Wild Things!

The morning began with a bobcat.  Or wildcat, or whatever your region calls its big dark grey-brown slinking kitty about 3-4 times the size of kitty.  This one was moseying across the De Leon UMC church parking lot in front of FROG and TOAD.

Here in Central Florida we are surrounded with national and state wilderness and state park areas.  This is home to black bear, deer, big cats, armadillos, alligators, big birds, two kinds of skunks and more red ants than we’ve seen since Colorado.

 Sorry for the lousy pics.  I call this my Loch Ness  Monster photographic syndrome. When I really want an immediate photo everything decides to take longer on the camera; or in me.

Saturday was a rainy day.  Just drizzles, mostly, and warm (75 the high) but gray and wet.  No problem! Lets go 10 minutes south to the annual on-street Deland Art and Craft show!

We were really headed to the library and found the show.  And while the art was fascinating we really enjoyed this acrobatic act, the Acromaniacs.  But Deland and its library were not our ultimate destination either.

So another 20 minutes south and we were turning off rte 17 for Blue Springs State Park.  Mona’s cousin Jerry McDowell had suggested this place when she called him the evening before.  He and his wife live in Port Orange, on the Atlantic coast, about half an hour east of us.

Blue Springs started, well, as a spring (no pun intended).  An amazing clear water spring, like many others in West Central Florida but much higher than most in volume of water expelled daily.  It’s constant 72 degree flow is somewhere over 100,000 gallons daily. So it, like many of these springs, stay warm when the ocean coastal waters get cooler.  And this attracts the Manatee.  By this weekend over 300 of them have arrived for the season!

Blue Springs, because it was a reliable water source, became a center of prehistoric Indian activity thousands of years ago, and in the early and mid 1800’s, secret home to bands of Seminole Indians escaping Andy Jacksons Indian Removal Act (to Oklahoma- remember Trail of Tears) and before the Civil War to escaped slaves who became partners with the escaping Indians in these almost untrakable dense woods, jungles, and swamps.

But after the war the Thursby family moved to this point of land on the St. John’s River and were among the first Floridians to grow oranges as a crop.  They built a steamship dock here and soon grew  a rousing trade in shipping to Jacksonville, down river from here.  Then by wagon, and later train, to Orange City, that built up around the new citrus farms, just 10 miles away. And in the late 1800’s, tourism.

Before the prehistoric Indians, and oranges, and through the Thursby family years, Blue Springs has always been the winter home to hundreds of manatee.

Thank you, Jerry, for sending us to such a magical place!  Sorry kids, this puts Fantasyland back a few notches in our book.  When you can see real manatee children playing and being nursed by their moms, it just beats the Dumbo ride all to pieces.

We spent the afternoon in the drizzle at Blue Springs (Its TG week, the manatee are piling in,  and there are no crowds due to the rain!) Then we headed home to De Leon, and a phone call.

Mona called a long lost-touch-with friend of our kids and us, Kathleen Fisher.  Kathleens family moved south from Lancaster, Pa,  this summer as her husbands job with Verizon moved him to Sanford, Florida, only half an hour or so south of Deland.  So what do you do to meet up with long lost friends?  Have dinner at Sonnys!

There’s a convenient Sonnys in Deland and we headed back there and spent a couple of hours over good food reminiscing and getting to know husband Dwight and boys Michael and Jared.

Larry Crum would love meeting these men. Hunters all, and lovers of the Pennsylvania mountains. And Jenn DeWalt… Kathleen and the men LOVE to fish! Great fishing here!  Hint, hint.

We had met at Sonny’s at 5:30 and were just saying goodbye from our coach where we had repaired when the restaurant began to clean up, at 10:00.  So much to talk about!  Diesel engines, teens at play in their clothes in bathtubs, deer that are just too small here in Florida, and dogs.

What a joy to meet such great people as we travel the continent!

-Ken