Saturday February 13th 2021

It rained off and on all night into the morning. By late morning the time between the rain showers well out lasted the duration of the showers. The sun actually managed to break through for a few minutes during the afternoon. It didn’t last long. The frequency of rain is forecast to increase over night. Tomorrow may be all rain.

I’m not complaining. The snow and ice to the north along with the deep freezing temperatures are far worse. Just fifty miles north of here they are getting more rain. Over five inches of rain with flash flood watches are in place a little to the north and west of here. A cold front is stalled out north of Gainesville.

Between the showers I got in one visit to the prairie observation platform and a walk to the day use area along Lake Wauburg. I spotted three wild horses today. The picture I took was at maximum zoom and I had to crop it some more to make the horses visible. I hope one of these days the horses are closer to the observation tower.

One of my tasks for the day was figuring out where to make a reservation for next January. Tomorrow is the day to make my next two week reservation. The problem I am running into is lack of available inventory. The 14th of January next year is the Friday before the MLK holiday weekend. Sites big enough for my RV home at most of the Florida State Parks I checked are already booked. At others there is only one site open for January 14th 2022. There seem to be many for Sunday the 16th and Monday the 17th. I’ve identified a couple of options to try in the morning, but I’m not holding out much hope. As always the fall back is a commercial campground for a few days, but I don’t have to book them as far in advance. In my experience, most commercial campgrounds won’t take a short term reservation this far in advance.

In past years I haven’t had this level of difficulty making reservations for Florida State Parks. I needed to make reservations for the most popular parks 11 months to the minute of availability, but there were usually a hand full of sites to chose from. At the less popular state parks I could count on hours or even days of availability. That meant I could try for the popular parks then fall back to the less popular parks. This year even the less popular parks are booked for the weekends starting on Wednesday or Thursday. It really seems to be caused by people that discovered camping during the pandemic.