Trail along the Suwanee River

Even though this is our 3^rd time visiting the park, I didn’t realize how many hiking trails the park had. Unfortunately, the park doesn’t have any maps and even the hiking apps have limited maps. We were able to use google enough so we didn’t get lost. There was a trail right outside our RV that wandered to the river (0.6 mi). John and I took a left along the Suwanee River and eventually made it back to the RV after walking the park roads for a total of 2 miles.

On my morning walk, I did the same walk to the river then turned right. The full hike was about 4 miles and pretty nice!

The cool part is that this trail is part of the Florida Trail. The trail runs ~1,500 miles from Big Cypress National Preserve (near the Everglades) to Gulf Islands National Seashore (near Pensacola). During my hike, I met 4 hikers that were doing the trail. One mentioned he’s done the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail, and the Pacific Crest Trail. Those trails are much more popular but the Florida Trail is known for being a good trail to hike during the winter since no one in their right mind would hike during the summer in Florida. The trail also is known for sections that require slogging through swamps where you regularly see alligators. Since Florida is basically flat, it is not a tough trail but it can get exciting!

I want to come back to do more of the trails in the park.

Two Nights at Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park

Last month was an eventful single night out with our RV. This time we survived two nights. There were no major issues but our list of tweaks is pretty long. There was more work than we expected to debug all the systems and personalize it to what we want in an RV. We’ve also learned that RVing only a few days a month is more work than full-timing it. Besides restocking food and clothes before a trip, the stored RV gets more of a damp feeling in the Florida humidity without us living in it. Anyhow, we’ll survive!

Love the trees!

We’ve visited this park before (1,2). We always have to visit the Carillon Tower. The carillons haven’t worked for a while (we heard them back in 2015 but they were broke in 2017). There is fundraising going on to get them fixed sometime.

The museum has these dioramas that I find fascinating. Lots of work to get the perspective right along with the fun of the moving parts that might include a horse, a buggy, or a steamboat. Each of them represents a Stephen Foster Song (these are
“Camptown Races” and “Oh! Susanna”).

We walked to the Spring House right outside the park. The town of White Springs with 13 hotels and multiple boarding houses was built around this sulfur spring (we could smell it). People would visit for the “medicinal” properties and included Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. By the 1930s the popularity waned and all those hotels closed.

The spring was said to flow 32,000 gallons per minute back then. The flow reduced over time and eventually stopped as phosphate mining pumped excessive water from the aquifer. When we visited the flow from the spring seemed strong but the local electric power company was recently given a permit to pump water from the aquifer so the spring will probably stop flowing again.