Florida Trail: Day 31
Feb 6, 2022
Mile: 226.2 to 235.9 (9.7 miles)
Start: Ghost town of KICCO Campground
Finish: Field camping next to horses, Westgate River Ranch Resort
Waking up at 3 AM listening to the wild pigs in the woods nearby and shining a light and yelling at them to scare them off is getting kind of old. Having to scare off the animals at night would hopefully not be an issue tonight at the River Ranch Resort campground and we could get a solid night’s sleep. After shooing away the pigs it was tough to get back to sleep until around 4am and I guess I slept until about just before 8. It was later than anticipated but we packed up quickly because we had just under 10 miles to hike and needed to show up to the River Ranch Post Office before 1 PM when they closed. The office had our resupply packages and we had to make sure we picked them up since the next town was a couple days hike away.
We were nervous about park rangers coming to check our nonexistent permits or campers with permits rolling up on us during the night which turned out to be unfounded and we left without incident. Luckily the other people camping had the same idea as us and went to bed early without much craziness going on. This morning the barred owls were hooting their iconic “Who cooks for you?” like crazy next to our tent so I was able to snap a couple pics of them. One of the owls looked super sleepy and was nonstop hooting his “good night!” to his partner but the crows didn’t seem to care much for him being around. The crows started ganging up on the owl who eventually stopped hooting and flew off. Hopefully the crows didn’t bother him much as you see some of these birds of prey flying around with a whole gaggle of crows cawing and diving at them. Maybe the crows are telling them to get them away from their nests or something like that. Anyways, if you can’t tell there wasn’t much going on in this corner of the woods this morning! Lol owl dramaaaaa!
The trail this morning continued through more cow pastures and we only scared up a couple of cattle who had more of a healthy fear of humans than the herds we saw yesterday. We descended into the thick jungles, trekking through cypress trees with the dangling spooky moss and dense cabbage palms. You really have to watch where the trail goes through the cabbage palms and cypress because it turns and twists so frequently that it’s easy to get lost.
I finished my audiobook by Stephen King which wasn’t too scary but I definitely wasn’t going to listen to the story in the dark. Next I hit up some murder podcasts to distract the pain from my raw blistered feet which were pretty messed up. The tops of my toes on my left foot were scraped raw I suspect because my shoes were too tight in the wrong places and my socks filled with dust, mud and dirt from hiking. I’ve had three pairs of socks with me but even rotating them out felt like it wasn’t doing much at this point since they were so dirty. Last night at camp I had come in limping and this morning my feet were a little better in shape after resting and drying out. Plus the blister bandages, antibacterial ointment and Leukotape to secure the bandages on helped immensely and they felt okay for the 10 miles.
The miles flew by fast and our minds were fueled on nothing but the desire to pick up our packages and eat food at the restaurant at the ranch. The River Ranch Resort is kind of this over the top dude ranch where you can take your family glamping (aka glamorous camping) in one of their Conestoga wagons or enormous teepees or even a hotel. You pay for horseback riding tours, archery, skeet shooting, etc and if you don’t like outdoor stuff you can stay in their hotel and go in the pool. You can even get your groceries at the marked up general store where they even have Starbucks!
All we were looking forward to was eating at the restaurant where we didn’t expect much because we were in the middle of nowhere and it was probably Sysco food. We were so hungry that we didn’t care – I mean for breakfast I had literally just eaten cookies and Frito chips that fell on the ground so anything was good at this point. However I broke the sacred rule that Shannon and I have where you’re not allowed to talk about food for 3 hours into your hike. I developed this tendency on the Appalachian Trail to dream about food and start talking about it first thing into our hike. Shannon would get grumpy because then he would start thinking about food when he was normally just fine and would get frustrated because there was no food except granola bars. Oops I guess I messed up on that one.
Anyways we were maybe only an hour into our hike before I started fantasizing about the steak that I wanted to eat at the Smokehouse Grill at the resort. Shannon said he wanted chicken salad with some veggies which are hard to come by on the trail. Then we both sighed, the thought of real food keeping us going for the next few hours.
