Crystal River

Monday, 18 January 2010

Today is Martin Luther Day and a public holiday. We spent the day ambling up from St Petersburg stopping off in a couple of State Parks – with no charges! The first one, Phillipe State Park, was named after the first European to settle in the area. Phillipe was a Frenchman who started the Florida grapefruit growing business; with the help of a couple of hundred slaves.

The second park was the John Chestnut Senior Park by Tarpon Lake. The only things I can remember was that it was cold and Paul left his, much used, Swiss army knife on the picnic table. He is so usually so good at checking when we get up and leave anywhere, to make sure we take all our stuff; but you can almost guarantee that the time he doesn’t check is the time one of us will leave something behind. That penknife has been all around the world with us. It has served us well, now it will serve some other bugger!

The reason for coming to Crystal River is to ‘dive with the Manatees’ – but it’s far too bloody cold! It was getting warmer but another cold front now following the deluge of precipitation of Saturday night. For an area that is in the dry season, I was surprised to see how much standing water was left after our little storm – God knows what it must be like in the wet season!

Another thing we wanted to do was to walk/climb down into a rather deep, but not flooded, sink hole; but guess what, this place is closed today, the day we arrived, and it will be closed again tomorrow. Time is running out and the weather is warming a little so it is going to be a mad dash down to the keys, something we could not possibly miss, as we will probably never come back to Florida!