Tuesday September 12th 2023

It was a very humid day without much wind. Combined with high temperature in the low nineties it was a very uncomfortable day. Late in the day into the evening there was the sound of thunder in the area with dark clouds and lightening on the horizon. Most of the storms formed east of here and moved east after they formed. It didn’t rain here.

Since I was so tired yesterday, I went to bed early last night. This morning I was up earlier than normal and took a walk around the park before breakfast. The campground was pretty empty last night. I counted seven occupied sites out of thirty in my loop. I haven’t checked the other loop of thirty campsites yet. The park staff has done some maintenance since my last visit in April. They have painted new site numbers on the pavement along the side of the park road and new gravel has been added to some of the sites. Currently they are doing some cement work on one of the pavilions in the day use area.

This was mostly a day to settle in and relax. I took two additional walks around various areas of the park during the day. The water level in Lake Manatee is a little higher than I’m used to seeing. The walkway onto the floating docks at the boat launch area are close to level rather than a walk down to the dock. There are warnings posted about possible blue green algae in the lake. That may be the reason I didn’t see anyone using the boat launch. Possibly it will be different when the weekend arrives.

Monday September 11th 2023

The heat and humidity made for an exhausting travel day. As with any travel day it had its challenges. The first started shortly after I pulled out of my site shortly before 11AM and finished at my arrival at Lake Manatee State Park around 3PM.

I had my first issue with dumping my Black holding tank when I stopped at the dumping station on the way out of the campground. After connecting up the dump hose and opening the valve nothing came out. Since there was no one waiting behind me and it was a quiet period, I got out a hose and connected it to the flush line. After about half an hour of flushing and dumping I got the tank partially emptied. The gauge still indicated more than a little in the tank. I added a few gallons of water to the tank before travel. My goal was to provide something to slosh around during my drive. When I arrived at my destination my first stop was the dump station to see if the holding tank constipation was cured by the water laxative during the drive. It seems to have been successful.

Traffic was heavy on Interstate 75, but probably not worse than normal. Once I was south of the Florida Turnpike the real heavy traffic near Ocala thinned out until I reached the intersection of Interstate 275 north of Tampa. Traffic the rest of the way was very heavy, but it never backed up. Even the bridge construction over the Manatee River north of Bradenton didn’t cause a backup today. The last eight miles of the journey on state road 64 wasn’t any better. I had to lock up the brakes to avoid one idiot driver. I’ll be finding displaced stuff inside the RV for the next few day. The bottom line is the drive took my full attention.

I finished setting up for my stay by 4PM. I’ll be here for two weeks assuming mother nature doesn’t send a hurricane this way. This deep in the Florida peninsular I’ll need to react and run from a hurricane quicker than in the northern part of the state. Currently there is nothing threatening this area in the pipeline.

Sunday September 10th 2023

It was a little warmer and more humid today. The temperature peaked in the low nineties. A little outside exercise is all it took to develop a good sweat. Walking down to the river was not a fun activity today.

The first thing on my non agenda agenda was scoping out a good place to buy gas tomorrow on my way out. I know from experience that the stations near the interstate get very busy and become difficult to navigate with the big motorhome pulling a car. The last time I tried to use them I had to wait for a long time for cars to move so I could get out. I think I’ve identified a better alternative before I get to the interstate. If there isn’t a lot of traffic it will work. I have also identified an alternate location.

On my way back from my scouting trip I stopped at Walmart for groceries. Sunday isn’t my prefer day to fight the crowds shopping, but I was in need of a few things. Specifically I was out of butter substitute and orange juice. Other things that I needed are much easier to work around. As expected the store was very busy and it took a very long time to check out.

I only took one walk to the river today. The monkeys are still in the area. Today they were along the trail and river at the kayak launch. There were a couple of other people watching them when I arrived. They were either braver or more foolish then me as they approached them and tried to interact with the monkeys. I kept my distance and took photos of the monkeys in the trees. I don’t know if it was the monkey activity or the time of day, but there weren’t any birds in that area of the river.

Tomorrow is a travel day. I am moving south to the Bradenton Florida area. It is about 150 miles mostly down Interstate 75. Traffic is always heavy all the way south. I expect it will take three hours if traffic cooperates and four if it doesn’t. Since checkout time here is 1PM I haven’t done my day before outside task preparations yet. It will be a busy morning.

Saturday September 9th 2023

After yesterday’s long day of travel I slept well last night. Still, it was tough to get started this morning. I only have two days to enjoy the park. In the past I have had two weeks. Lingering over breakfast was not in the cards.

I took two walks to the Silver River today. It is about three quarters of mile down a trail that is actually a dirt access road for park vehicles. At the end of the road is a kayak and canoe launch into the river. The water level is a little higher than I’m used to seeing it during my previous visits in the winter. During my morning visit to the river it was filled with kayakers and powered boats. There were even manatee in the water according to the kayakers. I couldn’t see any from shore.

