Back in Florida

 

Dunnellon, Florida (high 81, low 60)

We left Twin Oakes Rv Park about 9 am (so much for an early start) and drove 266 miles straight south on I-75.   It was cloudy most of the day, and we ran into some rain, but had no problems.  That’s a lot of driving for us in the last two days, so we decided we needed a vacation!  :)

We decided to take advantage of Al’s 50% discount for camping at Florida state parks.   We got a 2 night reservation for site 21 at Rainbow Springs State Park, formerly known as Rainbow River State Park.  We’ve been here several times before either kayaking or diving the beautiful Rainbow River, but have never camped here.

The old campground was close to the river and just one small camping loop.  It was more for tents and small trailers and certainly not big rig friendly.   A few years ago, they added a new and wonderfully designed campground, complete with sewer hook-ups.   The main road is wide and paved, and all the sites are angled for ease of backing in and they are plenty roomy.  When the new campground was first done, there were only a few trees and no vegetation between sites.  There was no privacy.  Due to the weather in Florida, things tend to grow very quickly and now there is plenty of privacy between sites.  I’ll take some pictures today.

We tried to get a few more nights, but unfortunately nothing was available for Friday and Saturday nights, so we decided to just be happy to be able to stay two nights.

We got backed in.  Al hooked up the electric and water.  I worked inside getting things all back to normal.  We were mostly all set up and decided to take a walk down to the river.   

I noticed that there was a RV in the site right next to us.  I thought that was odd, because that site was one supposed to have been empty, and we almost chose that site.

Then a little bell went off in my head.

Remember, I said we booked site 21?   For some reason, I very expertly directed Al right into site 22!   Uh-oh!

Of course, we couldn’t have noticed it before we got all settled in.  It wouldn’t have been the end of the world, if we would have had to moved, but we sure didn’t want to.  In our experience with other state parks, they would have just told us to move.

We went right over to the office to see if they could change the site for us.  Normally, we haven’t had good experience with State Park staff being overly helpful, but Ranger Cindy and the volunteer (who’s name I do not know) were more than helpful in trying to change the site for us, so that we didn’t have to move the motor home.   Florida State Parks camping is done with Reserve America, and if someone had booked site 22, we could have been in trouble.  The big problem was that the parks computer was down, so they had no access to the system to know what was booked or not.  Somehow they worked it out and we didn’t have to move.  It’s a good thing, because I think Al might have killed me!   :)

We were all pretty tired last night, and couldn’t even stay awake to watch our favorite shows at 8 pm.  For some reason, even the kitties are always tired on travel days, and as soon as they got dinner, they were all in their beds.

We got up early and I went on-line to see if there were any cancellations for this week-end.  It turned out that there were a few, one of which was on this same row with all nice sites.  We jumped up, threw some clothes on, grabbed the flashlight and went to check out the site.  It’s a bit shorter than the one we’re in now, but it’s fine, so we made the reservation for an additional two nights.  So…..we will have to move on Friday, but at least we’ll be here until Sunday.   4 nights in Rainbow Springs SP…..good deal.

Lots of pictures will be coming.   This is a  beautiful  spring fed river.  We hadn’t planned on kayaking the river but now that we have a few extra days, we may either kayak this river or the nearby Silver River.