St Marks to Tallahassee Rail Trail

After two days of paddling Peggy wanted to rest and read, so we had a relaxing day and later walked over the St Mark’s River bridge to a popular Oyster Bar restaurant. Even though it wasn’t even 5 pm and only 2 tables were full it took us an hour to get our food. Peggy’s shrimp was fine but my two little fish were not good. I’d skip “Oust Too” if you are in the area. We heard that Savannah's Restaurant, which was about 4 miles away and right next to the rail trail, had a great sea food buffet but we didn’t get there.

On Saturday morning we drove the RV with our bike to the Wakulla Station Trail-head which was about in the middle of the 16 mile rail trail. It had plenty of parking and a friendly attendant that would watch the vehicles. The 12’ wide paved trail , with other trails leads all the way to Tallahassee and has covered benches about every two miles. I was surprised that even though this was a Saturday morning we saw very few bikers considering how nice the trail is. It was in the woods the entire way.

We decided to bike south to St Marks and then biked over to the small San Marcos de Apalache State Historical Site. Established by the Spanish in 1680 and taken over by USA in 1820. They have a small museum & short walking trail to the top of a hill that was an old gun magazine that was never excavated. We planned to get back to the park by noon so we biked a few miles past our start for a total  of 18 miles and then enjoyed a light lunch and rest while watching Ohio State beat Michigan in the comfort of our RV. At half time we headed back to camp to watch the rest of the game. We had planned to here stay for another day and bike out to the lighthouse which was on a road right across from our campground but the weather forecast called for morning rain and temperatures dropping into the low forties the next day.

So we moved up our itinerary to head to the 32 mile long paved Nature Coast State Trail which runs from Cross City to Chiefland on Sunday morning. They were predicting 80^oF and partly cloudy skies.

There is a good parking lot access to the trail across from Fanning Springs. We biked North about 4 miles to cross the bridge over the Suwannee and then back into Fanning Springs State Park. They charge $6 per vehicle to see the spring but let us in on our bike free since we were just heading in to take a picture and come right out. We biked about 10 miles on this very pretty wooded trail.
We then drove to go grocery shopping before checking in at Manatee Springs State Park. It’s usually booked on weekends but sites are readily available from Sunday to Thursday.