Well, Hello February!

Location: Avon Park, FL (High 83, Low 61)

Wow, where did January go? Even though it was a bit rainy for Florida, we still managed to get some fun times in.

Last week I was going to do my “Part 2” on our visit to Paynes Creek State Park. But since it’s been so long since my first post, I’m just going to go on and include it in this one about the past couple weeks.

Back in the mid1800s, there was a trading post established in central Florida, which was attacked by Seminole Indians.

In response, the United States established a series of forts, including the one at this location next to Paynes Creek. The soldiers here never actually saw any battles, unless you include the ones they had with other local inhabitants, namely…the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes prevailed as the fort was only manned for about a year before it was abandoned due to illness.

 

None of the fort remains, but this is the location where it stood.

 

 

We enjoyed a nice walk around the trails, although a couple of them were closed due to flooding. We also weren’t able to make it to the location of the trading post because that particular trail, although not closed, was still very wet and we hadn’t worn our hiking boots.

 

The Peace River also meets Payne Creek at this location. (By the way, it did not take us 40 minutes to walk this one mile, even at our “leisurely” pace.)

 

 

We didn’t try to have a seat in the riverside bench.

 

 

 

 

After checking out the trails, we enjoyed a nice lunch.

We may go back another day to check out some of the trails we missed.

And what else have we been up to?

One day we took a drive over to Slim’s BBQ in Arcadia to meet up with a group of Heartland owners. It’s a small world…we first met two out of the three couples in this picture when we were spending some time in Port Aransas, TX two years ago. We had a great time chatting the afternoon away.

 

I mentioned the rainy days…luckily we kept our Wii system although we haven’t really used it that much. A couple weeks ago we got it out and set it up, and I’ve been using it to get some exercise on the rainy days…including this evening of Wii bowling.

 

And this week when we finally did get some nice days, we took a ride over to Highlands Hammock State Park for a nice bike ride.

It was a beautiful day and we enjoyed the three mile loop, which has a really nice bike lane. We actually went around several times to make it a ten mile ride.

 

 

We walked a couple of the trails hoping to get a view of some alligators, but none were to be seen, just this good sized snake, which we think is a water moccasin. Luckily we were on a boardwalk, and this guy was below us in the water.

 

Our first month here has been a great one, and we are looking forward to February being more of the same. And I’ll try to check in more often!