Visiting Silver Springs! Also, first time at Southern Palms

Here begins the real struggle with booking RV parks...we visited Southern Palms RV Resort, a Thousand Trails resort, for the first time...however, I could only get 12 days here instead of our normal 14.  We've never tried Southern Palms because it is a considerable drive to get to Disney World compared to the other Thousand Trails parks, but since we no longer have our Disney passes, we figured we'd give it a try (it was also the only park in the general area available for any amount of time at all for this period!).  Turns out the staff are very friendly and the park is nicely maintained.  They even have a maintenance guy come with you to your spot to help you park...mostly because they cram you in like sardines (though not nearly as close as we were at Winter Garden...) and want to make sure you're parking at the right spot in the lot to maximize everyone's free space.

Parking at Southern Palms...we didn't yet have
a neighbor on the right side of the photo.

While at Southern Palms we started searching for land to buy.  I've mentioned that we're thinking all the campground crowding and the price of diesel are getting to us and we don't know that we'll continue this much longer...our desired solution is to find a plot of land to build a house and live in the RV on that land while we do so.  We spent a few days driving around central/northern Florida and southern Georgia looking for land.  We found a beautiful plot in Georgia with a pond...but the neighbor's house looked like a junkyard, so we decided we did not want to deal with that.  The search continues!

The highlight of our stay was a visit to Silver Springs State Park.  This was recommended to us by a neighbor back when we were staying at Rose Bay, and finally at Southern Palms we were close enough to make an easy day trip of it.  We took the extended glass bottom boat tour and loved it!  According to the website, the glass bottom boat was invented at Silver Springs in the 1870s.  We found out on our boat tour that Silver Springs used to be an amusement park, owned by ABC Studios in the 1950s-1970s.  They had exotic animals and other entertainment, and filmed portions of several movies and TV shows at that time.  The state took the park over in 2013, removed all of the entertainment except the glass bottom boats, and let everything basically go back to the nature you expect at a state park.  The current boats have been running since the 60s.  We saw four manatees, several alligators, and tons of fish, turtles, and birds.  All the seats in the boat were good seats to view the glass bottom.

The unusually ornate entrance to the park seems to date back
to its time as an amusement park

Sitting on the glass bottom boat

You may have to squint just right, but we floated right
over a sleeping manatee!  (Also 3 more I didn't snag a photo of)

A movie prop boat abandoned on the
river's bottom

Keeping an eye out for interesting stuff!

Can you see the alligator lying in the floating grass?  This seemed
to be a favorite pastime for them

These are three statues of gods originally placed for a movie
and later briefly featured in things like James Bond's 
Never Say Never Again

We highly recommend the glass bottom boat tour at Silver Springs!  We saw so many cool things through the glass bottom (including the numerous springs, which really didn't photograph well) and the surrounding nature was beautiful.

Magnolia Springs State Park

We spent a woefully short time at Magnolia Springs State Park in Georgia.  This was a lovely park with so many things to see and do!  We had a nice campsite that backed up on the woods.  It was a little strange that with all of this room they stuck the concrete picnic table and fire ring behind the RV instead of next to it.  Not all sites were like this, and since we weren't planning on cooking out in our short visit it wasn't a problem, just a little odd.

Our campsite at Magnolia Springs State Park

This park seemed to have a little bit of everything.  Of course it had the eponymous spring, which was lovely and full of yellow bellied slider turtles!

Magnolia Spring; it was interesting that (I think) because it fed a 
pre-existing stream, the surrounding area was not nearly so 
clean looking as the springs we saw recently in Florida - only the
spring itself was the beautiful blue color

So many yellow bellied sliders!!  We counted 26 coming at us - clearly
people feed them from the bridge regularly, as they came 
swarming to us (really moving fast!) as soon as we stopped on the bridge

An alligator just off another bridge :-)

In association with the lake and spring they had a trail along the lake and boat rentals.  There were lots of nice looking cottages, a few of which looked like they had a view of the lake.  

The other really interesting thing about this park is that it is the site of the short-lived Camp Lawton, a prisoner of war camp for captured Union soldiers in the Civil War.  They had a short history trail with signs and a couple of ruins, plus an informative museum about not only this camp but others like it.  I don't remember learning much about the conditions in Civil War prisoner of war camps, but they were pretty brutal!  The pictures of the men leaving the camps at the end of the war reminded me of the prisoners in the concentration camps in Germany.  I guess the thing that makes the Civil War camps slightly better is that they didn't just kill thousands of civilians upon their arrival at the camp - in fact, until President Lincoln put a stop to it, there was a regular prisoner exchange between Union and Confederacy that kept the prison populations low and transient - but still, the circumstances were pretty awful.  It was interesting to learn more about this depressing part of our history.  This camp was designed to alleviate crowding at Andersonville/Camp Sumter, and reports from the prisoners indicated that the circumstances were indeed a little better at Camp Lawton, but it only lasted 3 months as just after it was completed Sherman started marching toward the area, and the confederates were worried he would come and liberate the camp.

One of the three redoubts guarding the camp - the only one
still really visible

One final thing about the park I just have to include is the gopher tortoise just outside the nature center.  We didn't make it to the nature center while it was open, but it was cool that they had the tortoise outside, and it makes me think this nature center might have been nicer than most.

