Silver River State Park

After eating our lunch, Donna and I decided we had plenty of time to do something else before heading home.  We tossed around a few ideas and then decided to go to Silver Springs.  I have never visited there before and am very much wanting to see it.  We drove over there, only to see they were closed!  After August 18th they are only open on weekends and holidays.  We passed Silver River State Park and decided to try that instead.  I asked the girl at the front gate what was at the park and after her giving us the run down we went inside the park.  We parked and saw the Cracker Pioneer Village and Silver River Museum, which are only open on weekends and holidays.

We looked at our map, then saw a sign for Sinkhole Trail and decided the sinkhole sounded interesting.  We started down the sandy hiking trail, with flip flops, and decided very shortly after that it was hot and we didn't have the best hiking gear on.  I also saw on the map that this path was 70 minutes long and we still wanted to do the trail to the river, so we turned around and backtracked at that point.  We then took the River Trail so we could see the Silver River.  We arrived at the river and I saw an alligator right near the boat ramp.

You can barely see him, but he is to the left of the wooden post.  We hung out here a bit, catching our breath and giving my aching calves a rest and listened to all the sounds of nature around us.  Then we headed back.

Just as we began to head back, it started to rain.  That should have been no surprise to us because we had noted that it felt like it was going to rain, saw clouds and heard thunder.  We must have thought we could beat it still, but we did not at all.  Since we were so hot and sweaty, the rain felt nice.  We were worried about our cameras but once we situated them in dryer spots we laughed the whole walk back to the car.  I am borrowing Donna's picture to show you what we looked like when we were done with the trail.

This was not the adventure we were expecting, but then again, they rarely are!  It was a great day.  Hopefully we will manage to get a few more day trips in again before we head back to Peace River!