After not being able to visit family and friends last summer, we decided to take a full 3 months and visit. Hopefully my daughter and her family will be ready for the 3 month invasion

We decided to drag the RV

as we plan on doing more camping during the summer closer to Minnesota. But first….there is preparation of the vehicle required before we leave.

Gary has a certain way to get the car ready for travel so we can not only haul all our stuff but make sure that if the cat barfs

he doesn’t do it on the interior of the car. That nice plastic saved the car interior but not, his bed, my hat, our treat bag….I guess it was too long a ride for him.

We did travel our normal 1700 miles but we added a few extra miles and took 2 weeks instead of our normal 3 days. Gary came up with the itinerary and I made the reservations. My first priority was to have a campsite close to the bathrooms. When ya gotta go, ya gotta go.

We decided that we were going to explore the country a little so instead of the fastest route on our Garmin, we set it to the shortest route. What a mistake that was. Going from point A directly to point B might be the shortest route but holy hoot, we drove down every little road the Garmin could take us on. Plus thru every little town on the map. It took us WAY longer to get to our destination than it should have. After our first day of traveling like that we switched our Garmin back to fastest route for the remainder of our journey LOL.

The first place we stopped was Silver Springs State Park, ya know, the place where they have the glass bottom boats….the place where they used to film Sea Hunt, Tarzan and Creature from the Black Lagoon?

The only problem with this campsite is there is no TV nor internet service. Looks like tonight will be another night of Chicken Foot. Now if I can only get him to play Canasta with me

The campsite did have some very nice trails we could walk.

Here’s Gary at the trail head. We brought our coffee so in case we got lost we had something to drink. We smart cookies

We continued on our walk and came across this sign

What?! There are wild monkeys in this place! And they are telling us not to feed them? What idiot is going to walk up to a wild money and offer them some of their cookies? Or a piece of their banana? Apparently there are a lot of idiots that walk these trails if they have to have this sign posted. Well, we’ll be sure to keep clear of the moneys…..and the idiots

Gary and I haven’t been back to see the Glass Bottom boats in over 35 years so we were curious as to how much had changed. Gary didn’t think the place had changed much, me? I couldn’t remember. I have trouble remembering what I ate last night for dinner. Anyway, we found this place that was set up like an old time little village and we saw this old glass bottom boat.

This was one we probably used last time we were there, now it is a museum artifact. Here is what we went on this time

We had to wear masks while we stood in line and on the boat

I think the water was more weedy and mossy than it used to be

They said that the fertilizer was effecting their water here too, causing moss to grow. Better take the kids here quick before the whole place is full of it!

When we were done with the boat ride we took a walk around more of the park. We saw this really tall tree

Here is another one of these guys, and he is on a Palm tree!

Many of you may or may not have known, but Gary was part owner in a wholesale florist shop back in the day. They had a plant that grew there that he called a little boy flower. Here is what it looked like

In this park, I found a big boy palm

You could also do some kayaking here and I even think they had a glass bottom kayak you could rent…and the key word here is YOU. Cold day in you know where before you get me on one of those, especially in an alligator infested river.

It was fun to visit it again and see what had changed. The camp site and trails were nice but now we are off to our next adventure at Skidaway Island State Park.