160 Parks in Three Years? Am I Supposed to Be Impressed?

So, the big news this Sunday is that my parents made their local paper, the Villages Daily Sun ("The Only Paper in North America with a Growing Subscriber Base! The Villages: The Internet? No one here knows how to use any technology developed after 1975!"). They're featured as the Villagers of the week. The Sun does weekly stories on Villagers with nifty hobbies ("He has every single Frank Sinatra album ever cut embossed framed and mounted on the walls of his house!" or "She collects ceramic cows, look how there's no open shelf or counter space in her home!")..

Somehow the newspaper found out that my parents have been visiting Florida State parks these last three years, and that they finally visited their last park this past week.

This is the result:

This last Monday I actually accidentally ran into my Dad at Lake Griffin State Park in Lady Lake (the park closest to my parents' house) as he was finally dropping off his "Passport" booklet with all the stamps from each park in it. I was ironically and serendipitously there to pick my own passport booklet up. I'd decided (inspired by them) to use the parks as interim destinations in my road trip to discover Florida this summer.

It was Monday, July 20th.

This past week I've been to 13 parks. When I was in Orlando (for three days) I only visited three, but these last three days I've been to nine. I have to admit that with only one exception I've basically blown through them, only spending about 20 minutes driving around, getting out of the car to walk around for five or ten minutes then leaving. That's because they've all been dedicated to camping and RV sites, fishing, hiking, nature walks. There've been a couple with horse and mountain biking trails trails, too. One park, Payne's Creek, is a historical park centered on the site of a Federal fort built in 1849 during the last Seminole War. I spent an hour there in the museum and walking around the location the blockhouse had been built.

The one park I spent a bunch of time at, actually going there twice and staying for hours, was Wekiwa Springs, which is a first magnitude spring that is the source of of the Wekiva River, which we - my parents and Aunt Mary Jo - went canoeing down a year ago. We saw this 20+ foot alligator, and a bunch of smaller gators on the river, which is separated from the swimming hole around the spring where all the juicy people (hundreds of them on a summer day like we've been having) are frolicking by a net and a row of floating logs, I think. I didn't examine the anti-gator defense that closely, but it didn't seem all that formidable.. Nothing 20' of hungry primordial lizard couldn't probably blow through if he really wanted..

Anyway, this coming week I'm going to go to all the parks between here and Key West. They're all along the ocean, and most have good beaches, so I'm going to spend more time at these ones..

Then, I'm going to turn north through the Everglades and head toward Tampa. Then, I'll go to the St. Augustine and Jacksonville area, then cut west toward the panhandle and Pensacola.

This will take maybe a month, month and a half.

What I'm saying is that I am going to get every single park stamp in my Passport booklet in less than 2 months, hoss.

All visited by August 20th, 2011.

That's right. I'm throwing down.

Watch me now. Watch me roll. It's hammertime.



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