.
We drove to the south tract (the Arbuckle) and picked a spot in the Reedy Campground and took it easy for a few hours on this perfect 75-degree day. There’s only one other camper here so it appears to be another great deal—a $5 campsite in a beautiful area and hardly anybody around.
We had supper around 1700 and then walked a three-mile section of the Florida Trail from the trailhead right by the campground. We walked south on the trail and very soon started following Reedy Creek on its eastern bank. This is something new for us in Florida. The other trails have all been flat. But on this one, Reedy Creek follows a nice ravine and the trail follows along on the edge of that ravine, giving us views from above. The trail is mostly lined by palmettos and smaller live-oaks and overlooks the tannin-tinted creek winding back and forth and festooned with many different types of growth. There are cattails and arrowhead and tall grasses and palmetto and many different types of trees. The foliage is a little different here. Where further south it was all green, here we see a mix of luxuriant green mixed with some dead-brown—very much a look of a new Spring. That’s appropriate. The ranger told us today is the first day of Spring.
We came upon the cutest little armadillo we’ve ever seen. He (or she) didn’t know we were there at first so we had a chance to watch him work, plowing away with his nose. Once he noticed us he scampered off the trail yet still stayed close so we watched him for another twenty minutes before we moved on.
After two miles we came to a blue-trail intersection which we knew would take us back to our departure point. This trail made a bee-line across a fairly recent burn but we had a wonderful golden-hour sun just setting as we walked back. We then spent the evening blogging and reading.
--------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 18 March –
This morning our friends introduced us to a local breakfast landmark, The Dome. It’s a friendly little neighborhood spot which feels just right on a Sunday morning—a great place to read the Sunday paper and sip a coffee after a hearty breakfast.
We then drove to an upscale sporting goods store called “Bill Jackson” to shoot. I wish we had ranges like this back home. It was like going to a small version of a Cabelas or Bass Pro but behind the gun section was a six-lane handgun range. We spent an hour or so punching holes in paper and I was very happy to give both guns a good workout and also to get a chance to shoot some guns I’ve not tried before. I had an immediate jamming problem with my target pistol at first but traced that to the ammo—it apparently doesn’t like the cheapie stuff.
Later that afternoon we drove downtown to the waterfront and took the Looper ride with our friends. The Looper is a tourist trolley which circles downtown and gives a half-hour narrated tour, all for a quarter.
As we headed home we shopped at a local Publix in preparation for grilling tonight. We had a Portuguese beef and sausage plus home-made Sangria—yeah, baby!
After dinner we sat around working down the giant Sangria tub but finally had to give up on it and retire to our reading for the night.
--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 17 March –
Today our friends took us to pretty little Weedon Park for breakfast. We had stopped at Starbucks and the St Pete Bagel Company along the way and had our feast at one of Weedon’s picnic pavilions.
We then drove into Tampa to the Tampa Art Museum to see an exhibit on Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and Frederick Church. This exhibit had a little of everything. It featured landscape painters and their role in establishing interest in tourism in the areas they painted. We had sections devoted 19th Century paintings and studies of the American West (particularly the Grand Canyon and Yosemite), the Catskills, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, and Maine.
After the museum we went to Ybor City for a late lunch at The Columbia, a Spanish restaurant, where we shared a couple of pitchers of Sangria while enjoying our unique meals (I had a terrific seafood paella). The town was preparing for tonight’s St Patrick’s Day parade and it seemed a little odd to be in a Cuban historic district and passing cigar bars and Latino architecture yet we were seeing the gathering throng of party-goers dressed in their bright-green St Patty’s Day togs.
Back home later that evening we had a traditional corned-beef-and-cabbage meal in celebration of the holiday.
--------------------------------------------------
Friday, 16 March-
Today we left our wonderful little campground in OK Slough to head north. We had spent the night in the Wild Cow Primitive Campground, hoping to either see or hear a panther. We arose early after a perfectly quiet night—we had heard only owls and those off in the distance last night. After last night’s rain we hoped to see fresh panther tracks in the sandy two-track but the sand was too hard.
