Florida Trail: Day 43-47
Feb 18-21, 2022
Mile: 408.1 to 419.1 (+2.8mi for 13.8 total miles)
Start: Mutual Mine Campground, Withlacoochee State Forest
Finish: Pat & Kathie’s house at The Villages via Inverness, FL
We woke up fairly early this morning to get up and out around sunrise. The Mutual Mine Campground had been pretty quiet all last night except for the roar of highway traffic not far off. We didn’t have any animal troubles as we had previous nights and were able to get a full night’s rest without having to yell at wild pigs or chase off raccoons for once. And there were no miner ghosts left behind from the days of ye olde phosphorus mining so we were pretty sure the campground wasn’t haunted. Shannon did have a little trouble sleeping from the bright lights from the bathroom pouring in his side of the tent. Usually when that happens we try to cover our heads with our neck gaiters or my eyes with our hat but I guess he didn’t think of that half asleep at 2am.
Anyways we only had 12 or so miles to go this morning which was great and we took off heading back down the blue blazed trail to the Florida Trail. We said hi to Kirk, the very friendly campground host who at 6:40 in the morning was already up helping a group of campers who were staying there that evening and already showed up to park their car. It was a group of Karens and they had no respect for anyone but themselves yelling and talking at the top of their lungs in the darkness and parking at the wrong campsite before Kirk gently told them to go park at their actual campsite. I looked at my phone and sighed deeply as it was before sunrise and it was still pretty dark. We couldn’t wait to get out of there. Kirk must have the patience of a saint because I could not deal with disrespectful people like that all day.
Shannon and I took off glad we had already even awake so the group of Karens didn’t wake us up and headed in 1.7 miles down the side trail. Water is so scarce out here that even if we didn’t go down this trail to the Mutual Mine Campground we would’ve had to go down another mile long side trail to get water in 6 miles. The pine hills are dry, rolling and sandy with surface water locked far underground in caves. If you can believe it, this section of Florida is kind of like a desert. The trail was fine this morning and we swatted spiderwebs for a while that had cropped up overnight until we hit the burnt section that was literally on fire yesterday. Today was no different in terms of fire except that we didn’t have to bushwhack through an actively burning forest. Thankfully we were able to follow the rerouted side trail that wasn’t on our GPS track. We still had to jump over flaming logs that had fallen in the middle of the trail that were still on fire and smoking. You really couldn’t linger along the trail because the tall blackened pine trees had been weakened from the controlled burn. Many were being held up by a thread, precariously wobbling next to the trail cracking and groaning ominously as we walked underneath them. The key words this morning were, “Hike fast and don’t look back.”
Shannon said he really wanted to push one of the burnt trees over next to the trail which is never a good idea. I told him to go ahead because then I will get to be a widow and marry Snoop Dogg as I’ve always had as a life goal back up plan, especially now if the tree fell and squished him. I told him if the tree fell on me that I’m gonna come back and haunt him for the rest of his life. He didn’t like either of those options so he left the burning trees alone and we hiked on down the blue blaze side trail.
Soon we returned back to the orange blazed Florida Trail which, surprise surprise, was also on fire. We just shook our heads in dismay, wondering how the heck we got ourselves into this mess of burning forest. Luckily we didn’t have to dodge too many burning trees today and it definitely seemed like overnight that the amount of flames had gone down which was a nice improvement. I did have to wear my bandanna over my face to block out the smoke and ash again which wasn’t fun. However we were extremely relieved as the fire on the trail continued to die down and the trees were only smouldering and not actually on fire.
As we trekked up and down the little sand hills, we thought it was hilarious that we’re finally running into our first bout of elevation after a whopping 500 or 600 miles into the Florida Trail. It was also ironic that once we popped out of the woods and onto a fire break (a.k.a. a dirt road) that there was a big printed sign that said, “Trail closed due to fire” with tons of bright pink and yellow ribbons blocking the entrance. Where the heck was the warning sign on the south end of the Florida Trail? Geez! We probably wouldn’t have hiked through an actively burning forest if there was a sign posted. There were probably not too many people who hike the Western Orlando section of the Florida Trail (most go east) and I guess it was just a fluke that we were walking through as the woods were on fire. We were just glad we hadn’t hiked through the day before like another couple who Kirk the campground host told us about. He said they had come into camp all black and charred like we had last night but more scared and frazzled. Yikes.
