Our Last Four Days at Ortona

The Caloosahatchee River at the Ortona Lock is a narrow canal with high banks and does not look good for paddling our canoe. We like rivers that wind through wilderness areas. This river has nothing intersecting it either except for canal ditches from the nearby Orange Groves and cow pastures.       

So we decided to do some biking in the nearby development, that I talked about in our last blog.

But sometimes we forget things.

So every other day we rode out of our campground and down the highway to this totally empty development with paved streets.

We tried to go on different streets on each of our 4 rides. The map shows where we went and the total length of the ride from our campground.

We found 1 house, 1 RV and one lot with a picnic table and I sure there were at least 2000 tiny lots.

I understand that all these lots were sold by a developer years ago but it is too far from any town where you could shop or go to school. It has no sewers or electric utilities. Anyone that bought here got screwed because now they are paying $300/year in taxes and the lots would be impossible to ever sell, unless you can find another sucker.

   

Every day the Hang Glider group was there doing their thing, so we stopped to take a our rest break and watch them have fun.

A truck pulls them down the road to launch and on these breezy days they can stay up there a long time.

If you look closely in the picture where the guy is being pulled up into the air you can see two others already up in the air already. Those aren't birds.

The weather finally got warm and the temperature next week are supposed to go above average. January this year is at least 10^o colder than last year.

We left Sunday morning at 7:15 AM and drove to Tampa Bay. It was very foggy but traffic was light. We got to EG Simmons County Park hear Apollo Beach by 10:15 AM.

We planned to get here early to get a campsite. They do not take reservations and that’s why we try to get there on a Sunday morning when any weekenders may be leaving.

Wow for the first time ever there were 15 sites available, everyone was heading home after the weekend. So we picked site 79 which is a big site with easy bay access from our campsite.

We then drove off to do our grocery shopping for the week. We didn’t want to stop along the way since we wanted to be assured we got a campsite. We will probably stay here for 2 weeks. They changed the rules again, 30 day limit for any site.