Day 108: Suwannee River State Park

The weather always seems to give us one or two days with lows in the mid to upper 50s and highs in the 70s and 80s before another cold front or rain system passes through to cool things off.  So today was our day to make hay while we had lots of sun to work with.  We hit the road a bit earlier than usual, in an effort to cover a longer than typical distance.  We could have had a short day and stayed at a KOA, but decided to split the riding so that we could stay at another state park.

Virtually the whole day had some sort of headwind.  For the first hour or so it was around 5 mph, but after that it was pretty consistently around 10 mph with a stronger gust or two thrown in to keep us off balance.  Add some rolling hills and 10 miles of construction at the end, and it was a fairly challenging day.  We were fortunate to have good weather, as the construction would have been a real hazard in the rain.

I rode the first 52 miles, and aside from the rolling hills, it wasn't too bad.  Alea did the last 32 miles and once again managed to get the stinky end of the stick.  First, there was a fair amount of traffic through Madison, FL, though most of the way through town there was a nearly empty parking strip to ride in.  Then came the construction.  They had paved most of the westbound side of the highway.  That left the eastbound side prepped for overlay, which included texturing the shoulder to assure the overlay would adhere properly.  That made it too bumpy to ride on, so Alea cautiously rode against traffic on the freshly paved westbound shoulder.  That lasted for several miles, before she reached the section that had been prepped on both sides, but had yet to be paved.  That was the worst section, which lasted about 5 miles and had more truck traffic than we had seen all day.  Alea was especially cautious and eventually got past all of that.

The courthouse at Madison, FL.
I always appreciate when municipalities are thoughtful enough to provide
for the welfare of all of their citizens.  Sights like this were pretty common
before Reaganomics.

So we eventually made it safely to Suwannee River State Park, where we are camping for the night ($24.20, power, water and showers).  We somehow managed to get one of the more private sites in the campground (likely because the pad is too short for most of today's RVs).

We asked the park ranger about the fact that so many state parks are nearly fully booked for next week.  She said that happens at Thanksgiving and around Christmas and New Years.  The weekends are often booked, but midweek it is possible to find sites in most parks (and availability is much better after Martin Luther King Day).  That's good to know, as we were starting to wonder how difficult it would be to get from St Augustine to Palmetto?  It'll only be a two or three day ride from St Augustine to where we'll leave our route to stay with Alea's sisters in Oviedo, and we can wait out the holiday rush there.  We'll be able to leave on Sunday and get across the state before the following weekend, so finding campsites for the final days of this year's trip should be no more difficult than has normally been the case.