As we drove toward the entrance gate we saw an oncoming pickup slowly rolling along with six or eight radio-collared hunting hounds around it. The hounds were forging off into the bush here and there but mostly just crossing back and forth, very intently trying to catch a scent along the roadside. We nodded to the two guys in the pickup and noticed they were in some type of uniform and had an insignia on the side of the pickup. That meant they’re not hunters but we didn’t catch the wording on the insignia.
After exiting the forest road we stopped at the nearby state forest office. We told them how much we had enjoyed our visit and asked about the pickup and hounds. We learned those are the panther trackers. They spend their nights ranging the roads with the hounds, tracking panthers. In some cases they are replacing batteries on tracking collars but often they’re just trying to find additional panthers to collar. Once the dogs pick up a scent, they tear in after the panther and eventually tree it. The trackers then shoot the panther with a tranquilizer gun and then weigh and measure it and give it a health checkup and then collar it. The ranger told us there are five to eight panthers back in the area of the primitive camp and new road, i.e., the lower section of the state forest.
We said our goodbyes and headed north, bound for St. Petersburg. But we were in no rush to get on boring old I-75 so we headed directly north through Labelle and on to Arcadia, marveling at the many ranches, then the miles and miles of pine tree farms and then even more impressive orange groves. Florida’s interior is very different from the coasts—very much a working area. The roads are filled with large trucks, many of them hauling oranges and grapefruits to the massive processing plants we’d occasionally see.
At Arcadia we stopped for lunch at a Wendy’s and our first significant rain began there. Today is our 29th day on the road and our first rain of more than ten minutes duration. We drove toward I-75 and eventually joined it but lasted only an exit—traffic was terrible. We had four lanes of stop-and-go traffic and things weren’t improving. Labashi plotted us an alternate route through Bradenton and that turned out to be a great idea. Traffic thinned out and we were soon crossing the I-275 Skyway bridge into St. Petersburg. By 1400 we had arrived at our friend’s house where we were staying the weekend.
We spent the afternoon chatting away and catching up with our friends and then went to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant in the St. Petersburg Baywalk district. After such a wonderful dinner we walked through a John Lennon/Yoko Ono exhibit of drawings in the Baywalk and then returned home and retired early to read before falling asleep early after the busy day.
(posted from the East Hernando Library at Brooksville, FL)
(this post covers 16-22 March, 2007)
----------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, 22 March –
After a quiet night at Lake Kissimmee we departed to the northwest to go see the Withlacoochee State Forest. We followed FL60 west and then 39 North through Plant City and Dade City to Brooksville. There we stopped at the Forest office for a basic orientation. We then drove to Hog Island campground in the Croom tract, largely because it sits astride the Florida Trail. We picked a campsite ($12) and parked the van for the day at about 1500. Labashi took a break but I wanted a bit of a walk so I strolled the Hog Island Nature Trail. It’s interesting to see the difference in the woods here. Now we have no palms and only a palmetto or two under a high canopy of live oaks for the most part. After supper Labashi and I hiked four miles on the Florida Trail, heading south from the FT trailhead near our campsite toward River Junction. This section had a nice, wide trail of sand covered by innumerable brown live-oak leaves. It changed from an open large-tree woods to a scrub woods to a palmetto-scrub mix and then back again several times in our walk but alas, no wildlife. We returned to the van just before dark and had a Bailey’s to celebrate our walk then blogged and read the evening away. I can read my digital watch face clearly until 2000 but by 2005 it’s impossible. But what a wonderful thing Daylight Savings Time is--- it’s so great to have these longer evenings.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 21 March –
After heading north up FL17 from our campsite in the State Forest, we spent the main part of the day at the Bok Sanctuary, the grand estate and summer home of Edward Bok, former editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal. The estate sits on the highest point in peninsular Florida, the Lake Wales Ridge, and has a fantastic view of the surrounding countryside. Orange groves fill the county and we had the heady perfume of orange blossoms to accompany us all day. The chief tourist attraction at the Bok is the bell-tower—a carillion—but the highlight for us was the surrounding garden. These gardens are understated; less showy than many but very relaxing. Our favorite flower here was the Nun’s Orchid.
