Suwannee River, Florida

We arrived back in Florida from our two month holiday break. We visited with family in Jacksonville, took a car trip to Sarasota, where we stayed with our good friends Pete and Bonnie, and even had a catch up lunch with our Gator friends (formerly of La Crescenta) Judy and Bill. We traveled back to NE Florida to check on the motor home, which was being stored in St. Augustine. It was in good shape except that we had a dead battery and the air conditioner wasn’t working. Coach Net came out and jump started us so we could make it to Camping World where all was fixed.

We traveled inland and to the west of Gainesville on Feb 16 and stayed at a county park (Hart Springs). We used the Foghorn Outdoors Florida Camping book to find this park. Most of the campgrounds listed in Trailer Life are private, with paved parking lots, and very busy. We much prefer the larger, more secluded sites in state and county parks. The Foghorn Books give a great description and rating of all the parks.

Hart Springs had 60 large sites and was located off the beaten track. It was quiet and less than half full. We picked it because of its proximity to the Suwannee River. The Suwannee is a beautiful meandering river with large oak trees along the shore with Spanish moss hanging from them . During our walk along the river, we came across a sign warning fishermen to watch out for jumping sturgeon, because people had been hurt by these large nonnative fish jumping into boats.

Since we were only 25 miles to the west of Gainesville, a trip to the University of Florida was in order. (Whose national champions?) We walked around the campus and reminisced about old times and even saw the site where John proposed to Pris.

Our big adventure was that the temperature dropped to 21 degrees (it broke the all time record for low temperatures) and necessitated keeping the water dripping all night. The only problem was that the water pump that supplied the water to the campground froze, and at 3:30 AM we had no outside hookup water to drip. John saved the day (or night, in this case) by staying up and turning on our faucets every 15 minutes to keep the water flowing. Luckily, we had a small amount of water stored in our tanks. Pris contributed her bit by going back to bed.