The Best Two-Day Road Trip
Well, I’m back! On Sunday I drove my daughter and her friend up to camp in Tallahassee, and had a mini-adventure of my own on the way back. As my husband said, traveling is therapeutic, and it was great to have a change of scenery. Read on for details! The girls are attending a band camp at Florida State University, and had to be there to check in at 1:00 pm on Sunday. Tallahassee is a 6 1/2 drive from our house, so we left at 5:30 am. Oof. I wasn’t looking forward to this part of the trip, but it turned out to be fun. The girls were excited, and the friend had never been north of Orlando before, so once we got up into Central Florida she was astonished at the change. Yes, it looks a lot different up there! Tallahassee is up in the panhandle, and it really feels like a different state. Beautiful old trees (no palm trees!) very hilly, and the campus of FSU is beautiful. By the time I got the girls checked in and settled in their dorm room, they were ecstatic. It was my daughter’s first time at sleep away camp, but she wasn’t nervous at all. She had no problem saying goodbye, but I got very sad, which I wasn’t expecting. I had a simultaneous flashback to two years ago when I left my son at college, and a flash forward four years to when I’ll be dropping my daughter off for real. I didn’t cry (my daughter would have killed me) but I felt it. Sigh. But then! I drove away to start my own adventure. I headed back south a couple of hours to get to Ocala, where I would spend the night. Ocala is right in the middle of Florida, north of Orlando and south of Gainesville. I had never been there- all I knew was that it’s horse country, and there’s a national forest. When I googled it, I discovered an online walking tour of “historic downtown,” and decided there must be SOMETHING interesting to see, so I picked it as my destination. My original plan was to run in Ocala National Forest on one of the many trails. The problem is, the reviews on All Trails app were very positive for winter hiking and running, but overwhelmingly negative for the summer. People said the trails were wet, muggy, and buggy. One person said they pulled 45 ticks off their legs, and another said they had to turn back because there were so many spider webs with “spiders as big as my face.” Hopefully that last one was an exaggeration, but I still wasn’t too excited about running in the forest. But not to worry! My hotel was right near the Cross Florida Greenway.. What is that, you ask? “The Cross Florida Greenway is unique in many ways. Occupying more than 70,000 acres of land formerly known as the Cross Florida Barge Canal, the Greenway is a 110-mile linear park that is more than a mile wide in places. It hosts more than 300 miles of trails of all types — paddling, hiking, mountain biking, equestrian and paved multi-use.” At one point there was a public works project to build a canal across Florida, connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean. Thanks to the efforts of environmentalists, the project was abandoned (yes, I can see how having barge traffic going through the middle of Florida would really screw up the ecosystems.) The land that was cleared for the project is now a protected area. Who knew??? I used the All Trails app to find a five mile trail, and headed out for my run bright and early on Monday morning. You guys! There was SHADE! It was a trail runner’s dream. My five mile run turned into seven, thanks to the fact that I went off course several times. I wasn’t following the app closely- every once in a while I would take out my phone to check it, and one time I realized I had gone almost a mile off course- oops. But that’s okay! I had water, the trail was fun and I wasn’t overheating. I didn’t mind running a little extra. The only problem was, this was technically a mountain biking trail. Parts of it were narrow, and I was worried about encountering cyclists. But for most of it I was alone. Towards the end I met several bikers, who were extremely polite and grateful when I stepped off the trail to let them pass. Overall it was a great run! Next up: walking tour of downtown. After showering and checking out of my hotel, I headed to the downtown area. I had downloaded the tour on my phone, which consisted of descriptions of locations that corresponded to numbers on a teeny tiny map. If I tried to enlarge the map, it was very blurry. Hmmm. Each building featured on the tour had a little plaque with a QR code, which you could scan to read further information. Since these signs were fairly easy to spot, I eventually stopped squinting hopelessly at my phone, and just wandered up and down the streets, searching for signs on the buildings. This turned out to be a really fun way to see the city! And I saw things that I wouldn’t have seen if I had stuck to the original tour, like this: A running store! It was right next to “Brick City Bicycles.” As I learned, Ocala is nicknamed “Brick City” because after the great fire of 1883, the city was rebuilt with buildings using brick rather than wood. I also found a “secret” mural… and an art center, which had exhibits from local artists- sadly it’s closed on Mondays. Eventually I realized I was VERY hot, so I stopped in at a coffee chop for an iced tea. As I sat there, I scrolled through the tour on my phone, trying to