- Summary
- A New Mode of Travel
- The Map
- Today's Ride
- Saturday Night Camping
- Musings on Frostptroof
- The Photo Link
Summary
Today's destination was Highlands Hammock State Park. We did it a different way today. We put the bike back on Speedy and drove to just outside Frostproof. I got out there and rode to Highlands Hammock via back roads and Ellen drove the direct route. She found herself at a very busy state park, being a Saturday. We had BBQ for dinner and are waiting for the noise to stop.
A New Mode of Travel
As I've written before, the 50 mile rides are just a little bit too long, so I'm trying to make them into 50 km rides (~30 miles). In this part of Florida, it is hard to find campgrounds that are only 30 miles apart and not pricey and crowded. One can find a commercial RV park in most towns, but they tend to be either mostly mobile homes or setup like a parking lot. It isn't really for us, even for just an overnight stay. The new strategy that we are trying for the next few days is for me to put the bike on Speedy, drive to a point about 30 miles from the the next nights camping spot. I hop out and Ellen leaves me and the bike behind. Hopefully, I'll catch up, usually by taking a quieter route. We'll see how it works. It went pretty well today.
Today's Map
Not only did we shorten my ride today, but we got through probably the busiest section of Florida that we have seen this trip. We left Lake Louisa in Speedy and turned south on US 27. We were in the Greater Disney World area. US 27 was a four to six lane road for about 45 miles, through Haines City, Winter Haven and Lake Wales. Heavy traffic, lots of traffic lights, lots of malls and subdivisions. US 27 is really the only through road south and, if I'd cycled it, it would have been on 27 to about Lake Wales. It would have been quite unpleasant, so say the least.
Ellen let me off at the intersection of Fort Meade Road and US 27, just outside of Frostproof, FL. At this point, I headed east on Fort Meade to a series of county roads that roughly paralleled US 27 almost all the way to the park. After passing by some older subdivisons and mobile home parks along Lake Clinch, I turned south onto a back road and plunged into orange country.
This was definitely a center of orange growing. I passed thousands of acres of orange groves, mostly ready for harvest, some being actively harvested. As I zigged southeastward over to Old Avon Park Road, it was nothing but oranges as far as the eye could see. There were only a few breaks with an occasional field of cows and a conservation area or two.
Old Avon Park Road lived up to its name. It was old. I'm not certain, but it seems that once a county titles a road "Old", it ceases to actively maintain it. This is the first paved road I've ridden that was cracked and bumpy. But it had no traffic. It may have been bumpy, but it was quiet. Only the birds made any sound.
One on the sounds I heard seemed to be a raptor screeching. I thought it might be another nest, so I stopped for a look. I didn't find the nest, but I did spot a large hawk sitting on a dead branch. It stayed long enough for a couple of photos, and just I packed the camera away, it flew right over me.
At one point I stopped for a break in the shade of an orange tree. It was amazing how full of oranges a tree can be. There must have been a thousand on this tree alone. They were picking them in several groves as I rode along. A purpose-built picking truck pulled of of a grove in front of me and drove up to a parked semi-trailer. It had a large circular tub on a crane arm. It looked like this was what pickers dumped their individual loads into. The driver could then lift the load and dump it into its own truck bed. When it pulled up to the big semi-trailer, the truck's entire bed box lifted up to the height of the trailer and tilted sideways to dump it load into the trailer.
At the end of Old Avon Park Road, I jogged via a couple of back roads and entered Avon Park.The road I ended up on was called Memorial Drive and ran through an industrial part of town and a somewhat seedy neighborhood, but it had a brand new bike path that ran alongside the road. The path continued all the way through town, but ended abruptly. Shortly thereafter, the road curved around Lake Sebring and popped onto Sebring Blvd., only a few hundred yards from US 27.
I crossed 27 and turned south onto quiet West Sebring residential streets. The roads went south through well-kept neighborhoods of smallish bungalows. The back streets went a few miles to to Hammock Road and entrance to the park. At the intersection with Hammock Road there was a small farm stand. I'd passed up getting any fruits and veggies at a farm stand a few days ago, then I had another 30 miles to go and didn't think they'd survive. But, I had only a mile to go this time, so I picked up some ripe tomatoes, cucumbers and an enormous grapefruit.
From there it was into the park.
Saturday Night Camping
The ranger at Wekiwa Springs warned Ellen that the park campgrounds filled up on weekends, but I don't think we ready for this. When I arrived, Ellen was at our site, which was, somewhat fortunately, at the end of a row. There were campers packed in everywhere. The campfire ring of the campsite next to ours was about three feet from Speedy (we were able to shift Speedy over by a few feet later). The campground has nearly 140 campsites and they are anything but widely spaced. Many had several large tents, certainly more that the allowed two, totally filling their sites. And, of course, they had more than the allowed two vehicles packed in.
Ellen said it gave her the feeling of being in a refugee camp. It wasn't quite that bad, but it is very tight and rather loud. It's about 11pm as I write this and there is still the beat of dance music coming from someone's sound system. The "campers" in a travel trailer two sites over have a large flat screen TV attached to the side of their trailer facing us. It was on when Ellen arrived and has been on ever since. You wonder why they bother to go camping. The older fellow in the campsite behind us has been staying for a while and said the entire place will be empty by tomorrow afternoon.
At least we were able to get away for dinner. There is a little snack bar in an old traditional CCC building away from the campground. Ellen found it on a walk through the park this afternoon. It was having all-you-can-eat BBQ this evening. We decided to partake of it. It wasn't the best BBQ we've had, but pretty good and was a quiet respite.
Musings on Frostproof
As I was riding through the short bit of Frostproof, I wondered how it got that name. Given the old subdivisons and mobile home parks, I imagined that it was some developer's marketing ploy to sell homes in Florida to cold northerners tired of winters in Minnesota. That's a good ol' Florida tradition. I was close, but not close enough. It was a marketing ploy, but not for real estate developers.
In the 1890s it was called Keystone City, a small agricultural town based largely on citrus. When they applied for a post office, the name Keystone City was rejected because a post office already existed in the similarly named Keystone Heights, Florida. The person applying for the post office then chose the name of Lakemont, as the town is set between two lakes. But, a citrus grower named Carson preferred Frostproof, because the area escaped a frost in 1894 that killed off most of Florida's orange crop.
When the application for a post office reached the Post Office, the name had mysteriously been changed to Frostproof. It could have had something to do with Mr. Carson volunteering to deliver the application to the post office on nearby Fort Meade. The town became Frostproof.
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