As we hiked on through the pine forest we came across a campsite that had been symbolized by a road symbol on our navigation app instead of a tent symbol which we had no idea was even there. There was a water source here which we hadn’t known about with picnic tables and flat spots that would’ve been good for camping if there wasn’t a huge human, um, excrement in the middle of camp. Gross – the Florida Trail poo bandit strikes again. Although we think most of the time when we see human “leftovers” in the middle of the trail it’s usually just dumb weekend hikers out who don’t know about “Leave No Trace” principles and digging a cathole to bury your waste. Unfortunately it’s a gross reality we sometimes have to deal with.
What also was kind of yucky was that the water source here was a giant horse trough that looked clearish if you squinted your eyes tightly but if you opened them up all the way it was swimming with the tons of green algae. Despite there being more single-celled organisms than liquid water, this horse trough was definitely better quality than some of the other water sources we’d had previously seen on this trip. Highlights of our disgusting water sources so far had included the thick brown swamp buggy puddle which was akin to liquid mud and the electric green alligator pond water scooped up so fast that there were small silver fish swimming in it or the shallow gray puddles that had little sea monkeys swirling around them. Yum yum protein!
Besides walking through a trail that was on fire, this morning was pretty uneventful. I hadn’t had any breakfast, just snacking on a single granola bar to get through the miles and was feeling pretty low energy. My legs were kind of tired from the long miles in the oppressive heat and humidity and I was very excited to have a few days of rest soon. My body was feeling pretty worn down and I struggled a bit hiking and ended up falling behind Shannon. There was a bit of relief from the thick humidity when we stopped to hang out in a small cave next to the trail. The shaded walls were cool and felt almost like air conditioning in the thick heat of the jungle. Climbing into the shallow depths of the cave was a refreshing way to cool down. The shaft of light that fell through the cavern illuminated the dark brown nodules of phosphorus and luminous limestone drips that dotted the walls. It was a much needed stop.
We left the cave, traveled through a jungly bit and then back into hot sand hills. As we neared the parking lot that led into the town of Inverness, I trailed behind. Suddenly Shannon popped out from behind a tree with a cigarette in his mouth. I had so many questions and snapped, “What the heck are you doing and why are you putting trash in your mouth?”
Shannon showed me a whole pack of menthol cigarettes that he found on the ground and I told him he better throw that away or I was gonna get mad. Sometimes Shannon needs a gentle reminder that we don’t pick up trash off the ground like rusty knives thrown on the side of the road in a ditch or random packs of cigarettes lying on the ground in the woods. We only pick up cigarettes if we’re going to throw them away so the animals don’t get to them and get addicted. Ha!
The trail spit us out in a housing development and we walked along a busy highway to a traffic light intersection. It was another mile or so to the car rental where we were going to take the weekend off to hang out with my family friend Pat and her partner Kathie. They live in The Villages which is like this crazy party place for 55+ year olds and supposedly it’s kind of like a cruise ship on land with so many activities and fun things to do. At the Enterprise car rental we scooped up our car, declining the lady trying to upsell us on other cars since ours wasn’t ready and because it’s her job to. We politely declined but got to talking with her about how we were planning on going to see Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue of Tiger King fame and she was so excited for us that she ended up giving us an upgrade two sizes bigger for free. It was pretty rad!
We didn’t find out until after a little bit of googling that Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue wildlife sanctuary was closed to the public because apparently wild felines can catch Covid. They’ve even seen Florida panthers and bobcats catching Covid and it cripples their nervous system to the point where they can’t walk anymore. It’s pretty sad and we respect what Carole and her team are doing and hope one day that we can go see some of the wild cats that they protect. Shannon just wants to ask her if she offed her ex-husband by putting sardine oil on his shoes before walking into the tiger cage but I think we’d probably get kicked out.
