Day 15 - Manatee Springs

Sunday morning we took the short drive to Manatee State Park.

Driving into the park, there were deer grazing by the road, they clearly are comfortable with people.

They have some pretty extensive elevated walks that follow the Spring with observation points along the way.

At the end of the walkway it comes out onto a pier that reaches out into the Suwannee River. When we arrived it was guarded buy a flock of Black Vultures.


They are the size of chickens or bigger and really did not want to move.

We walked the boardwalks in the morning but did not see any Manatees, but we did come by the spring where there were scuba divers. I vaguely remember this from 1979 when Aunt Joyce took us here, or some place very close, I will have to verify from pictures when I get home.







We decided to take a nature hike of about 4 miles, all flat.

We came by this guy, a black racer snake, he was good sized, over 3ft in length. June did not initially see him and when I pointed out she was about to step on him, she let out quite a squeak.. :-).  I tried to move him with a stick and he struck, so I felt it prudent to get a bigger stick.  Once I flipped him off the trail, he zipped off into the brush...it is obvious why they are called racer snakes...pretty fast.

The hiking trail has 19 markers that identify different things of interest, #7 was the state tree, a Sabal palm or cabbage palm. It has a heart like an artichoke that is edible, but once harvested the palm will die.

After our hike we decided to walk the board walk one more time, just to see if there were any Manatees about.  I talked to a ranger and he said there were some sleeping near the pier where the Spring feeds into the Suwannee.  We were lucky, there were 7 Manatees just loafing about.  One of them swam over to the pier like he was saying good morning and then returned to the others.  There was a couple in a canoe and they had to be careful not to hit them with their paddles.

It was cool.

We saw this unit in the parking lot, all the way from Germany. I also spoke with a couple from Ontario that were full timing in a 1975 Toyota class C, amazing what you see on the road.










We returned to the Falcon and both took showers, with only a 6 gallon hot water tank, amazingly there seemed to be plenty of hot water.

Our next destination was planned to be Okaloosa Island, so we headed that way, stopped at Walmart again to get a few things and to park in the shade to make lunch.  As we made our way west we ran into very very heavy rain, driving visibility was very bad, so we decided to find a place to get off of I10. We found the Hitching Post Corral and RV Park with our Passport America card (from Fretz), it was only $25 for the night...so we took it. It was a pretty awful night, it was raining hard most of the night, deafeningly loud, with thunder and lightening, not much sleep. We even had branches falling on the RV, I just hope my antenna and solar panels did not get damaged.

Looking at the weather, we will probably not see much sun on Okaloosa Island, but it looks worse inland, so I think we will make the visit to the coast anyway and hope the weather passes before we start back towards Tennessee.