Only picture of the day, what a cool sounding name.
As you can tell by this picture it was a pretty dreary day
2/24/10
Day 112
63 miles
We woke up this morning and were thankful to have been in a warm bed last night. It has been so cold here that we have begun to use the phrase “Florida Cold” for when something is extremely cold. Such as “Greg, is it just me or is it really cold outside right now.” “Yeah it is Florida Cold right now.” We have found out a couple of new things about Florida while on this part of our trip. It used to be that when I thought of Florida I thought about palm trees, beaches, nice warm weather and typically flat and very swampy. Well, this part of Florida is very hilly, though the hills are not very large or very steep. Either way, this state is not flat. The landscape is filled with trees, and it was a surprise to me to find that most of the trees around here are pines, longleaf, shortleaf and loblolly. The second big revelation we have come to is that Florida is definitely not always warm. Well, actually it usually is. The average lows here this time of year are around 45 degrees. We have been having an average low of around 25 for tonight and the next several nights. We are experiencing Florida at about 20 degrees colder than its typical low. Yikes!
We know that tonight will have a low of around 25 so we hope to get to the campground, get food in our bellies, and get to sleep! We are riding hard today to make it in time for the campground to be open as it closes at sundown. It has been slightly damp and cold all morning and the sun hadn't peeked out once. Finally we decided that if we saw a cafe we would stop in for lunch and to warm up. Sure enough we saw a nice little restaurant and got inside just as it started to drizzle. Greg got a lunch special with meatloaf, black eyed peas, mashed potatoes and gravy, coffee and a lemon crème pie. My lunch was a big bowl of vegetable soup. I loved this homemade soup because it was not from a can or a mix and they actually put fresh veggies like okra in to spice it up. What a good choice for lunch. After getting warmed up and having to tear ourselves away from the cozy, warm cafe, we faced the cold, dismal road ahead.
Although it never got warm today, eventually the sun came out from behind the clouds and we were encouraged to get to the campground and make good time. After some good effort to get to Marianna we remembered that we still had three more miles to ride to the state park where our campground is located. Greg ended up riding that whole way with a half gallon of milk in one hand so we could have milk with our granola in the morning. We got to the campground in the nick of time because the ranger had already closed the gate but had not left. She was very friendly and let us through the gate and checked us in so that we could just pay in the morning. We rode yet another mile down to the campsite and set up our tent around 6:20PM. Greg made some quesadillas for dinner and after the meal we scurried as quickly as we could into our sleeping bags and drifted off to sleep (after a dessert of Newman-O's -in the tent, what a treat!)
Dani
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