Alafia River State Park and Summer Plans

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I’ll admit, it felt good to be back on the road after sitting still for 3 months. I suspect our limit in the future will be somewhere in the one to two month range, but who knows? Our next stop will be to head a bit further south. I know, it’s early April and most snowbirds are starting their journey north but we have signed up for a Habitat for Humanity build and rally in North Fort Myers. We have five nights to kill and had booked a site in Alafia River State Park before the build starts. 

If you do a Google search for mountain biking in Florida, it’s likely this place will be at the top of the results. It was a bit of a surprise that there is any real mountain biking in Florida other than in the panhandle, but we figured it was worth a shot. Even though it was a weekday, the drive through Tampa wasn’t too bad. We had reserved one of the pull thru sites and found it to be pretty nice with a couple shade trees to set our chairs underneath. Nearby were some tall, high voltage power line towers that had some bird platforms situated on top. The closest one was only a few hundred feet away and a couple of ospreys had built a large nest. We got out the binoculars and discovered there were three young birds in the nest as well. It was fun to watch mom and dad going out for fish from the many nearby ponds and tear off small chunks for the youngsters. 

Incoming!

Adult and One Young Osprey

Adult and Two Young Osprey

In Flight

We headed out before dinner on the first afternoon and did a couple mile hike to scope out the park. There are many miles of hiking and equestrian trails besides the ones for biking. There is even an equestrian camping area in another loop from our campsite. It isn’t required to have a horse to camp in any of those sites and most of the rigs there did not have horses. North of the campground is the day use area. There is a large parking lot and it was pretty full. This is the start of most of the mountain biking trails. We picked one of the hiking trails that meanders next to some of the mountain bike trails to find some of the many geocaches hidden in the park.

A Dragonfly Visited Our Campsite

Green Face

Alafia River used to be a phosphorus strip mine but was abandoned well before mine operators were required to return the land to its original condition. In the intervening years, nature has reforested the area and it was turned over to the state. In a way, having the land all distorted by the mining has created a perfect topography for a mountain bike course to be built. They have four “easy” trails, seven “intermediate”, thirteen “advanced” and four “expert” trails. We discovered that there are quite a few man made features added to the trails to make the riding that much more interesting and challenging. As we walked the hiking trail, we passed by one of the tall wooden ramps but no cyclists were there to show us how it should be done. It turned out that what we saw was actually part of one of the intermediate trails - the North Creek Trail.

Part of North Creek Trail

Alafia Bike Trail Map

The next day, we hit the trails with our bikes. We figured we should start with the “easy” trails just to make sure we knew what we were getting ourselves into. There is a trail out of the equestrian campground that gets us to the 1.5 mile Hidden Rivers trail. This single track trail winds through a nicely wooded area. Fortunately this bike trail, like many in the park, are one way. So we shouldn’t need to worry about oncoming traffic. There are lots of twists and turn but not much more than a few feet of elevation change. There also aren’t many sandy stretches and the biggest obstacles to overcome are tree roots, rocks and a few spots with trees on both sides of the trail where it isn’t clear our handlebars will clear.

This trail ends up on a multi-use trail that we can follow up to the next “easy” trail - the Sand Pine trail. This one is 1.7 miles long and is in a much more open area. The terrain is sandy but not to the extent that traction or cornering are compromised. The most obvious thing about this trail was the fact it had been burned recently and still had the smell of burned wood in the air. We later found out that this area had a prescribed burn less than 4 weeks ago. This trail merges into another “easy” one named Rock Garden which is mostly back in the woods and was a lot of fun for its one and a quarter mile length. Combining these three trails in a loop from the campground is 7 to 8 miles long.

Prescribed Burn Aftermath

Charred Sand Pine Trail

The next morning there was a park hosted “camper coffee” event. We attended it and met one of the campground volunteer couples that happen to be geocachers as well. They have placed the majority of the caches in the park. Another thing mentioned at the event was an app called Trailforks. It is a mountain biking trail map app that includes all the trails with descriptions and elevation profiles. But the best feature is it works with the phone’s GPS to show exactly where we are while out on the trail. Plus you can download all the trails for a state so you don’t need to have cell coverage while on the trail which will be good in more remote areas. We started using this app during our stay and are not sure how we have lived without it. With as much biking as we do, this app will be a big help as we travel the country. 

After the event, we hopped in the car and drove to Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales Florida. It’s about an hour away but was closer from this stop than our stop in Hudson. Chris had heard about this place and added it to our list of things to see while in Florida. What’s so special about this place? There is a very large carillion that stands 205 feet tall constructed mostly of marble that houses 60 cast bronze bells. The smallest bell weighs 16 pounds while the largest comes in close to 12 tons! The 50 acres that surround the bell tower were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr and includes some very impressive gardens.

