Way Down Upon the Suwannee River

Way down upon the Suwannee River,
Far, far away,
There's where my heart is turning ever,
There's where the old folks stay.

I guess since we made the Georgia State Song the theme of yesterday’s post, it would only make sense to make the Florida State Song the theme of this one.  And especially because we are parked right beside the Suwannee River for the night.  We sat on deck chairs overlooking the river for a while after dinner, enjoying the breeze and the setting sun.  A very peaceful, idyllic setting courtesy of complete strangers, whose property we are camped on.  When making last-minute plans for Florida during the busy season, we turned to bonndockerswelcome.com for several nights in various locations.  Everything else is all booked up. This is one of those nights.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

From getting up on an 11-degree morning and dealing with frozen plumbing to sweating in bed because it is so warm and humid, the change in climate takes your breath away.  This morning was warm and humid, got down to 69 degrees last night.  Not the greatest sleeping weather.  Add a nearby interstate freeway, vehicles coming and going at all hours of the night one person leaving his pickup truck idling all night and it becomes quite a cacophony, especially with the windows open.

But the price is right.

We took off before 8am and were on the road four miles before we made our first stop.  The welcome center at the Florida border serves free orange juice and grapefruit juice.  We opted for the grapefruit juice.  Now having gotten the morning pucker out of the way (the stuff was pretty tart, but tasty), we were back on the interstate, headed south.  Our destination, a section of the Santa Fe River which contains several springs.  This is a very popular kayaking destination, as you can kayak to 8 springs in 8 miles of river.

We spotted a bicycle at the Santa Fe River Park and drove to Poe Springs, where we put in.

Poe Springs is the first spring, and it requires paddling about 1/4 mile upstream.  This is also a popular swimming hole as evidenced by the stairways leading down in the water.

We made stops at Lilly Springs and Mermaid Springs and had lunch at Rum Island Springs, a very popular area where several people were wading in the spring.  Right now it’s mid-week in February, I can imagine this place gets mobbed on weekends and during Spring Break, and also during the summer.  This was the perfect time to visit these springs.

At Gilchrist Blue Springs, we got out of the kayaks and went for a swim.  This spring is crystal clear and very blue colored.  And, with the water in the low 70’s, it made for some great swimming.

But we couldn’t spend all day here, we had four more springs and about six miles of river to go.

The next few springs are all part of the Ginnie Springs Campground, a private facility sitting on about two miles of the river that’s known for raucous parties and 18+ behaviors in a lot of ways, as one guidebook gently put it.  Coming here mid-week, before the Spring Break or summer revelry was a good idea, as we could view the beautiful springs without having to deal with Sodom and Gomorrah.

Many of these springs have deep fissures where the water springs up, making them a diver’s paradise.  The view under the water is beautiful, and I was able to capture some of it by sticking my GoPro in the water and taking pictures.

We were nearly five hours on the water.  So that took the better part of the day.  It took another half hour to bike back to the RV and then retrieve all our gear.  So when we were all done it was nearly dinnertime and we headed to our boondocker location for this evening.

One thing we discovered after dinner was that our stash of after-dinner chocolates were a lump of molten goo.  The RV sat all day in 80+ degree weather while we were on the river and, coming out of a Michigan winter, we didn’t think to store the chocolate in the refrigerator.  It’s there now.

So we are at a beautiful spot along the Suwannee River, several miles off the main roads, in an area where all the homes are on stilts and there are even more than a few 1960’s single-wide trailers perched eight feet off the ground on concrete blocks.  All this for good reason.  A marker out front marks the level of some of the major floods.  The highest one, 1973, was about a foot over my head.  This whole area is a marshy, swampy area that looks like it floods regularly.  


Way up in the frozen north, there’s such a thing called ​permafrost​.  Looking around here, I would call much of the area ​perma-mud​.

Miles Traveled: 145