At lunch we were reading some of the reviews on Carole Baskin’s Big Cat Rescue. Their social media people are on point and had responded classily yet on point to any negative review (or pretty much any review) that was posted on Google. It was funny to see the one star reviews where people have never even been there before and the Big Cat Rescue people would go through the person’s name on Google and search their record to find out that “…sorry [insert name here] you we have records of every guest who’s ever been to our sanctuary and your name is not on that so this is obviously a fake review. You should try to be a better person this year and not post fake reviews for things you don’t know about.” The replies were witty and got to the point straight away with being classy which was a very hard thing to do. I appreciated that and Shannon and I laughed at quite a few of the reviews. Carole’s team called out every single hater and troll and said things that we’re not only discrediting to those one star reviews but also told them to grow up and try to be better people and not hide behind Internet screens saying mean things.
I spent the afternoon trying to chase down a package had sent from Key Largo up to Inverness general delivery but I had stupidly not taken a picture of the tracking number, instead putting my faith in the US Postal Service which from experience should’ve known better. After driving around to a couple nearby post offices, we gave up and just hope one day the package will return back to my parents house in Massachusetts. The post office people are very kind but fortunately there’s not much they can do without tracking numbers.
Anyways we decided we had spent enough time looking for disappearing packages and finally it was time to do some driving to The Villages to see Pat and Kathie. We were running a little bit late because we still had to do laundry and shower and Kathie and Pat kindly moved our dinner reservation out a half hour. We hung out and chatted, doing our laundry and showering which felt so good after about 5 or 6 days in the dusty wilderness with not much in terms of taking a real shower. Plus our clothes were starting to stand up on their own so it was definitely time to get those into the laundry.
Pat and Kathie took us out to dinner at a beautiful country club which is one of many in The Villages community. At this restaurant you can watch the sun set over the water which is gorgeous but tonight there were some storm clouds on the horizon so the sunset was a little muted but pretty still. After weeks in the forest eating ramen and instant mashed potatoes, it was absolutely amazing and somewhat culture shocking to be sitting with the breeze rolling in, a drink in hand and yummy food on the way. We chatted and laughed and had a really fun dinner.
Kathie and Pat told us we had to get going so we jumped in the car since their golf cart had a punctured tire and we headed out to one of the three squares in The Villages where every night there is live music. They even have an app for The Villages which tells you which band is playing when and what type of music they are. The app also provides the schedule for the hundreds of clubs that they have for the 100,000+ residents. There are over 60,000 golf carts in The Villages which is absolutely insane. We sure did see a lot of them tonight and there are so many they have their own driving paths for the carts.
We went to one of the squares where in the center on a big stage there was this guy named Scooter who DJs on cruise ships and stuff like that and is apparently legendary in The Villages. He teaches people how to dance for 4 hours straight and usually the band does a 45 minute set and then takes a 15 minute break but Scooter will just stand up there for 4 hours and just go crazy. He was probably in his 50s and just a ball of energy nonstop dancing. Sometimes Scooter would say, “I need a break,” and he would pause for five seconds before announcing, “Okay I’m done with my break!” and just go right back into it. He would teach you how to do all the different dances eight steps at a time then move on and teach you a whole dance and then you dance for a couple minutes with your new steps. Shannon and I were definitely a little rusty but Pat was on fire! She was dancing so hard and helping us keep the beat. We were still on the struggle bus but having a blast with Scooter and probably I don’t know 400 other people out dancing and a bunch more sitting in chairs hanging out and enjoying the nice weather and the evening breeze. We danced until dancing time was over, laughing and sweating and having a great time.
