Bridge

Flagler Beach, Florida

We decided to try an experiment this morning and see if the sun would actually rise if we weren’t there to see it. 

It did!

After we drank coffee and read blogs, we took a walk over the bridge that leads to the beach.  The bridge goes over the inter-coastal waterway, so it needs to be high enough to allow large boats travel under. We thought it would be good exercise and be able to check out the beautiful view.    It’s a 2 mile walk over and back.  There was a  park by the bridge where we could park the car. 

There was a nice little trail to the bridge.

The bridge had a nice little walking path where you were protected from the cars.  It was quite a nice walk.

It was pretty high…thought it might kill us walking to the top, but it actually wasn’t too bad.

We have been trying to finalize some plans for the winter.  One thing about spending the winter in Florida, is that you need to have some sort of game plan.  We prefer to go where the mood takes us, but that’s not always a good plan in the winter in Florida.  There are way too many snowbirds here and if you don’t make reservations, you can be out of luck.

So, as of right now, we’ll be going back to Sweetwater Rv Park in Zephyrhills when we go back to Tampa later this month.  It will be a good base camp for the winter, but we still plan to make other trips from there.

I made reservations for after Thanksgiving for 2 weeks at a Thousand Trails “max pass” in Fort Myers.  It’s about 100 miles south of Tampa on the gulf coast.  It’s a very pretty area with beautiful white sandy beaches.   

When we get back from there it will almost be time to head to Hillsborough River State Park where we’ll spend Christmas.  Sweetwater will be our “home” and we will just go ahead and pay for three months and lock in the monthly rate.  We won’t be there all three months, but it’s cheaper than paying the weekly rates.  At least we will have a nice site to stay and a home to come back to.

Apparently, with Thousand Trails, we can’t make reservations further away than through the end of December.  I guess I’ll have to wait until next month to make plans/reservations for January.  We really like this camping membership and hope they will continue to offer the Max Pass membership next year.  Without that, we would only have 3 campgrounds here in Florida and it probably wouldn’t be worth it to us.

We haven’t decided what we will do tomorrow, but we have our week-end planned.

On Saturday we will go to the Jacksonville Naval Air Station for their air show.  The Blue Angels will be performing and we love watching them and the Thunderbirds.  I actually prefer the Thunderbirds (Air Force).  It may be  because I’m an air force “brat.”   Actually, Al is too.

On Sunday we plan to head down to Palm Coast for the Seafood Festival.  It’s not my favorite thing, but Al wants to go, so I guess I’ll have to go. 

We’ll be leaving Flagler Beach next Wednesday and we are trying to find some alternatives if we can’t get into Blue Springs State Park.  We have three “plan B” parks.  There are plenty of spaces in the state parks during the week, but they are full on the week-ends. 

Blue Springs State Park

Flagler Beach, Florida

We started our day with our usual early morning sunrise at the beach.  It was very windy and a little chilly with the wind blowing straight off the Atlantic.

I liked this picture showing the heavy surf and the shrimp boat in the background. 

We went home for a little while then decided to head over to Blue Springs State Park.  We hadn’t been there for years and didn’t remember anything about the campground.

On the way to the park we were traveling on I-4.  There was this  Class C pulling a pretty good sized travel trailer.  He was weaving all over the road and going over the speed limit.  We finally were able to get in front of him and he was texting with one hand and holding the wheel with the other.  I think he may have been transporting new rv’s.

We got away from him as fast as we could and arrived safely at the park.

Blue Springs State Park is home to a large concentration of Manatee.  They start arriving once the ocean and rivers start cooling down.  The spring water is a year round “warm” temperature of 72 degrees, so it’s the warmest water they can find during the winter months.

There were a few Manatees already and we spent quite a while watching them.  Once a large population of them come in, they close the swimming and kayaking area off to protect the manatee.

Today, there was a group of 22 kayakers!  I think it was the senior citizen regatta!

It was pretty breezy and cool there, so we didn’t get our kayaks wet!  Yeah, we’re wimps.

There was a family there from Minnesota.  The little 8 year old girl Erin was snorkeling with the Manatee and really enjoying it.  The Manatee seemed interested in her and would come right up and look at her.

She wasn’t alone.  Her dad was right there with her while her mom went to buy her a snorkel.

This was two adults and a baby manatee.

Her mom finally got back with masks and snorkels.

I got a  few nice shots of mama and baby manatee.

We finally drug ourselves away from the Manatee and went over to the campground.

I expected the campground to be small with cramped sites, but we were surprised how nice the sites were.  Many of them were big rig friendly.

The main road was paved and plenty wide.  No tight curves or overhanging trees.

The sites were completely private and angled so that you could more easily  back in.

They were sandy…no concrete pads here.

Site 25

Site 18.  This is one of 2 sites that you cannot reserve.  We determined we could fit into both this site and 39 which also could not be reserved.

 

Si 39 doesn’t look as pretty, but Al thinks we could get a satellite signal there, plus there were lots of birds around, including the rare Florida Scrub Jay.

We want to spend a few days at a state park when we leave here, but they are all booked up for the week-ends.  We figured if we can get one of these two sites we would be locked in for the week-end.  Hopefully no one else will get there before next week!

It’s really a very nice campground and we’re anxious to spend some time there.