Ocean Pond Our Last Florida Campground

On Sunday morning we leave Juniper Springs. If the weather is good our plan is to drive to Silver Springs State Park and paddle the 5 mile long Silver River from a small marina up to the source of the spring where all the glass bottom boats are.

Over the years we have always enjoyed this run, especially with our kids when there were wild monkeys along the way. There is lots of wildlife since it is now in a protected State Park.

Later in the day we hope to make it up to Ocean Pond Campground in Osceola National Forest. We camped here on the way south over Thanksgiving and it was very full. We hope that on a Sunday, we will be able to get a campsite with electric power.

We will then start watching the weather up North and plan to take three days to make it home from here. We will start on I-10 to I-95 and I-26 which will bring us to I-77 our route home. See the map on the left.

 

 

We made it to the marina to launch our canoe for our paddle up the Silver River to the source of the Springs by 8:30 AM Sunday morning.

We were on our way upstream by 9 AM. It is a 5 mile paddle  against a strong current and it took us 2 hours. About 1-1/2 miles up from the put-in we saw a big group of monkeys along the river that were introduced when they were making a movie here 50 years ago. Despite attempts to remove them they still seem to be surviving just fine.

There was still all sorts of birds, turtles and a few alligators and the concession still looked the same but there were very few glass bottoms boats and no jungle cruise.

What we did notice was that there were all sorts of rental kayaks near the head of the spring.

The biggest change was there was no more nice white sandy bottom and there was all sorts of sea grass in the water and lots of algae. It is not nearly as pretty as it used to be.

It took us a little over an hour to paddle back downstream and we were on our way by 12:30 and got to Ocean Pond by 3:30, only to find out that we just missed the last site with electric hook ups and there was only a couple of other sites available.

However on Monday morning several electric sites became available. Now we just have to decide when we will head for home.