After Bok we drove northeasterly to Lake Kissimmee State Park and parked the van in a campsite ($20). We set up the bikes and pedaled to the marina to see the boat launch and then to the Observation Tower to see Lake Kissimmee off in the distance. We also saw ten wild turkeys in the middle distance displaying the most amazing colors as the light changed. We biked back to Mocha Joe for supper but wanted more so we biked to the Cow Camp. The park has a weekend ‘Cow Camp’ where a re-enactor plays the part of an 1876 Florida cracker cowboy. The camp is closed today but we still enjoyed touring the area and imagining the cowboy at work. He lives in a thatch-roofed open-sided hut where he has a ten-by-ten-foot rough-hewn wooden platform on which there are two rope beds and rudimentary table. A hand-pump serves the corral and the cowboy’s drinking and washing-up needs.
As we went on through the camp following the two-track road, we came upon an armadillo and watched him at work for some time. Then we re-mounted the bikes and continued to an open field where we came upon a dozen wild turkeys, including a large gobbler strutting and fanning out his feathers to impress the ladies. A little further on we saw eight deer and three turkeys in the cattle field.
With less than a half-hour to go before sunset we rode back to the hard road and on to the Observation Tower. The afternoon’s turkeys were gone and we saw only one deer from there until darkness overtook us and we returned to the van for the night.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 20 March –
We spent today in the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest. This morning’s walk took us on another section of the Florida Trail, this one departing School Bus Road’s south end in the Arbuckle Tract. After donning hunter-orange in deference to the turkey hunters, we walked north on the Trail to a blue-blazed trail leading into Hidden Hammock and a primitive campsite--- and quite a beauty of a campsite it is. We were a little surprised to find no privy or water source like we expect to find at designated campsites back home and I’m curious to see what the Florida Trail Guide has to say about those two subjects in this area. We noticed the primitive campsites where we stay in Mocha Joe also do not provide a water source though they do provide a very clean and regularly-serviced porta-potty and a dumpster. I’m wondering if the state has decided there’s liability in providing well water at camp sites or perhaps they just gave up after repeated vandalism of the pumps in the drive-in campsites.
After our two-mile warmup walk we had an early lunch and then drove to the wildlife check station. As we drove up we noticed a hunter taking a turkey out of his trunk to report in. This was excellent timing for us. Mac, the check-station monitor, weighed the turkey in (19 and a half pounds), measured his beard (ten inches), and spurs (1 and seven-eighths inches), examined it for indications of disease (none present) and took a picture of hunter and bird. Today is the opener of the season here at Lake Wales Ridge and there were two turkeys killed, the 19-1/2 pounder and a 12-pounder. This is a quota area, meaning that hunters line up (in their cars) at the check station sometime before 0430 to get one of today’s ten permits from Mac. But today it was easy—there were only five hunters requesting permits. The hunters then depart for their selected hunting area and enter the woods in the pre-dawn darkness and set up to await daylight, now between 0630 and 0700. The hunters may hunt until 1300 and then must check out at the same check-station. They are permitted one turkey per day, two per season. The Spring season is in two sessions of three days each.
After Mac finished checking the hunter out, we talked with him for an hour or so. He gave us a tour of the old cabin now used to store some of their gear and walked the property with us pointing out old cow pens and the well pump and watering trough which had been used here prior to the land becoming a state forest. Mac is a good-ol-Southern-boy and told us as he gets older his plannin’ gets longer and his doin’ gets shorter. In fact sometimes his plannin’ is so good, he has figgered out the doin’ doesn’t really need to be done atall.
Behind the cabin lies a mile-long nature trail so Labashi and I took that on. This one introduced us to cut-throat seeps, which are becoming rare in Florida. A cut-throat seep is grassy area of widely-separated pines and palms in a meadow of cut-throat grass. This is possible only in areas where water seeps from a nearby marshy area and provides just the right conditions for this type of area to grow.
The trail then took us on to ‘ecotones’ (edges) of Flatwoods, Flatwood Marsh, and Pine Scrub ecological zones.
We then drove to Lake Godwin, a small, very remote-feeling lake at the end of a sandy two-track trail. After checking out the lake we relaxed in the van, reading and blogging. I finished the excellent ‘West with the Night’ and am looking forward to some Randy Wayne White novels about south Florida given to us by our St. Pete friends.