During my second hike down to the river at the end of the day. I didn’t see anyone. The trail was empty and so was the river. Even the wildlife seemed to be missing. After a few minutes of watching the water flow by, I spotted movement on one of the areas of vegetation in the river. Three little well camouflaged ducks started to move around. A parent emerged from the tall grass to watch over them. It wasn’t all that unusual, but it was nice to see some wildlife above the water surface.

The big wildlife sighting of the day happened earlier on my walk back to my RV Home after my first visit to the river. I encountered one of the troops of monkeys in the area. All of the monkeys are ancestors of monkeys put on an island in the river to attract tourists in the middle of the last century. They didn’t know they could swim off the island, reproduce and grow in size. Filming Tarzan movies at Silver Springs may have also encouraged the monkey population.

Every time I’ve visited the state park I’ve been on the lookout for the monkeys. On a previous visit I spotted one briefly on the far bank of the river, but today I got the full experience. Walking back along the path to the campground a monkey crossed the path in front of me. At first I thought it was a medium sized brown dog on the loose. As I continued on the trail I started to hear banging and snapping limbs from high in the trees. I realized the noise was coming from monkeys moving around in the trees. Still, I couldn’t see any of the actual monkeys. Then about ten feet away off the trail a monkey came down a tree and looked right at me before moving away down the trail. It stopped briefly and I got a decent picture. While I stood at a safe distance I spotted a couple of other monkeys that came out into the clear along the side of the trail. Somehow the experience wasn’t what I expected, but it was interesting. I’ll continue to be on the lookout for other troops when I visit this park.

Friday September 8th 2023

I was up early to get ready to travel. The weather cooperated and kept the rain away. My departure was right on plan pulling out between 10:30 and 11AM. I completed the 230 mile drive shortly before 3PM. The travel day had a few events that kept it from being a perfect travel day.

The biggest annoyance of the trip happened in the first hour of travel. I when over a good bump and the radio went off. It tried to come back on only to go off again. The power connection to the radio probably came loose. The pod casts I was streaming over bluetooth from my phone went silent. To keep me entertained I put the phone in my lap and used the phone’s speaker. As long as the road surface was fairly smooth the road noise didn’t prevent me from hearing the pod cast. I’ll have to climb under the dash this weekend to check the connection.

Thirty or forty miles east of Tallahassee on Interstate 10, I started to see evidence of the hurricane. Trees on both sides of the road and median were in distress. Some were uprooted and others were snapped off half way up the trunk. In some areas they came down in the road. Crews with chainsaws had cut the trees back, but the down trees hadn’t been removed yet. It looks like the trees haven’t finished coming down yet. Coming around a slight bend at the top of a rise a tree was blocking the passing lane. There was no warning so it clearly was a new issue that I had to squeeze into the line of traffic in the other lane.

The agriculture check station west of Live Oak on Interstate 10 has been turned into a FEMA staging area. There were big trucks unloading supplies in the middle of the area and lots of RVs and temporary housing around the perimeter. The other thing I saw with my quick glances as I was driving by were a lot of tanker trucks. I don’t know if they were for water or fuel. They really looked out of place.

I arrived at Silver Springs State Park east of Ocala shortly before 3PM. I am on site 23 for the next three nights. I booked this site on Monday so I didn’t have to go into the heart of the hurricane area in Perry Florida. I canceled my reservation at the Perry KOA Holiday when I found this site available. It clearly became available because of a cancellation. All of the sites at the State Park are spacious, but they are in the trees. For shade and comfort that is a good thing. For satellite TV access the trees are not so good. I will have to enjoy regular over the air TV this weekend.

Thursday September 7th 2023

The bright sunny and dry weather seems to be coming to and end along with my stay here at the Eastbank campground on Lake Seminole. It was overcast this morning followed by sun most of the afternoon. As the sunset a thunderstorm moved into the area from the east. The forecast is for more rain overnight into the morning. It is arriving just in time for moving day.

This is my last full day here for this visit. There isn’t a lot to do in the area or at the park, but I really enjoy my stays here. The I’ve been here for a two week stay each year since 2020. The first year and this year each had a few days away in the middle of the stay because of weather.

The first half of my day was lazy. I lingered over my breakfast coffee and muffins. Eventually I got motivated to take my first walk of the day around the campground. Only a few RVs departed today. I suspect people are arriving for the weekend. There were a few new RVs on my second and third walks of the day. The third walk was as daylight was waning to watch my last sunset across Lake Seminole for this visit.

I have completed all of the outside travel preparation that I can do ahead of time. That way I don’t have a lot to do outside in the morning should it be raining. My goal is to leave around 10:30 or 11AM. I have about 230 miles to Ocala. It will likely take around 4 hours.