We grabbed ice cream afterwards, listening to hilarious stories of how Pat tried her hand at dragon boat racing and her team got off rhythm and tipped the boat over in the lake in front of us which is home to a resident 15-foot-long alligator. Luckily no one got hurt or eaten but it was a funny story! When Kathie suggested that we were probably tired we drove home under the light of the full moon. It was so pretty to see the moon rise over the palms and sink behind the clouds on the horizon. These next few days off we’re going to explore the Kennedy Space Center, swim with manatees in Crystal River and paddle in Silver Springs State Park which is a series of hundreds of crystal clear springs bubbling from aquifers creating a beautiful lake and river that you can kayak. We were so excited and made sure to go to bed early or we wouldn’t have the energy to get through this weekend.
Silver Springs was amazing. Not only did we kayak with beautiful fish in the gin clear water but we were surrounded by turtles, terrapins, endangered flowers, anhingas with their zebra-striped epaulettes and all these wild beautiful water birds. Surprisingly there were also probably a dozen manatees we kayaked near, the enormous silvery gray sea cows swimming in the river and eating the grass that grew on the river’s bottom. Manatees need something like 100 pounds of grass a day to survive and this was surely the place to go as the entire area was protected and had great quality water and lots of turtle grass.
We saw a couple of the wild golden furred rhesus macaque monkeys that were released on an island here in the 1930s by an eccentric boat captain to attract tourists. Well these people who brought in the monkeys to boost profit didn’t realize the non-native critters can swim. The monkeys quickly left the island, reproducing like crazy and even with wildlife management programs they number about 400 still on the loose today. You don’t want to get near the monkeys because they carry Herpes B and if you get scratched or bit by one of these monkeys you can die from the disease. Luckily the monkeys stayed far away from us climbing in the trees. Giant manatees burst through the water up right next to us to breathe without us even realizing they were next to us. The blue-gray speckled backs of the manatees blended in with the sandy patches of the river where springs came up all silvery and gray. I wasn’t paying attention at one point because a patch of sand next to me turned out to be a manatee that surfaced to breathe and all of a sudden I found myself only an arms length away from an 8-foot-long alligator floating on a map of tangled reeds. It was pretty scary and as I tried to paddle away without screaming too loudly, I accidentally hit another 7 foot alligator with my paddle because I could literally reach out and touch him. Later on down the river when I was taking underwater videos of the manatee, something bit my finger twice! I was pretty sure it was a fish and I actually caught him on video right before he decided to chomp my finger. I was just glad it was only a fish and not a gator because probably I wouldn’t have had a finger anymore.
Another of the days off from the Florida Trail we headed towards the Atlantic side of Florida to see the Kennedy Space Center and all of the super cool space artifacts. We figured that we would get a hotel reservation on the way so we didn’t have to drive hours and hours back to The Villages.
We were struggling to figure out why there were no hotels and came to find out as we opened up app after app there were literally no rooms in the Holiday Inn available in the entire state of Florida. There were no Comfort Inns, no Marriotts, no name brand hotel rooms available in all of Florida and thought it was maybe a glitch or something. Turns out this was only the weekend of the Daytona 500, a holiday weekend, winter break and a big rodeo. It was crazy because at some point I just asked Shannon to pull over because there were no hotels that we could afford in the surrounding 3 hours around us. It was so bad that there was a hotel with 120 reviews with the word “cockroaches” going for $500/night. We continued to open up apps and search engines and slowly just watched hotels in the entire state of Florida disappear instantly as rooms were canceled and then instantly rebooked. As we looked at the map we realized that there was nothing between Orlando, Daytona Beach, Cocoa Beach, Palm Beach, Miami or Tampa that we could afford to stay in that was less than $550 a night. Everything was sold out. So after being stubborn and even looking at campgrounds and getting laughed at by camp hosts, we called Pat and asked if we could go back stay with her that night. We had wanted to be closer to Cape Canaveral where the launches were happening because it’s about a 2 hour drive from The Villages and there was a rocket launch the next morning that we wanted to catch. Pat said come on back and even gave us some delicious ice cream when we got home.