At 1700 we drove to the trailhead of a blue-blaze trail which would intersect the Florida Trail just before it turns toward Lake Arbuckle. That walk took us through lush palmetto and slash pine to the lake. There we met a young couple enjoying a backwoods picnic at the lake and we chatted for a few minutes about the gators they had seen nearby on earlier walks in this area. We continued north along the trail to the lake’s edge but saw no alligators. The wind had come up and the beautiful lake had small whitecaps, giving the lakeside trail a wild feel. Palmetto crowded the trail close to the water and it was easy to imagine the alligators hiding in wait for us in the deep bush. But they don’t do that. And if they do, they’re very good at not leaving tracks in the sandy trail between the water and the palmettos. I should know—I looked very closely for those tracks!
We returned to the van by 1900 and drove to our campsite at Reedy Creek where we had a late dinner and then read and blogged the evening away.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 19 March –
In yesterday’s email we learned from our neighbor back home that our mailbox had been hit and knocked off its mount sometime Saturday. Everything had been normal when the neighbor departed for work Saturday morning (after the previous day’s 8-1/2 inches of snow) but when he returned that evening our mailbox lay in the snow and large truck-size tire marks ran close to the pole. I thought it might have been the snowplow but the neighbor doesn’t think so because of the curve of the track—it appeared to be a turn-in right at the box.
Whoever it was must have departed with significant damage to his front end if it wasn’t the snow plow. The 3 x 3 steel arm he broke off surely would have left a mark. Anyway, this morning I called home to our post office, to our township police department and to our neighbor to get it reported and to thank the neighbor for taking the mailbox to his house until we get home.
We said a reluctant goodbye to St Petersburg and headed back inland away from the city and back to the forest. We drove east for a few hours to the Lake Wales Ridge State Forest near Frostproof. We checked at the local State Forest office and found we can indeed stay in the primitive campgrounds and there are several hiking trails to choose from, including a section of the Florida Trail. We do have to be careful in the south tract where turkey hunting season starts again tomorrow but hunting is not allowed in the north tract and it has several hiking trails. And if we really want to do a trail in the south tract we need only wait until the turkey hunters quit hunting by the 1300 deadline.
We drove to the south tract (the Arbuckle) and picked a spot in the Reedy Campground and took it easy for a few hours on this perfect 75-degree day. There’s only one other camper here so it appears to be another great deal—a $5 campsite in a beautiful area and hardly anybody around.
We had supper around 1700 and then walked a three-mile section of the Florida Trail from the trailhead right by the campground. We walked south on the trail and very soon started following Reedy Creek on its eastern bank. This is something new for us in Florida. The other trails have all been flat. But on this one, Reedy Creek follows a nice ravine and the trail follows along on the edge of that ravine, giving us views from above. The trail is mostly lined by palmettos and smaller live-oaks and overlooks the tannin-tinted creek winding back and forth and festooned with many different types of growth. There are cattails and arrowhead and tall grasses and palmetto and many different types of trees. The foliage is a little different here. Where further south it was all green, here we see a mix of luxuriant green mixed with some dead-brown—very much a look of a new Spring. That’s appropriate. The ranger told us today is the first day of Spring.
We came upon the cutest little armadillo we’ve ever seen. He (or she) didn’t know we were there at first so we had a chance to watch him work, plowing away with his nose. Once he noticed us he scampered off the trail yet still stayed close so we watched him for another twenty minutes before we moved on.
After two miles we came to a blue-trail intersection which we knew would take us back to our departure point. This trail made a bee-line across a fairly recent burn but we had a wonderful golden-hour sun just setting as we walked back. We then spent the evening blogging and reading.
--------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 18 March –
This morning our friends introduced us to a local breakfast landmark, The Dome. It’s a friendly little neighborhood spot which feels just right on a Sunday morning—a great place to read the Sunday paper and sip a coffee after a hearty breakfast.
We then drove to an upscale sporting goods store called “Bill Jackson” to shoot. I wish we had ranges like this back home. It was like going to a small version of a Cabelas or Bass Pro but behind the gun section was a six-lane handgun range. We spent an hour or so punching holes in paper and I was very happy to give both guns a good workout and also to get a chance to shoot some guns I’ve not tried before. I had an immediate jamming problem with my target pistol at first but traced that to the ammo—it apparently doesn’t like the cheapie stuff.
