Thursday January 19th 2023

It was a windy and warm day. The next weather front is due to pass through overnight. Today the winds of the leading edge of the front were blowing things around. Leaves, branches and other woodland materials were blowing out of the trees all day. Despite the wind, the temperature climbed into the low eighties. As I’m writing this blog entry the rain has started to fall on the roof of my RV home.

My first walk of the day to the day use area at the lake turned into a much longer hike. I continued through the picnic area on the Lake trail out into the woods. I connected up with the Jackson’s Gap trail and the Chacala Trail. Making all of the correct turns resulted in a three to four mile loop. I passed through some of the areas that have been burned over the last few days and a few areas of forest that had been thinned with a chainsaw.

For the most part it was nice walk in the woods. I didn’t see any significant wildlife, which might be a good thing. There was a warning sign about bears at one of the trail intersections. Not to far along the trail from there I saw a foot print in the damp sand that I think might have been a bear. I imagine all of the controlled fires being set in various areas of the park have the wildlife a little disturbed.

This morning I made another attempt at booking a Florida state park reservation for next December. It wasn’t successful. I am now more convinced that the Web application is not able to handle the load at the start of the reservation window. This morning I managed to get the page to display a link for the site I wanted. Once I clicked on it everything froze until a time out message was displayed. This is the type of message that should never be seen by the user. It should be trapped by the application and translated into a graceful error handler. I’ll keep trying, but his is going to be difficult. There really isn’t much choice if I want a reservation. The telephone line has its own set of issues. Hopefully there are people working on fixing the application.