Manatees & a Hunt Camp

We enjoyed a few days south of Tallahassee at Newport Campground.  This was a county park unlike any we've been to so far - usually county parks have large day use areas and a campground in the back somewhere.  This park seemed to be more of a hunt camp provided by the county.  They even had a place to hang and gut your kill!  There was no day use area to speak of, and the size, arrangement, and privacy of the campsites felt much more like some of the lower-end private RV parks we've been to than a public park.  The campground was full but I only saw one child the whole time we were there - another oddity for county parks, which are usually filled with weekending families.  This is the only park we've been to that appeared to have long term tent campers.  So odd in so many ways.  However, it was convenient to our route, had a nice little river observation area (from which the long term residents said you could occasionally view manatees...no such luck for us though), and the campground host was very friendly.

Our campsite.  Aaron was quite strategic in managing to not 
really capture the campers very close on both sides in the photo.  They 
placed an orange cone at the front of the RV because they 
worried it was too close to the road and might be hit.

River Observation Deck

This is the first time I've been in a tidal area long enough to really notice the change in tides.  I've been on the coast plenty of times, but always just for that one point in time, somewhere mid-tide, where the extreme changes really weren't obvious.  I knew we were close to the coast, but thought we were far enough inland that any tidal action would be unnoticeable.  Not so!  It was really neat to observe the change in tides every day - we looked the tide schedule up so we could regularly go out to the campground's river observation area at precise high and low tides.

High Tide

Low Tide

There were two highlights to our visit in this area.  First, we went up to the Wakulla Springs state park, where we saw manatees right away!  There was one super close to the swimming area and then a mother and babies far off that we could only see a vague shape of through binoculars.  Apparently the high-volume spring is popular for manatee births as it is a relatively safe area for their babies.  The water was unbelievably clear, the first place we've seen manatees where you could see them beneath the water and didn't have to wait for them to surface.

First time ever we've snagged a picture
WITH a manatee!

Close up of the manatee in case you didn't 
believe the gray blob in the other photo :-)

Second, we drove down to the St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge and Lighthouse - conveniently our campground was at the other end of "Lighthouse Road" so we were as close as you could be to it!  Unfortunately the lighthouse itself was closed due to COVID restrictions, but the area around it was quite picturesque and we enjoyed walking along the beach.

Picture perfect day!

Walking along the beach next to St. Mark's Lighthouse

And our trek west continues!  We have one more stop in Florida before we leave this VERY LONG state and get to put another state sticker on our map.