Later that afternoon we drove downtown to the waterfront and took the Looper ride with our friends. The Looper is a tourist trolley which circles downtown and gives a half-hour narrated tour, all for a quarter.
As we headed home we shopped at a local Publix in preparation for grilling tonight. We had a Portuguese beef and sausage plus home-made Sangria—yeah, baby!
After dinner we sat around working down the giant Sangria tub but finally had to give up on it and retire to our reading for the night.
--------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 17 March –
Today our friends took us to pretty little Weedon Park for breakfast. We had stopped at Starbucks and the St Pete Bagel Company along the way and had our feast at one of Weedon’s picnic pavilions.
We then drove into Tampa to the Tampa Art Museum to see an exhibit on Winslow Homer, Thomas Moran, and Frederick Church. This exhibit had a little of everything. It featured landscape painters and their role in establishing interest in tourism in the areas they painted. We had sections devoted 19th Century paintings and studies of the American West (particularly the Grand Canyon and Yosemite), the Catskills, Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks, and Maine.
After the museum we went to Ybor City for a late lunch at The Columbia, a Spanish restaurant, where we shared a couple of pitchers of Sangria while enjoying our unique meals (I had a terrific seafood paella). The town was preparing for tonight’s St Patrick’s Day parade and it seemed a little odd to be in a Cuban historic district and passing cigar bars and Latino architecture yet we were seeing the gathering throng of party-goers dressed in their bright-green St Patty’s Day togs.
Back home later that evening we had a traditional corned-beef-and-cabbage meal in celebration of the holiday.
--------------------------------------------------
Friday, 16 March-
Today we left our wonderful little campground in OK Slough to head north. We had spent the night in the Wild Cow Primitive Campground, hoping to either see or hear a panther. We arose early after a perfectly quiet night—we had heard only owls and those off in the distance last night. After last night’s rain we hoped to see fresh panther tracks in the sandy two-track but the sand was too hard.
As we drove toward the entrance gate we saw an oncoming pickup slowly rolling along with six or eight radio-collared hunting hounds around it. The hounds were forging off into the bush here and there but mostly just crossing back and forth, very intently trying to catch a scent along the roadside. We nodded to the two guys in the pickup and noticed they were in some type of uniform and had an insignia on the side of the pickup. That meant they’re not hunters but we didn’t catch the wording on the insignia.
After exiting the forest road we stopped at the nearby state forest office. We told them how much we had enjoyed our visit and asked about the pickup and hounds. We learned those are the panther trackers. They spend their nights ranging the roads with the hounds, tracking panthers. In some cases they are replacing batteries on tracking collars but often they’re just trying to find additional panthers to collar. Once the dogs pick up a scent, they tear in after the panther and eventually tree it. The trackers then shoot the panther with a tranquilizer gun and then weigh and measure it and give it a health checkup and then collar it. The ranger told us there are five to eight panthers back in the area of the primitive camp and new road, i.e., the lower section of the state forest.
We said our goodbyes and headed north, bound for St. Petersburg. But we were in no rush to get on boring old I-75 so we headed directly north through Labelle and on to Arcadia, marveling at the many ranches, then the miles and miles of pine tree farms and then even more impressive orange groves. Florida’s interior is very different from the coasts—very much a working area. The roads are filled with large trucks, many of them hauling oranges and grapefruits to the massive processing plants we’d occasionally see.
At Arcadia we stopped for lunch at a Wendy’s and our first significant rain began there. Today is our 29th day on the road and our first rain of more than ten minutes duration. We drove toward I-75 and eventually joined it but lasted only an exit—traffic was terrible. We had four lanes of stop-and-go traffic and things weren’t improving. Labashi plotted us an alternate route through Bradenton and that turned out to be a great idea. Traffic thinned out and we were soon crossing the I-275 Skyway bridge into St. Petersburg. By 1400 we had arrived at our friend’s house where we were staying the weekend.
We spent the afternoon chatting away and catching up with our friends and then went to dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant in the St. Petersburg Baywalk district. After such a wonderful dinner we walked through a John Lennon/Yoko Ono exhibit of drawings in the Baywalk and then returned home and retired early to read before falling asleep early after the busy day.
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
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