A Driving Tour

This life is growing on us!  Up around 7am, Michael takes Emmi out, coffee and computers then a long walk for all of us.  We had planned to kayak again today but the weather wasn’t looking favorable, instead we took a nice drive.

Our mission was to check out various RV parks we had read about to see if we wanted to move when our month is up here.  NOPE!  This RV park is deluxe compared to the other two we saw today.  One of the parks, Rock Crusher Canyon RV Park in Crystal River is very nice—good sized sites, privacy vegetation between sites, heated/screened pool, lots of activities, huge—but still not as nice as Cedar Key.  The other one on Lake Rousseau was awful—packed in like sardines.  No, we both like this park and this is where we will stay—no heated pool or not!

After we left Crystal River and the Dunnellon area we decided to check out Rainbow Springs State Park.  Elaine and Mark had mentioned this park as a beautiful spot. Rainbow Springs is a first magnitude headspring basin producing 400-600 million gallons of water per day forming the Rainbow River.  Think about that, 400-600 MILLION GALLONS of water per DAY!  That’s a whole lot of water!

It is a beautiful spot—no where in the literature does it mention the waterfalls are man-made, I guess we just assumed they were natural.  The tallest of the falls was closed due to a leak.  The park is lovely, quiet—the actual spring water is a gorgeous shade of green, the park is planted with all kinds of blooming plants of which only the camellias were blooming and frost had bitten most of these several days ago.  We did find a few still beautiful flowers:

At one time this park must have been a commercial venture—there was a zoo located here in the past.  The gift shop and concession area were closed, there was a fire over the weekend.  Bless the woman’s heart that was taking our entrance money, she failed to mention any of the closures until after she took our money.  She also failed to ask me if it was OK to give Emmi a dog treat before she handed it to Emmi.  Thankfully Emmi is quite picky about her dog treats and spit it out.  I told the woman thank you and discreetly retrieved the treat putting it in my pocket.  I’m sure this park is probably packed in the summer with people swimming in the spring made pool.  Personally I’m not too sure about swimming in any water that isn’t in a swimming pool in Florida after seeing our friend “Buddy” the alligator here in the RV park pond.

Our first stop of the day was out to the coast at Inglis, Florida.  An idyllic setting except notice the background in both of these photographs????

It was a wonderful day seeing new country and enjoying Florida.