Wakulla River, Florida

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Thanks to our new-found friends Larry and Catherine Duchesne from Alberta, Canada, we planned a trip with them to Wakulla Springs State Park to see the Lodge and take a boat tour on the Wakulla River. The Springs are one of the largest and deepest freshwater springs in the world and provide an area for (human) swimming and diving in the Summer. The Lodge was built in 1937 and has a beautiful interior. We ate lunch there after our boat tour and a short walk on one of the nature trails. The tour down the river was excellent, our guide managed to find many interesting birds, along with some manatees, alligators, turtles and white-tailed deer. A Great Blue Heron was good enough to pose for us and allow some close up photographs as tour boat cruised by.
Later that day we visited St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge which covers 17,000 acres, stretching for 43 miles of coastland South of Tallahassee. The entrance near our campsite in Newport took us eventually to the mouth of the Wakulla River past many tidal ponds to St. Marks Lighthouse where we found several species of wading birds and ducks.
One night Colin woke up as something slimy landed on his face. We found a tree frog, only about an inch long, which had managed to find its way into the van and immediately hopped into the back of the van when the lights came on. Then followed a search until, after emptying the rear of the van completely, we spotted him again hiding under our bed and released him back into the outdoors.
Finding our way around this part of Florida proved to be a little challenging as our GPS didn’t always match reality. However with three powered up and running we eventually found our destinations (see photo).

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