Thursday March 23rd 2023

The day began on a positive note. I successfully booked another two week Florida State Park stay for next February. This particular site is at Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park. I will be on the same site I was on in January of this year. There were only two sites available this morning and I got the best of the two. Now I can sleep in for the next two weeks before I have to get up early to book the next two weeks.

The next part of the day was filled with physical labor as I prepared the rig for travel. The temperature rapidly climbed into the eighties as I worked to get everything packed and configured. Lake Manatee State Park is another older campground that doesn’t have room on the camping loops to hook up my towed car. Once everything is ready for travel, I move the car over to the day use area. After walking back I take the motorhome to the dumping station and then to the car in the day use area. By the time I got all these tasks done, it was close to 12:30PM as I pulled out of the state park.

I arrived at Lake Manatee State Park two weeks ago with an almost empty gas tank. My first order of business was to fill the tank. I scouted a Seven Eleven earlier in the week for easy access to the pumps. Once again a pickup truck with a very slow agenda put a monkey wrench in my plan. There was nowhere appropriate to wait for the truck to finish up at the pump I needed to access. I moved on in search of plan B for gas.

A Raceway station on the opposite side of the road a few miles closer to the highway was my solution. I had bought gas there before, but it necessitated crossing the four lane road at an intersection and maneuvering into the station from the back. I got lucky and no one was using the pump with easy access. Two hundred and twenty five dollars on two credit card passes later and I was ready to be on my way. It was after 1PM when I got on Interstate 75 heading north. It took over half an hour to travel the first eight miles.

The trip north and east on Interstate 75 and Intestate 4 was solid traffic. This area has some of the heaviest traffic I encounter in Florida during the winter. There were also several construction zones. Traffic slowed to a crawl in each construction zone. It was well after 3PM when I arrived at the check in station for Colt Creek State Park north of Lakeland Florida. I still had another two miles along a winding road to reach the campground. I’ll be here for two weeks before I return to the Sarasota Bradenton area. Lucky me I have to travel through all the traffic two more times in the next month.