A day for Jeff and a day for Rose

January 21, 2019 Rose Peters 0 Comments

This weekend we traveled to Orlando to do some work for VMX conference. Jeff and I split our free time into a day for him (Universal Studios) and a day for me (Florida State Parks). This was my first time to Universal and it was fun, of course. The new(ish) Harry Potter area is amazing! The day was twice as fun thanks to a generous gift certificate that I won in a work party scavenger hunt. On top of that we also got extra money from a nice gentleman named Bernie who works for NBC and had us watch 30 minutes of tester programming in exchange. I would say we walked about 4-5 miles in our entire day at the park – maybe a little more than half of what we usually do at Disney.

We left the concrete jungle of Orlando to travel about an hour out for our first park. We then looped back along a path of several more parks before racing back to the hotel for the football game.

Blue Spring State Park

Lower Wekiva River Preserve State Park

Rock Springs Run State Reserve

Wekiwa Springs State Park

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Blue Spring State Park

We had a cloudy, windy day for most of our State Park day. Despite this, the waters at Blue Springs are still emerald green and so beautiful. There are big families of manatees clustered along the shore and drifting lazily along the spring. Check out this live manatee webcam here! There are also big schools of enormous fish that make me want to grab my fishing pole to snag one for dinner. We also met squirrels and so many cute little vultures scavenging around the picnic tables like raccoons. This park is a very beautiful and I can’t wait to come back again!

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Lower Wekiva River Preserve State Park

This park is less structured with a larger area for hiking in the pine forest and palmetto scrub areas. I looked hard for a bear, but unfortunately (Jeff thinks fortunately) we didn’t see any. We did see a lot of these mystery sand hills which I think is covered pretty well in this article – the conclusion seems to be that these are probably caused by pocket gophers.

While on our walk, we also found a good article about the spelling of this park (because we knew we would also be heading to Wekiwa Springs today). Turns out, the true spelling is likely the native Seminole-Creek Indian “Wekiwa” word for water. It was only changed to “Wekiva” by some developers who thought the hard “vee” sound was more desirable. This has been referred to as the “great spelling tragedy of Central Florida”.

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Rock Springs Run State Reserve

So Rock Springs Run is even less developed than the last park. There is a main road through the park, but it will feel pretty brutal on the average car. By the time we got here, it was pretty chilly and getting extremely windy (there was a high wind advisory for the area). We walked back along one of the trails to get a few pictures before coming back. This is a nice park for horseback riding and can be nice for longer hikes – next time on a nicer day!

Wekiwa Springs State Park

This was our last park and a pretty close call on whether this one or Blue Spring is my favorite. They are both so beautiful and this park has created a really nice swimming area that looks like a luxury pool. Despite the cold weather, the water is still in the 70’s and several people came out to swim. I’m pretty sure they must be from the North considering the relatively light attire compared to our several layers and warm jackets! I wanted to stay at this park much longer than I was able to, but we had to race back to our hotel to catch the Championship football game – so sorry, Saints (and my ears after listening to Jeff scream for 4 hours)! The last thing we did was to try to find the first Geocache in the Operation Recreation Geotour (GT3D) hosted by the Florida State Park system. It was just my luck that the cache seemed to have disappeared in time for my visit. Someone else couldn’t find it either later that day – bummer!! I guess it will be a reason to go back again this year.