Manatees and more!

A Quick Note Regarding Grad School
It's funny how things change and how they basically stay the same too. After much thinking, talking, and budgeting, I decided that now is just not the time for me to go to grad school. There are just too many debts that need to be settled and, as exciting and perfect as grad school would be, it would be terribly unwise of me to uproot the household and move away from well paying jobs in this economy. It's not cancelled, per se, but it is on hiatus. More time for ADVENTURE, right?

In the few months since my last post (sorry!) I have successfully completed the northeast region and most of the central region of my State Parks passport stampie book. I have only dabbled into the panhandle, but in total I have visited over 65 Florida State Parks since April of this year. I never thought I would have gotten this far into it this quickly, but here I am, with a quickly filling stamp book.

The weather has gone from hot to cold here, and my mood about it has done the same. The transition is always tough for me, with one day being in the upper 80s and the next being down in the 50s. It's like summer is in the throes of death, and I am the only one who is really sad about it. However, I have a tendency to focus on what I am losing with the loss of summer rather than what I am gaining with the onset of winter. I need to remember that now I can stop worrying about yellowflies, springwater is warm (relative to the air), and it's easier to see critters through the leafless forest. I love the smell of woodsmoke, the thinness of the air, and that great feeling when you're standing near a fire and it feels like the skin of your face relaxes out of its cold stupor. No, winter isn't as horrible as I make it out to be. Being cold, though, is another matter. I hate being cold more than I hate most things. Good thing I love scarves and big coats!

Onto the parks!

Blue Spring state park is better than I could have imagined it to be. When I tried to go there in the summertime, it was full of nasty people and I purposefully avoided going in. A few weeks ago, we went on a Sunday and it was just plain impressive. The park parallels the spring run and the springhead itself, and there's a large house on a hill nearby. The house is original to the property, which used to be a farm back in the day, and the first floor is open for touring. To our delight, the house also had a wonderful porch with some pretty awesome rocking chairs. Needless to say, we spent a good long time on that porch just enjoying the day.
The park encompasses a relatively small area, but it makes up for itself tenfold by the sheer variety of fauna. I kid you not, there were manatees swimming alongside giant gar underneath sunning alligators while bald eagles and ospreys soared overhead. Throw in some exquisite weather and you have yourself a postcard. We natives have a saying - "It's days like this that make people want to move here."
The spring itself, while visually appealing, is small and rather uninteresting from a swimmer's perspective. Two large trees at some point fell into the spring and crisscross over the mouth, which is a dark almond-shaped cutout in the limestone. It's not very large, and I really have no desire to go poking around submerged objects (it's a phobia of mine).
Blue Spring is really a lovely park, but I would certainly save it for the cooler months. Less people and more manatees... if only the rest of the state could be so.

Speaking of manatees, I recently visited Homosassa Springs. It's certainly like no other state park I've ever visited, and it's a bit too touristy for my tastes. It was unbearably busy and filled with many of my least favorite members of the Florida population ("Nature done best come to us if she knows what's good for 'er!"). I am sure there are plenty o' legitimate park and nature lovers in that throng, but they're hard to detect among the rest.
Memaws-visitors notwithstanding, Homosassa isn't all that bad. The official entrance is a gift shop/ticket sales area. One flash of my parks pass and I was in, moving through the double doors and lining up alongside a covered wooden boat dock. In the water next to me was a large pontoon boat filled with parkgoers packed three to a seat on baseball-park style aluminum benches. After they left, the next boat came by and my portion of the line was allowed to board. The electric-motored boat took us down a little run. The trip wasn't anything to write home about, as there isn't any real wilderness for miles, but I did see quite a few wood ducks and those are always a pretty sight. Also, their peeping is adorable. After about a 10 minute trup, the boat docked, my fellow passengers and I crossed the street into the actual park (not the "official" entrance, but rather a secondary one), walked through YET ANOTHER gift shop, and set out into the park itself.
More like a zoo than anything else, Homosassa houses only Florida native animals (except for an elderly hippo, but he's a throwback from the days it was a private zoo, and has since been declared a Florida citizen by the governor!). As far as zoos go, it's pretty nice. However, as far as state parks go, it's really disappointing. It's catered to those memaw-visitors I spoke of earlier.
The only upside to this carnival is the manatee viewing area. There is an underwater observatory that sits above the mouth of the spring itself, and in the winter the manatees enjoy hanging out there because of the constant water temperature and the feeding of romaine lettuce. I'm not sure where feeding the wildlife comes into the mission statement of the Florida State Park system, but I suppose when the wildlife is as endangered as the manatee, rules will be bent. I am still a bit on the fence about that, but they do a great job on manatee care and research so it may just even out.
I most likely will not return to Homosassa, just because of how un-state-parklike it is compared to the other ones I've been to. It's less natural splendor and more showcase and zoo, which I suppose make a lot of people happy, but not me. I'll stick to my trails through the woods where the animals roam free and the crowds are just a bit thinner.

Some of the other parks I've been to in the past months include Fort Cooper, Lake Griffin, and Crystal River. All three are absolutely lovely, and I have nothing but good things to say about them. They are all in completely different areas and have excellent, walkable, well-tended trails.

On to winter, and on to more ADVENTURE!