Wednesday September 6th 2023

The nice weather trend continued. With only a medium humidity and a light breeze the temperature climbed into the low nineties under a mostly sunny sky.

This wasn’t a very blog content worthy day. I spent most of the day doing chores around my RV home. My tasks were interrupted by several walks around the campground and down to the boat launch ramp. The campground was very quiet during the middle of the day. Only a few sites were occupied and most of those didn’t have anyone around. By evening more RVs had arrived to spend the night and there was a little more activity in the campground.

I did manage to get a few pictures of the local wildlife to fill in some content in this blog entry.

Tuesday September 5th 2023

The last of the holiday weekend residents departed today. The campground is back into sleepy midweek mode. I am all alone in my part of the campground. A handful of RVs came in late in the afternoon. I imagine they are travelers that will be gone in the morning.

I got the idea to drive up the east side of Lake Seminole today. It proved to be a difficult to impossible task. First the road is way back from the shore. You wouldn’t know there was a lake if you didn’t look at a map. The next surprise was the number of nice wide roads that turned into dead ends. I had to turn around three times when the road came to an end. The only way out to the north was after looping back around to the east and south. I didn’t get very far north, but I did see lots of solar panels. A passed through and around a very large solar power gathering site. Overall my drive was far more east than north. I was north of Tallahassee before I dropped south, picked up Interstate 10 and returned forty miles to the west and home. It was a lot of miles in a very pretty rural Southwest Georgia, Northern Florida area.

In another sign that fall is approaching I noticed that sunset is getting earlier. The time of sunset between Sunday and today has changed by five minutes. I am paying attention so I can walk up the hill to see the sunset over Lake Seminole. Tonight’s sunset was brighter, but less interesting than last nights.

Monday September 4th 2023

It is hard to believe the unofficial end of summer has arrived. When I was a kid in the northeast we always went back to school the Wednesday or Thursday after Labor Day. Now it seems they start before Labor Day to give them more flexibility with “snow” days during the school year. Here in Florida and I think elsewhere in the south, the kids went back to school the first or second week of August. The difference is they finish the year at the end of May rather than the end of June as in the northeast. Still the school year seems to be the reason I think of Labor Day as the end of summer.

The campground emptied out at a steady pace today. All of the weekend visitors packed up and departed for home or their next destination. Since checkout time in this campground is a very generous 3PM, a few campers hung on to the last minute. Tonight the close to sixty RVs are down to fifteen or twenty. I suspect the people who like to avoid holiday traffic will go home tomorrow. The campground is quiet tonight and the smell of campfires is missing.

I am scheduled to leave on Friday. My original plan called for spending the weekend at the KOA in Perry Florida. The town was right in the path of the hurricane. I don’t want to go into an area cleaning up after a disaster. Today I found a site at Silver Springs State Park in Ocala for Friday to Monday. It was available because of a cancellation. The park was full when I checked a few times before booking the KOA in Perry. Now I have to cancel the KOA reservation. I thought that campground might be reaching out to cancel reservations, but their web site seem to be encouraging people to come despite not having all of their utilities and amenities. Is that greed or a desire to provide a service?

The sunset the last couple of nights have been beautiful. Last night there were fewer clouds making a very bright sunset. Tonight the clouds provided a lot of reflection on the relatively calm lake surface. Both nights sunset pictures were interesting.

Sunday September 3rd 2023

The day began cloudy and threatening. It ended warm and sunny. The temperature peaked right around ninety which is the average for the area at the beginning of September. The really hot and humid days start to diminish as the month progresses.

I was temporally challenged today. If you asked me the time, I was likely to be an hour off one way or another. This area is right on the border between eastern time and central time. All of the clocks I set manually are on eastern time. The devices that get set automatically might be either. My cell phone is on central time ninety percent of the time, but occasionally it catches a tower in the eastern time zone and displays eastern time. One TV displays time directly from the TV stations in the central time zone. The other one still seems to be displaying eastern time. My satellite receiver is manually set to eastern time. Devices like my tablet and computer that connect to the internet via cellular data from my mobile access point behave opposite my cell phone. They are usually displaying eastern time and that is where it got confusing. All day yesterday my tablet was displaying eastern time. This morning it started to display central time leading me to believe it was an hour earlier than actual fact. No wonder the day seemed to crawl. I have to remember to look at one of the manually set clocks if the time is really important.

The campground continues to be very busy. A few rigs departed and a few arrived. The campers who brought boats got a chance to use them. The boat launch was very busy. I enjoy the atmosphere of the busy campground in small doses. It will be back to the quiet and tranquil atmosphere tomorrow afternoon about when my enjoyment of the active campground starts to wane.