We passed by a couple oak hammocks that had campsites with water pumps and a few of them were filled with trucks and weekend campers out to enjoy the rain and the mist. Then we crossed into a campground that had an actual camp host sitting outside his RV and he waved to us, greeted us and then said as we walked by, “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” which we thought was kind of interesting. Kinda reminded us of the movie Elf when the animated narwhal rose from the ocean depths and said, “Hey Buddy, hope you find your dad!” It was all we could do to not chuckle and thanked the guy instead.
The road turned into a gravel path and we passed by a bunch of horse pastures, spotting a giant swamp buggy giving tours from the ranch in the distance. The horses were pretty curious about our backpacks and Shannon even made friends with a sweet ginger colored horse who had a whole mess of teeny tiny burrs in her hair that turned into a single dreadlock. It was going to be pretty awful to get the hundreds of burrs out of her forelocks and she may just need to get her bangs buzzed off because she just had one big nasty dreadlock drooping down the front of her face.
We continued along the road finally checking in at the River Ranch Resort Lodge which was a little overwhelming with all the tourists leaving after the weekend. This place had it all: Teepees, Conestoga wagons, real tents, a saloon and even last night they had a rodeo. You could go do whatever your little cowboy or cowgirl heart desired from fishing to airboat tours and swamp buggy rides. One lady at the general store was complaining about how she couldn’t go horseback riding because the weight limit was 250 pounds. Motorcycles zoomed by nearly running us over and golf cart security eyed us hikers up.
We grabbed our resupply and gear packages before the resort office closed at 1pm, having to trek to two different buildings to find them and snuck in just before one of the buildings closed until the next day at 2 PM. Boxes in hand, we quickly unpacked extraneous dunnage and shoved our items in our backpacks then made a beeline straight for the restaurant. We didn’t want to subject other restaurant goers to our smell so we sat outside on the covered porch which was pretty stuffy because the windows were closed up. The waitress tried to turn on the fan but it didn’t work and then with Shannon’s help slid open the windows which were fused shut with age and grime. Who cares because it was time for chow!
I knew exactly what I wanted because I’d been daydreaming about it for days – give me that ribeye steak! It was exactly what I needed and it felt like even though I’m taking my vitamins, I still am low on iron. It was like a magical feeling I got as I devoured this huge slab of red meat cooked medium rare and covered in some sort of parsley butter. Shannon ordered pulled pork and we ate beans and corn which we later found out that the corn is stored in a big soup terrine of steaming hot melted butter so that the “veggie” was more butter than corn. You could tell that it wasn’t the resort’s first rodeo and they cut corners wherever they could, for instance only bringing out salt and pepper when it was asked for and then we got the 99 cent salt and pepper shakers (we know because we’ve bought them in the past). Who cares – we were hungry and filled ourselves with hot meals. On our way out our waitress even gave us a “to go” half-and-half sweet tea. I forgot how much I love the south sometimes!
At the resort they had everything you needed so you never had to leave. A general store had groceries, there was a post office, restaurant, saloon, even a church so if you wanna have your wedding or Sunday mass you don’t have to leave. Plus there was an airstrip and the waitress told us that people will fly in, have dinner and then leave. Yeehaw pardner! It kind of felt like we were in some version of the Righteous Gemstones tourist attraction and figured some enterprising organization had found all his cheap land in the middle of nowhere and decided to cash in from there on tourists.
Of course the “cheapo” tentsites were about as far as away from the all the hubbub of the general store and restaurants in pool and amenities as possible. There were a handful of RV campers still left but in this enormous 20 acre field we were literally the only ones tent camping which was fine by us. We took turns showering and doing bathroom laundry (or sink laundry as we call it) because there’s no laundry machine anymore at the resort. Our socks were so gross and sticky with old Band-Aids, mud and sweat that they could probably be used as a blunt object if we ever needed to fight off wild pigs or raccoons.
