A Few More Days at Silver Lake

On Wednesday, we decided to walk the nice hiking trails around the park.

With all our exercise how did Peggy manage to make me look so fat when she took my picture walking the trails along the Lake between the two campgrounds?

There are actually three campgrounds in this state forest at the Silver Lake complex. The first one called Silver Lake has Electric & Water with hot showers. A second similar site called Cypress Glen has bigger sites and is further from I-75 but was closed for bathroom repairs. The third called Crooked River is rustic and for tents only and has very wooded sites.

We did see some interesting wildlife, an Armadillo wandered by seemingly oblivious to us walking nearby.

Our campground was never more than half full even on the weekend. I guess the 14 day limit keeps out the snow birds. Maybe in January it will be more full.

On Thursday the weather warmed to the high 70’s with plenty of sunshine. The bike trail had all sorts of bikes travelling in both directions enjoying the longest 12’ wide paved bike trail in Florida. 
We headed north to just past Istachatta, a small town on the trail. I told Peggy she was doing well, by the time we got back to camp it would be a 16 mile ride. She grabbed the map and stopped at one of  the nice benches along the way to check it out.

On Friday, we decided to paddle downstream again from our camp since we saw way more birds and an alligator when we did this stretch last Saturday.

Today we saw a couple of timid alligators that jumped into the river when they saw us. But mostly we saw lots of birds. Egrets & Herons who never stood still for any pictures and dozens of Ibis running around the shallows along the edge of the river.

A couple of vultures along the river.

The river had dropped about 5”  to 3.4’ and it was a little harder to detect the main channel, but there was still plenty of water. You needed to carefully look for the leaves moving downstream.

However someone, probably the canoe livery, tied yellow tape to the branches occasionally so that you knew you were still in the main river channel.