Gopher tortoise!  The state reptile of Georgia

I won't make a separate post because we only stayed one night, but we spent our last night on the road before heading to the farm at Ebenezer Park, a county park in Rock Hill, South Carolina.  We were able to catch up with my friend Roddie (my old boss at Bank of America) while we were there, as he lived not far from the park.  He took us to an awesome restaurant in downtown Rock Hill called Kounter, which had lots of delicious and unique food. 

Our campsite at Ebenezer Park.  It was a bit narrow and not
very level and also suffered from having the fire ring and
picnic table behind the RV instead of next to it (again!), but it offered a
bit of privacy and sewer!

I won't bore you with all the amazing food photos we took, but
here was their version of beef sliders - basically half a pan of
Hawaiian rolls sliced in half and filled with a huge beef patty 
and pulled pork - mmm!!

Dining with Roddie

A fun double-bench swing overlooking Lake Wylie at Ebenezer Park

Next stop: the family farm!  Unfortunately the weather looks a little miserable for our first week there, so we won't get much work on the RV done right away.  In a couple weeks we'll be taking a trip with friends to the Louisville area, stay tuned for that!

Manatees!!!

Our last stop on our big winter Texas loop was at Crystal River, Florida.  This is well known for being the only place you can legally swim with manatees, and it also happens to be the home of the Crystal Isles RV Resort (Thousand Trails), so we decided to swing by on our way back to the Orlando area.  Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, this is the second largest spring group in Florida - the largest (also frequented by manatees) being Wakulla Springs, where we stopped on our way out of Florida in January.

Crystal Isles was a nice resort, perfect for boaters - a whole slew of the sites had their own personal docks, and there was a communal dock and boat launch for everyone else.  There was a nice pond with fountains in the middle of the park, and all of the sites were massively huge by RV park standards.  Several of the permanent residents had their RV, an outside patio/bar area the same width, and another width for a storage shed or boat.

Campsite at Crystal Isles

Our first order of business was to swim with manatees!!  I'd been looking forward to this for WEEKS, ever since I booked it.  Luckily for us the day I picked turned out to be a gorgeous day.  We were on a small tour - only one other couple - with a friendly and talkative captain who told us a lot about the area and manatees in general.  The reason the manatees are so attracted to this area is that the springs output a massive volume of constant 72 degrees F water year-round.  We arrived on the tail end of the real manatee season, but found a group of about 10 of them hanging out near the springs.  Unfortunately they were all behind the rope humans weren't allowed to cross, so we didn't get any up close and personal touching like you see in videos, but we did get a good look at them up close and underwater, and one tail got about 3 feet away from where I was swimming, so that was pretty exciting!  Truly massive creatures when you get so close!

Ready to swim!

Also ready to swim!  Our tour boat and captain are in the background

Manatees!!  Unfortunately all the underwater photos came out 
cloudy through the waterproof phone pouch

Floating outside the boundary, manatees in background

There were lots of hiking and biking trails all around the area, so after peaking the first day with the manatee swim we did a lot of hiking and biking nearby.  Our most major excursion was to the 7-mile trail at Crystal Springs Preserve State Park.  This was one of the longest natural (aka not paved) trails we've attempted on the bikes, but fortunately the roots and potholes of our western travels were absent here and we only had to deal with mud ruts and grass.  We saw several alligators - definitely back in Florida!

Redfish Hole

Biking the 7 mile trail

Alligator on the 7 mile trail

We saw TONS and TONS of fiddler
crabs in the salt marsh

Our last day we drove to Fort Island Gulf beach, where we enjoyed the tide pools and found yet more manatees in the wild!  Sadly we weren't fast enough to get their adorable noses surfacing on camera.

Tide pools at Fort Island Gulf Beach

Lots of birds were just hanging out on the rocks near the shore

Aaron thought I was going to slip off
the wet rock for sure...nope!

The whole area had a relaxed and beachy/vacation-y feel to it.  I loved it, but Aaron thought the smaller non-highway roads to get here were a little too stressful in the 40' RV, so if we ever come back it will probably just be in the car.

Happy pi day!  (This is my first ever
coconut cream pie - turned out great!)

Heading North - South Carolina Edition

We spent the last of our RV days at The Oaks at Point South in South Carolina.  We stayed here once before on our way down to Florida.  We quite enjoy this Thousand Trails park with its wooded campground and nice lake-side walking trail.

Unfortunately Aaron's phone absolutely died and we lost a few pictures so all I have to share are the few that I took.  We took lots of walks around the adjacent lake and saw lots of turtles and a few alligators.  This was the first time I've seen alligators in South Carolina!

Alligator #1

One of MANY turtles

Alligator #2

With the Coronavirus, social distancing, stay at home directives, and massive closures, we didn't even try to explore the area.  We stayed put in our RV or hiked the trails we could walk to.

When we left this campsite we made the LONG haul the rest of the way (we were on the road 7.5 hours) to my family's farm to park the RV and follow the rest of the world in staying at home and not traveling.  This was the longest and farthest we had driven the RV in one day - longer than each leg of our 3-day mad rush from Greenville, SC to Clearwater, FL when we first bought the RV, the previous record holders.  We were smarter about it this time than that mad rush, stopping for a break at every rest stop (with thorough handwashing of course!) and napping as needed (this is why it took 7.5 hours).

Now that we're settled for the duration of the pandemic, this blog will shift from our traveling adventures to our repair adventures...we have a long list of things Aaron wants to work on while we're parked, and I'll post updates on what he's doing.