Wednesday morning, we sat in the van watching Sally and Nina the dog going off on their morning walk. Ellen remarked that Sally would probably come back with a scrub jay sighting. Sure enough, a few minutes later she returned to get Ellen. There were scrub jays right by the entrance station. Off they went to see scrub jays, brown thrashers and a plethora of little forest birds.
This energized them for another try to walk into the prairie wilderness. I pointed out a jeep trail on the map that seemed to avoid the first couple of miles of wooded trail. This made the prospect even more interesting. They convinced Harry to accompany them, but I chose to take another bike ride. While they walked north into the wilderness, I rode west on Rt. 40 in search of coffee. There was supposedly a store by Mill Dam Lake, 10 miles away.
About eight miles down the road, on the edge of town, I passed the Mill Dam Recreation Area and turned in to take a look. It is a national forest group campground, open by reservation only. It was closed and empty, but I took a look around anyway. It looked like a great spot for a group outing— a small motorcyle rally perhaps? A large number of picnic-tabled tent sites, a group campfire circle, restrooms and a swimming beach. The lake was very low, but the water looked clear. I suspect a mill dam somewhere, but didn't see one.
It was then off to the lakeside community in search of coffee. The only food store in town was the Pak and Sak. It had nothing that I'd by a pound of. (Oh, I forgot, coffee packaging has been down-sized to 12 ounce "pounds"... just like ice cream's new 14 oz. "pints". Do they think we don't notice?). As I was leaving the store, I noticed a billboard for some business at the Winn-Dixie Plaza, 2.5 miles further down the road. I surmised that the "Winn-Dixie Plaza" might have a Winn-Dixie, a super market. It was only a couple of more miles so off I went.
As I approached the area where the Winn-Dixie was supposed to be, there was a Forest Service ranger station. By the side of the road, in front of the station, I saw what I thought was a Sandhill Crane statue. As I slowed down to take a look, the "statue"moved. The crane was only an arm's length away as slowly passed it. I just looked at me but didn't move away.
There was, in fact, a Winn-Dixie at the Winn-Dixie Plaza, so I was able to find an acceptable 12 oz. bag of coffee, also a couple of ripe Bartlett pears. Addiction taken care of, I headed back up Rt. 40 towards Juniper Springs, only stopping a Lena's Seafood to look at their menu—"New England Seafood with Southern Hospitality". Much like Paul's Cohasset Auto Repair, the original Lena's is in Salisbury, MA.
The bird watchers had not returned by the time I made it back to Juniper Springs, a 28 mile ride, so I tried out the new coffee and waited. They returned around lunch time from a relatively successful walk—lots of Florida Scrub Jays were seen. They were, however, along the jeep road shortcut to the trail. Not much was actually seen on the prairie.
By Thursday it was time to move on to Salt Springs, but not without a good pancake breakfast. While Ellen & Sally were out on their morning walk, I got out the grill and mixed up a double batch of Ellen's Banana Pecan pancake batter. She'd made up the dry mix before we left Cohasset, so it was merely chopping and adding the pecans and bananas, along with eggs and milk, to the mix.
They'd said that they would be no longer than an hour, so I waited until that time before making up the batter. Twenty minutes later, Harry & I could wait no longer. We fired up the griddle pan and started making pancakes. By the time we'd made up the first batch, along with bacon of course, Ellen & Sally arrived. Even though we'd gotten a bit of a head start, there was plenty to go around and it was a good breakfast for a cool morning.
After cleaning up, it was time to move on to Salt Springs, the largest of Ocala's developed campgrounds. There was the prospect of a powered campsite, as most of the sites were supposedly non-reservable...little did we know. It was less than 20 miles away, so I elected to bicycle while the others drove. Most of the ride was along Forest Route 11, one of the few paved NFS roads It was a road running almost straight north, but nearly devoid of traffic. It also had a public rifle range right at the beginning of the road.
I stopped at the range (it was right next to the road). There were already about a dozen people on the range shooting at targets. It was an open National Forest facility, but there was no obvious range manager. There were, however, many posted rules. Even without official supervision, it seemed quite well organized. It was rather loud and I was the only one there without ear protection, so I quickly left and headed north. The ride was pretty uneventful, a few cars, a line of motorcycles, a bunch of Florida Scrub Jays, two logging trucks and a Bentley were about all I saw. It was only a few miles of county road from the end of NFS-11 to Salt Springs and I arrived about an hour after the others.
A powered site was not to be had. Even though most of the powered sites are non-reservable, the Forest Service allows stays of up to six months on almost all the sites from October through April. This means that a large number of people come down in October, take a site and stay the entire winter. Many of the folks staying at the campground have been coming for years. According to the staff, this has gotten a bit dicey in the past few years with more people wanting sites than available. Campers, who have been here in the past, have arrived to find nothing available. It is a pretty cheap winter stay as a full-hookup site (power, water and sewer) is only $16 a day if you have a federal senior pass and most of the snowbirds are retired and over 62.
Anyway, with all the "walk-up" sites taken for the season, Speedy and Shiny (our moniker for Harry & Sally's Roadtrek) were relegated to the primitive campground, which was hardly more primitive than Juniper and Alexander Springs. They had picked a site that was only available for two nights, being reserved for Saturday night, but we were planning on staying four nights. Given our experience with weekends elsewhere, I pointed out that it was possible that there wouldn't be an available site on Saturday night, if we waited until then This reasoning prevailed and we moved to a site where we could spend the entire weekend. It turned out that it was unnecessary as it has been a cold weekend and the primitive campground has not filled, but it seemed a good idea at the time.
After setting up camp, we took bicycles over to "downtown" Salt Springs, where there was an NFS visitor center (Ellen & Sally were still looking for an Ocala bird list). The volunteers there were quite helpful and, although they didn't have a bird list there, one had a list she had saved from last year and found it, copied it and brought over to our site later that afternoon. We also stopped at a vegetable stand that was in the same plaza as the visitor center and picked up some fresh strawberries before riding on to the little supermarket up the street. Harry went a bit further to the hardware store It wasn't the best stocked market we'd been to, but bread, milk and a few other things were available. The hardware store was better equipped. Harry found all that he was looking for.
It was back to camp. While the others took a stroll (looking for birds, of course), I set up our sun shelter and the table and chairs and made an afternoon coffee. When they returned, it was decided that an evening campfire would be good... but we had no wood. The area around the campground has been picked pretty clean of downed wood, but they had firewood at the vegetable stand. I figured that with couple of straps, I could attach a bundle to the rack on my bike. Although a few eyes rolled at this idea, I took the challenge and headed off.
It was easier than even I thought it would be. They had some heavy boxes just big enough to hold a dozen pieces of wood. The box strapped onto the rack easily and with a rather heavy load, I brought back several fires worth of wood.
Later as we were getting ready for dinner, Sally came back from a short walk with Nina. While ducking under a palm frond, she evidently managed to disturb a nest of tiny ticks which had gotten all over her. She didn't actually notice this until she was cooking dinner, when they started crawling out of her hair. Needless to say, this was rather disturbing. Harry took over the cooking while Sally ran off to the showers in the hope of getting them all off. It was a rather itchy dinner.
We later found out from one of the staff that the woods behind our site are pretty well infested with ticks. Spraying shoes and pants with DEET or other bug deterrent is a requirement if you want to walk off the trail.
It's now Saturday, but I'm only up through Thursday. It is tough when one falls behind. I hope to catch up by tomorrow. Continued in next post.
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