Day 107: Newport, FL

Another cool morning in the mid-40s, but it warmed up fairly quickly.  Alea bundled up early, but was shedding layers about every hour or so.  By the time she had completed her 57 miles it was in the mid-70s.  It was a challenging ride early, with lots of rollers and no shoulders (though mainly only church traffic).  Getting through Tallahassee was easier than getting through Pensacola, but it's never fun driving in retail traffic, especially on those sections with no shoulder.  The last miles of the day were relatively easy, along a rail-trail on mostly flat terrain.

It's warming up - time to shed a layer!

We are camping at Newport Campground ($22, power, water and showers), a small campground run by Wakulla County.  The Adventure Cycling maps didn't show this campground or much of anything elsein this area, aside from a KOA near Monticello (30+ miles farther down the road).  We had Googled for 'camping' and 'campgrounds,' but came up empty.  Then we tried 'RV Park' and this showed up, about 15 miles off of our route.  It's a pretty nice little campground, though there are lots of ant mounds on our campsite, and it got pretty buggy as it got closer to evening.

This is one of the few weekends where we've had decent over-the-air TV reception on a Sunday, and the first such time when there is actually a Seahawks game scheduled this evening.  Of course with us being in the Eastern Time Zone, we'll be lucky if we managed to catch half of the game before nodding off...

We looked ahead to see what sort of booking problems we might encounter at Florida State Parks.  It's looking like there aren't many sites available next week, as everyone is capitalizing on their time off during Thanksgiving week.  Especially at the beaches, where virtually no campsites are available until the week after.  We're thinking that it is looking as though we should have pushed harder to reach Orlando at least a week before Thanksgiving (as originally planned), but so much for hindsight.

I suspect there will be other private campsites available, so we'll figure things out as we go along.