This is the start of the return trip. I left Milly’s today with only one item fer sure on my agenda between here and Reno, visiting Kurt in Austin.
I had planned to maybe visit Doug in Starkville, Mississippi (home of MSU!) but he is too far north of the Gulf and doesn’t have a tv. I had been toying with the notion of driving up there, 250 miles out of my way, to watch Thursday’s NBA on TNT featuring the Warriors in the second game. I’m not sure he’s a fan, but his former bandmates in Vinyl certainly are, so I know he’d be able to put up with the obsession. But driving that far to go to a sports bar (game will start at 9:30 local time) doesn’t quite have the same appeal, much as I would like to see Doug. Does that make me a bad person, too … shallow and materialistic or something?
Also … I was gonna visit Annie in Gulfport, but she said Tuesday and Wednesday weren’t good, and I’m coming on the Wednesday, so there you have it. This is not a bad thing I think. I’m ready for some road time.
It was predicted to me that this day, the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend would be a sucky day to drive, and by gosh it was! Approaching I-15 fifteen miles into the drive I could see the semis crawling across the overpass instead of zooming and right then I knew I was f—ed. In that lovely Florida way, I would alternate between racing at 73 mph (speed limit 70) and 0 mph. Finally I couldn’t take it, and switched back to the four-lanes, and haha, my road was under construction and only one lane for about 11 really frustrating miles. I switched back to the interstate before Gainesville. By then it was late enough that the citizens had made it home and traffic was semi-normal. I made to lovely Ocean Pond CG a little after dark. This is the last place I stayed on the way to Milly’s, and since I have to go back up the Florida peninsula to get outta here I go right by it, so why not? I lingered at Milly’s way later than I planned because there was a Cal hoops game on ESPN, and how could I not watch some of that? Also, it was hard to leave, who knows when we’ll see each other again. The drive was easily doable in theory, but when you leave at 2:30 and drive 5mph for some of it, you run out of daylight too soon.
I didn’t get a lot of esthetics from Ocean Pond this time; arriving in the dark and all, but it’s way cheap($6) with my new Senior Pass, has a nice shower, is nicer than a walmart in every way, even to just sit in the van and do this.
digression
[later note] … and I now realize I shouldn’t returned to Ocean Pond in the first place! I’ve often mentioned my 2002 epic road trip, comparing and contrasting with my experience on this road trip. It you’re having fun clicking through this stuff, and I hope you are, give a click or two to that one. It is kinda cute how I was trying to do the same thing I’m doing now, but with the less developed tools available then.
- The home page link is a map, crudely drawn before there was a Google Maps.
- Click the Stories button, and you get to little snippets of content, written as emails and organized here before there was a WordPress.
- And this is where I first tried to implement my interconnection idea – I called ’em Groups in 2002, Categories in 2010 … WordPress calls them tags.
But I digress on my digression … In the stories about Florida, the last time I visited my sister and all, I write about what an interesting place Manatee Springs State Park was and great time I had there. And it’s close to Milly’s, involves no freeway driving and wouldn’ve been a much more perfect solution to that day, if only I had the sense to read my own s–t at the time it would be most useful to do so. I am annoyed with myself.
In fact I think I confused Highlands Hammock with Manatee Springs. When I got to the former last week I wondered … where are the lovely freshwater springs that I remember? Answer, they’re at another park dumbass, which would know if you read yourself.
Monday
The wifi app tells me that there is wifi to be had at the Bob Evans (as in country sausage) on the strip outside Lake City at US 90 and I-15. So that was breakfast. Then more driving than I thought to go not nearly as far as I thought.
The major roads curved in ways I didn’t like, but there was a light gray line on the map that went straight in the direction I wanted, so I downsized from the four-lanes to the itty bitty roads. The first part of this road was very narrow but it had a little apron of 8″ of extra asphalt on each side to give you some wiggle room when semis come the other way even if it was kinda bumpy to have to put one set of wheels on the asphalt. That was kinda odd, but then the second part of the road was the same narrow road but without that 16″ inches of cushion, so me and the dump trucks had to really focus passing each other. Glad I drive a narrow euro-van instead being part of a dump truck on dump truck facedown! :)
I drove right past one wildlife refuge which I hate to do. I was still processing the guilt from doing that when the sign for another hove into view, so I went right into that sucker. It was St Marks NWR (no fancy native american names for these folks :), and it is where I spent the rest of the afternoon.
It had a lot of stuff going on. A little stretch of cypress swamp, a long stretch of tidal marsh, a fresh water pond right next to the Gulf, and then the actual Gulf itself, with a genuine lighthouse for that picturesque photo opp! I saw more birds new to me than anywhere else so far on this trip. The info signs say this is a big spot for Monarch Butterflies, and indeed I did see some (20-30), even on the last day of November.
There are White Ibis, which are very cool, I can imagine I’m in Egypt on the Nile.
There was a huge, very striking bird which must have been a Great Whitee Heron, like the Great Blue, except even bigger and not blue (haha), and with a longer, heaver bill it seemed to me. It was high-stepping around in the grasses stabbing with that big bill to nail some kind of luckless critter. Much more kinetic and fun to watch than these guys usually are. They seem to spend most of their lives posing.
[UPDATE] Wood Crane, and coots were coots, and Ibises rock!
The predominate swimming bird were coots I thought. but on further examination they were bigger and not the right shape, more like a goose with coot markings – a white bill and blackish feathers. I’ll go to the books and get back to you on this one.
Also, there are no-see-ums – there have to be! I can’t see um (haha), but how else to explain these sudden little pinpricks of sting I keep feeling all over my legs and arms – here and nowhere before, even the Everglades. No big deal as pests go, but fer sure they are annoying little f–ers.
To my dismay it was 4pm-ish when I got to St Marks (where did the day go?), but I stayed as long as I could. I hung around to see as much sunset as I thought I could get away with and still have daylight to get find a site in the National Forest down the road. I of course underestimated the time; it was almost dark by the time I got to the main road, with 30 miles more ahead of me. But I got real lucky. Right across the main road was a Wahulla County campground, utterly off the radar of all of my information sources, and so low key that I drove right past it. But I had the good sense to u-ey and inquire, so for $15 I’m plugged in and showered and chillin at a quiet c.g. in a really pretty place.
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