Silver Spring to Orlando

Monday, February 24, 2020

We were able to pull out this morning at 9:30. We are getting good at this!

Drove through a lot of farm land and horse ranches to get to Silver Springs. It was a pretty drive. The weather is a lot more Florida-like here. A beautiful 75 and sunny.  It was a good day.  We will be staying in our first 55 and older RV park on this leg.  We will see how that goes.

As soon as we arrived and got set up we rode our bikes across the street to the Silver Springs State Park.  This park is where they first introduced the glass bottom boat and they filmed the old TV series  with Lloyd Bridges, Sea Hunt.

  

  

    

    

 I wish my pictures could really show you how beautiful this place is.  We rode our bikes all over that park. It was a beautiful day and we only turned back when we were afraid it would be dark before we got home.  Didn’t want to cross the major highway in the dark.  We realized we went through all this trouble to bring our kayaks and we did not bring any life jackets.  So I hope to take our kayaks to play in this spring on our way home.

When we got home we looked up the Sea Hunt show and watched the first episode, of course.  It was not as corny as the Redford - Wood show we tried to watch before.

Rainy day on Tuesday so we stayed in and we washed the RV Wednesday.  That is quite a work out.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

We had a busy day today.  We went to the Ocala RV Show this morning.  Man, they have really outdone themselves for 2020.  Can’t wait till we can buy one of those second hand!!!

Then we headed down the road to zip line through the canyons.  We used Canyon Zipline and Adventure Park.  They were very good.  Sean and Josh did a great job and we even had the big boss guy, Pat, to help keep us all safe.  We did the 9 zipline tour and ended with a repel.  This was great, but I anticipated a little more of an adrenaline rush.  I never got nervous or butterflies in my stomach or anything.  It was fun, just not really what I expected to feel flying through the air like that.  I really thought I would have a problem walking off the edge of the platform.  But no!  Dennis either.  We were surprised.

  

  

Here are some highlights from the day.  We started out on a little trial line to ensure that we could break and turn around and pull ourselves if we were unable to make it to the end of the line.  It reminded me of when my father made a zip line in our backyard when we were little and the whole neighborhood would come over and we would zip from one tree to the other. Then we walked a couple of rope bridges over beautiful canyons and spectacular water.  It did not look real. The water was as odd green color, but it was really pretty. The bridges were a little nerve racking. Some of you know how clumsy I am so walking over a wobbling bridge, the fear was real.  Apparently this is in an old limestone quarry, so the canyons are man made.  The company hit the underground aquifer and the canyon filled up with water rather quickly.  Our guide said there is even still equipment in the bottom that they were unable to retrieve before the water covered it. One of the lines we took was 150 feet high and 1100 feet long and was only 10 feet above the water at the lowest point.  A couple of the ladies started breaking too soon on this one and did not make it to the end, so they had to turn around and pull themselves in.  Dennis decided to use a cycling app to see how fast we went on a couple of the lines and one was 36.5 MPH and another was 26 MPH.  Some of the shorter ones seemed like we were going 50 MPH, but it was only 15 MPH or so.  The repelling part was kinda corny, but it made me think I could really do that.  It was only about 25 feet above the ground and they had a weight balance think that only allowed you to go so fast no matter what.  That is kinda cheating.

  

Dennis is calling the 55 and over RV park an old folks home.  But these guys are outside and visiting each other and playing cards in the clubhouse, unlike our park in Bay St. Louis where people stayed in the RVs the whole time.  They are all pretty much snow birds, but these are much more active ones.

Friday, February 28, 2020

Happy birthday my dear friend Cheryl Bryan!  I know you have a lot of celebrating planned.  Wish I could be there with you.

The move from Silver Springs to Orlando was a smooth one.  We could not arrive at Orlando until noon, so we lollygagged all morning to leave at check out time, which is 11:00 and got to our destination around 12:45.  This is a Thousand Trails park and it it HUGE!  We will be staying here in the Orlando area for two weeks before we moved to another Thousand Trails a little farther south.  So I will let you know how this goes.