The next morning we left early, spending the whole day at Kennedy Space Center which was amazing, checking out the history of space, astronauts and deep space observation. It was so cool and the SpaceX Starlink rocket launch was scrubbed that day because of the weather but was moved to the early morning the following day so we were able to spend the night in East Orlando since Daytona was over and could drive down early and the next morning to Jetty Beach where we sat and watched the rocket takeoff. The beach was crowded with dozens of people sitting in beach chairs and blankets, the jetty was shoulder to shoulder viewing. Just before the rocket took off from launch pad SLC-40, our hands were shaking with anticipation even though it was just some Starlink internet satellites being launched. We were so excited! A family next to us had the app open for the countdown announcing 90 seconds then 20 seconds, 10 seconds and then all of a sudden only 8 miles away an enormous blast of orange light sparkled above the island. The rocket rose from Cape Canaveral shooting up into the cloudless sky and we watched as satellites shot off to low orbit around the earth, bringing the Internet to those who don’t have access to it. It was so cool to see the different boosters break away as the payload became smaller and smaller as it shot into outer space. The mission was going to land the reusable boosters somewhere in the Atlantic but we were much too far away to see that happen. It was awesome to see the rocket launch from maybe 8 or 9 miles away and I definitely want to come back and see a big rocket launch at night. It’s cool because quite a few people I used to work with at my former company went to work at SpaceX and Blue Origin building and launching rockets. Seeing the Falcon 9 launch was awesome because one of my friends used to be the Master Scheduler for the Falcon 9 flights, just like the one we just saw take off. It was so special to see the rocket launch having been so into space travel, relativity and astronomy since I was a little girl.
After the rocket launch we went up to Crystal River on the Gulf of Mexico to go swim with manatees. Since it was a holiday weekend all of the manatee tours were booked or they didn’t answer so we decided just to rent some standup paddleboards, wetsuits and masks and paddled on our own to the springs to check out the manatees. Crystal River is the only place in the United States where you can legally swim with the endangered West Indian Manatees. It was really pretty but the last time we had been here it was chilly so there were more manatees in the inland freshwater springs and it was also 6:30 in the morning when there were tons more manatees not bothered by humans. With the weather being so warm, the manatees had dispersed out of the springs and back into the gulf coast waters to feed. This afternoon there were only one or two manatees in the roped off areas around the springs and we were kind of overwhelmed with the amount of people swimming around here so we decided to wrap it up and head back to The Villages where we were going to have dinner with Kathie and Pat maybe listen to a little music and play cards.
Kathie had picked out a yummy Thai restaurant which had gluten-free options before heading to the Spanish Square where we listened to a band called Blonde Ambition which was fun and we danced again. At the Square we’ve been at the other night there was a car show going on so we cruised around that and then continued on to music. When Kathie and Pat first moved down here for the winter, they lived in the Spanish Village and had loved it because of all the wildlife and the community was very strong. Each neighborhood in The Villages has its own community club that meets up and they had a blast living there. They told us about the time Pat’s sister came to visit and they took what they thought would be an innocent walk down to get the mail at the post office. When they were crossing the street to the mailboxes, traffic was stopped because of two enormous alligators lying in the middle of the road. The two ladies grabbed the mail and on their way back the gators decided that they had enough lying down in the road and the 10-foot-long one decided he was going to start walking straight at Pat and her sister. Pat said she had never seen her sister run so fast as she got the heck out of there as quickly as she could away from the gators. The picture of the enormous alligator looked like it was on steroids and it was pretty wild.
We had an absolute blast with Pat and Kathie and it was so difficult to leave but there is a limit to how many nights people under the age of 55 can stay at The Villages. I think you get a month a year and we didn’t wanna take away too much from Pat and Kathie’s family and friends who will come stay with them. After a few days of rest and relaxation, dancing and ice cream, showers and rocket ships, it was time to go back to hiking. We’re forever grateful we got to stop by The Villages and had such wonderful hospitality. Thank you Pat and Kathie!!!