Since primitive camping apparently didn’t include any way to charge our electronics, we commandeered the nearest RV site with its electric hookup box and got our $50 worth of our tenting fee. I had hawk eyes on our gear and at one point these little shithead kids on their bikes started messing around with our charging battery packs and personal locator beacon. I had to yell at one of them asking if he could please move away from our stuff as I got up and started walking over. The little preteen know-it-all brat retorted that I shouldn’t leave my stuff around here because someone might steal it. I know exactly where he’s camping so if he was gonna steal it, we were going to rain down on him and his parents. Instead of being an a-hole, instead I responded with a thank you, ignoring his sassy reply and finally the little punk moved on.
After Shannon returned, I showered and washed my clothes in the shower, taking a good 40 minutes to scrub out all of the grime and dirt with the hot water, thoroughly washing out the borderline infected skin peeling off my toes. Eventually I got as much of the junk out of my socks as I could and hung up our clothes to dry on our tent. My blistered and battered toes were blasted clean in the soapy shower water and I dabbed a thick coating of antibiotic on the raw skin before letting them air dry. It was a new level of nasty for me when almost immediately after I started letting my newly cleaned toes dry, a fly flew onto my raw blistered skin, red with pus and started climbing around in it. I remember reading about how flies lay their eggs on rotting flesh and their maggots eat away the bad meat, leaving the healthy skin alone. I tried not to think about this as I picked the fly off my apparently rotting feet. It was a new level of Hiker Trash that I hope I never have to experience again as flies literally were trying to feed off my rotting feet.
After we showered, we picked up our electronics and threw them in our 1oz ultralight daypacks and headed to the general store to have dinner. We were the only people walking on the resorts with everybody else driving motorcycles or golf carts and somehow they still couldn’t stay away from us, nearly getting run over a couple of times. There was a whole dang road and they still got uncomfortably close to us.
Anyways at a general store we shared ribs, chicken, a salad, corn and beans which sounds like a lot of food but was only the beginning. We washed it down with a bottle of wine that tasted like water and didn’t even get us drunk. Then we filled up our water bottles in the bathroom to hydrate and dessert for me was another shared bottle of wine with an entire package of gummy snacks and Shannon was given an entire box of chicken fingers to eat from a random guy we talked with. His wife was chatting with us after we heard a whole mess of coyotes howling and he must’ve felt bad for us or something because we told him and his wife that we’re staying in tents and to wish us luck with the coyote pack! Shannon shoveled down the chicken fingers for dessert and after licking his fingers, announced that it was perfect timing because he was starting to get hungry again! We finished round two of overpriced junky wine and then decided it was time to hit the hay as it was close to hiker midnight around 8pm.
Back at the tent we still were the only ones camping in our tents and we decided that we could afford risking hanging up our bear line as a laundry line to dry our clothes overnight. There’s so much darn security at this place riding around in golf carts that we were sure they’d buzz over to say something to us. But it was good I guess because it makes people feel safe. To us all the security seemed to say that if you step out of line you can expect someone will be approaching you. As we had spread out our gear and resupply box goodies out on the picnic table earlier in the afternoon, it seemed a little too borderline “Hiker Trash” and a couple of security golf carts came over to check up on us. One of the guys said he saw us hiking up from the Florida Trail and came over because he super interested about our hike. He was very nice and I answered all the questions he had. He asked if we had any weapons, especially for the wild pigs to which I said we had pepper spray, knives and our own hiking poles which should get us through. Our new friend was so surprised to hear about our animal encounters and wished us luck and to be safe which was very kind.
During the night we didn’t have any trouble with wild animals which was such a relief. I couldn’t believe I had taken for granted having a good night’s rest as the last 3 or 4 nights we’d been woken up by raccoons and wild hogs and had to chase them away from our tent. It was so nice not having to worry if we’re gonna have to chase after hungry wild hogs in the dark and it was exciting to have a solid night of sleep.