Silver Lake–Withlacoochee River & Bike Trail

It’s only 90 miles from Juniper Springs to the Withlacoochee State Forest, but we needed to get propane, grocery shop and enjoy the drive on all secondary roads.. It took us 3 hours to get to our campsite at Cypress Grove Campground. We picked site 47 which we thought was a close site to the canoe launch and not too sloping. Even adding 5” blocks we were still going downhill a little, maybe next time  we should pick site 50, still close to our launch. There is good cell service here with ATT 4G.

So the weather was forecast to turn bad for the weekend. Heavy rain were forecast for the first time in 2 weeks and then it was supposed to go down in the low 30’s.

On Friday we decided to take a 19 mile bike ride heading north toward Floral City on the 46 mi paved Withlacoochee State Bike Trail, while it was still sunny and 75^oF. Peggy does well on the Tandem bike and it is nice to be able to talk as we ride along and enjoy the scenery.

The last few years we visited Paul & Helen who live in Inverness, FL. This year they brought their RV and their kayaks over to paddle the river. But with the rain and cold weather we decided to go out to lunch on Saturday and since he couldn’t get his motor home’s furnace working, they went back home.

On Sunday it finally warmed to about 53^oF and was nice and sunny so we headed south on the trail to the end at Trilby. This ride was 20 miles long and had our big mountain climb over the freeway overpass. We made it up non-stop in both directions in our lowest gear. It is supposed to warm back to the 70’s on Tuesday, so we plan to canoe the river.