Bok Tower and Reflection

Visitor Center

Dark Sun Flower

Impressive Entrance Door

Tower

The tower and gardens were constructed back in the 1920’s for Edward W. Bok. He was the editor of Ladies’ Home Journal and apparently had more money than he knew what to do with. After it was completed, he gave it as a gift to the American people. The place is now open to the general public once you pay your $15 admission fee. They have concerts twice a day, so make sure to plan your trip accordingly. We arrived early enough to catch on of the free docent led tours that explains the history of Bok, the gardens and the tower. Our tour ended at the tower just in time for the 1 o’clock concert. The sound from the tower was very impressive although I would have preferred to hear songs I knew. Maybe the carillonneur should take requests? How about “Freebird” or “Stairway to Heaven” or “Born to Run”.

Sundial on Tower

Intricate Stonework

After the first concert, we grabbed a snack at the cafe. Then we wandered around more of the gardens our tour didn’t get to including a couple geocaches on the grounds. The detail of some of the carvings and other features of the tower are rather impressive. They have a closed circuit TV showing the carillonneur playing the “instrument”. He presses levers that are attached to wires which move a striker into the stationary bells. Apparently only very generous donors are permitted into the tower and even then only one day a year. Bok Tower Gardens were a nice side trip to something a little different. Too bad we didn’t take my sisters to the place, I bet they would have enjoyed it. 

Adam and Eve with Serpent

Closeup of Door

Carved Stone Pelicans

The next day, we did some more hiking to get a dozen of the newer caches the local volunteers had recently placed at Alafia River. This park has a lot to offer beyond the excellent mountain biking trails. After lunch, I did a solo bike ride of the same loop from the day before. I really enjoyed the ride but even though I was able to ride fast, I did get passed by a couple of guys that seemed to come out of nowhere. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t keep up with them. If I was only 20 or 30 years younger! On my last bike ride in the park, I tried my luck on the North Creek Trail (see earlier picture). There were definitely some intense parts but I suspect if I had tried it earlier in our stay, I would have done much better after a few runs.

Green Cove

Mile Six Guardian

Resting on Handlebar Grip

Showing Off

Even though Alafia River has some great mountain biking trails, there is another very popular place only about 6 miles to the west. Balm Boyette Nature Preserve has 20 miles of trails for biking. There is a large parking lot and it was 75% full when we arrived. All the trails are about half a mile from the parking area. We stuck to the easy trails on the southern end of the preserve and really didn’t get a chance to see any of the more advanced trails. It seems like most of the people here are on those difficult trails because the ones we rode were pretty empty. I think we only saw 3 or 4 others during our ride. If you enjoy mountain biking at just about any level, this area of Florida has two excellent parks to keep you entertained and in shape.

Balm-Boyette Trail Map

Pretty Butterfly

Over the past couple months we have been working on figuring out what are travel plans will be for the rest of 2019. One area of the country we haven’t checked out are the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. With that in mind, for the last year or so, I have put together a Google map with pins at spots we might want to check out in that area. If I read somebody’s blog or watched a YouTube video with some interesting sounding spot, I would add it to my map. There were also the obvious additions like Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. 

Possible Stops on Google Map

The next step was to stare at that map and get an idea of what might make sense for a route. There were a few things in Minnesota that just didn’t seem logical to add to this plan. We have gotten in the habit of trying to spend a bit of time in a spot of interest rather than seeing how many spots we can fit into a given timeframe. That’s an advantage we currently have and really enjoy the slower pace of travel. We also added one of our items from our bucket list. The Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta is one of those things we have always wanted to attend. We checked out a couple different methods for attending and decided to go with a rally hosted by the Escapees club. They have a few options and we went with the longer, 11 night option. That way, we won’t miss anything during the show! The fiesta starts in early October so we now had some dates to bound our travels and it gives us about five and a half months to spend on the trip up north. 

We previously used Microsoft Streets and Trips to just roughly map out our travel routes. But this program is no longer supported so we wanted an alternative. We had read about a web based mapping tool called Furkot that sounded interesting. After watching a few YouTube videos, we decided to give it a try. It is free to use although they offer a pay version as well, but we haven’t determined if that provides options we need. We created a trip and added our starting point of North Fort Myers Florida and our ending point of Albuquerque New Mexico as well as the known dates. Then we simply started to add some of the more important stops like Glacier National Park, Custer State Park, the Badlands, etc. Initially we put in 2 weeks as a placeholder for any of the National Parks and a week for lesser stops. 

During the early stages, it’s really just to get a sense of where we will be and roughly what timeframe. The feature that comes in handy for us with Furkot is we can tell it that we don’t want to drive more than 200 miles on travel days. (That’s our unwritten rule.) This causes the route to have stop over pins placed so it is easy to gauge roughly where we may want to find a stopping place. It’s not like we use Furkot for finding campgrounds, but it can be set up to show campgrounds in an area rather than hotels.

Our Travel Plans

We probably worked on the plan on and off for 6 weeks during February and March. As the timing and locations got firmed up a bit, we started to check out availability at some of our stops. We determined that many of the places in and around the National Parks were starting to fill up and we needed to firm up some of the plans. We ended up putting together a trip where many of the stops are reserved. A few stops we picked are first come, first serve sites so we will see how our luck works out for those and a few more don’t take reservations more than so many months out, so we have them on the back burner. 

We are really looking forward to this upcoming trip and hope the weather and wild fires don’t cause too much turmoil