Florida Caverns State Park

 

Our two camp sites

This is one shot from St Joe's not in a previous blog, it shows Deb, Dee, and Trudie taken on Friday when the Gulf was as calm as a small pond.  We just wanted to include it.

We arrived here on Sunday afternoon after bidding goodbye to Deb and Trudie at St. Joseph's.  It was very overcast and we had seen the weather forecast so knew that we were in for some "weather" potentially lots of heavy rain, wind and thunder.  The Caverns are located in Marianna, a smallish town and in about one minute we had passed through the outskirts and downtown and were only a mile from the park entrance.

We managed to get set up while it was only sprinkling (or maybe raining lightly) and then the rains came...and didn't it rain.  With no rain gauge we could only guess, but our guess would be that we had well over 1" and maybe a lot more than that.  We had a small lake in front and to the side of the camper.  The campground has a mix of big class A campers and small tents.  There are lots of kids, due apparently to spring school breaks.  Everyone has water and electricity at their site so even the tenters could plug in a microwave if they wanted!  The campground is heavily treed and much to our surprise there are very few bugs.

This is another CCC built park from the 1930's.  It has a small river and maybe most important, it has the only caverns in the state of Florida that are open for touring. The caverns were discovered in 1937 and below are some iPad shots Marty took.

Down the entrance steps

There in the middle of this photo is a very small bat who is hibernating and is one of well over 20,000 bats in the caverns.   

The tour took about one hour and we were all forced to bend over to scoot under the low portions, watching out for our heads.  Only little kids were spared the hunching down.

On the way back to the campground is a swampy area where we had seen many birds.  We saw none there yesterday.

As we were riding our bikes further along the road back to our camp sites we saw this huge fungus growing.  It is just as bright as the photo shows and probably at least a foot in diameter.

Oh yes, a side note.  The local junior college's womens' basketball team won the national championship.  Big doings.  Also there is a bike trek called the Caverns to Coast in which the average age of the riders is 62!  The trek started yesterday.