The weather warmed each day as predicted. On Saturday we rode our tandem to pick up some groceries at Winn-Dixie, 7.5 miles Round trip on the FishHawk bike trails. We biked again on Sunday around a development called FishHawk Trails. This 14.5 mile ride was in their gated neighborhood, so we just tailgated a car through the gate for access. It was a nice asphalt trail. But the only place to get on this trail is through their main gate.
The rain we had last week brought the river up from 70 to 120 cfs, so on Monday we decided to paddle upstream and back from our campsite, about 5.5 total miles, to see how the river is at that low level. We found that there was plenty of water to run the whole 9.5 mile stretch from Alderman’s Ford Park We planned to do the river on Wednesday our last day here at Lithia Springs.
On Tuesday morning we got another hard rain for a few hours but by afternoon we were able to get in our last bike ride about 11 miles.
Now we really lucked out as far as water level, shuttle and weather. This picture is from 2 years ago when the same Campground Host gave our canoe a lift to the put-in. He had just arrived yesterday. The rain had brought up the river to 270 CFS a great level and the park service had cut out a few tress that were across the river. So we had some fun maneuvering and saw lots of turtles and 4 alligators as well as herons, ducks and a few big hawks. The run had a nice current at this level and we made it in 2-1/2 hours. It’s a very pretty stretch, a few houses half way down and a few more near our campground at the end.
We leave on Thursday morning to go to WP Franklin Corps of Engineers Campground at a lock on the Caloosahatchee River near Ft Myers. This is a very hard campground to get camping reservations. You need to get them exactly 6 months in advance at exactly 10:00 AM and you are limited to 14 days.
It looks like it will get a little cooler again but not as cold as last week.
Lots of wildlife
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