Silver Springs Conservation Area
Just a couple miles south of our hotel was the Silver Springs Conservation Area which has a 2-1/4 mile loop trail with about 2 dozen geocaches. We walked the whole trail, but only grabbed 12 of the caches. We wanted to save the other half for a future visit and besides we needed to get on the road to make it to Palm City in time for wine time.
The plan was to drive south to the turnpike, get on it for 60 miles or so and get back off onto some two lane county roads. By the time we made our way to the turnpike the crowds had dispersed, so we just stayed on the back roads. With the combination of a store bought map, a slightly uncooperative GPS and “rush hour” in Okeechobee we made to Sandy’s with only 15 minutes to spare.
40,000 Ghostly Images of Old Florida
We are on our way to visit Donna’s sister and her family and my snowbird cousin for a couple of days. Because we will drive back on Sunday on mostly Interstate we are taking two days to drive down on mostly back roads. On today’s drive we came into Florida and took aim half way between Lake City and Jacksonville where we found some small town’s and uncrowded back roads.
We originally planned on driving the Miata and doing some more Motoring Challenge photos, but the weather was supposed to be crappy today and then again Sunday for the drive home, so we opted to take the Sonata for the trip. Turns out there were some towns, counties and photo ops that would have been good for the challenge, but they were mostly mid-Georgia, so we filed them away for a weekend in the future.
Somewhere near the small town of Orange Springs the Purple Whale eased by the 40,000 mile mark. Tonight we are in a new HIE in Silver Springs. While this section of town is too full of modern amenities to be considered Old Florida, once inside our dinner spot we were thrown back in time. The Denny’s was located inside a Days Inn and it was filled with characters from Central Casting, including; a really old man alone at a table wearing shorts, sandals with black socks, a Veterans of Foreign Wars ball cap with large-lensed sunglasses who was chewing with his mouth open and eyeballing us because we didn’t belong, a skinny androgynous African-American who spoke on his cell phone loudly in a high-pitched stereotypical gay queen manner, plus the cook teasing a couple of regulars were they going to eat or were they here for the paranormal meeting.
I thought she was just joking, but when we used the restroom before walking back to our hotel, right next to them was a “banquet room” that was shared by Denny’s and the Days Inn and it was all set up for Investigating the Paranormal with Carolynn and Carla.
Yikes!
We had the dead and broken branches trimmed from around our house today by a crew that ordinarily would be ice fishing in Minnesota at this time a year. We called a couple local places but either they never returned our calls or told us that it would be at least a couple weeks before they could even think about giving us an estimate. These folks were going door to door with flyers. They were here for over 4 hours and they worked on seven trees total with 4 of them working at death defying heights without a net.
While watching the crew of four guys working we chatted up the owner of the company. He told us he has collected a couple hundred cards from the different tree companies working in the area. While helping clear out Hitchcock Woods he got to talking with someone familiar with the workings of the city and he found out that in the ice storm of 2004 the city collected 80,000 cubic yards of debris and so far from this storm, and they are nowhere near done, as evidenced by the piles of trees lining along our road, they have collected over 800,000 cubic yards…
More Moss Motoring Moments
This spot was today’s goal, the only National Park in South Carolina, Congaree Swamp. We didn’t actually enter the park, we’ve been in a couple times previously, back before it was made a NP, so we just took this picture of the sign. On our way there we drove through South Carolina’s recreation of the Scandinavian peninsula:
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- Denmark
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- Sweden
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- Norway
I’ve created a gallery so you can follow along with our adventures, it is over there on the left – 2014 Moss Motoring Challenge. We also captured a couple of counties, a dead end, an airport and a candidate for one of the next Sneak Peek photos, but I haven’t finished editing and uploading them yet.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1298
The Week That Was
As a run up for Season 2 of Orphan Black the folks at BBC America released 8 sneak peeks and because I’m such a nice guy I collected all of them and made a handy YouTube playlist so you can watch them back to back to back…and when I say peeks they are just that at 15 seconds a piece. To add a little meat to the list I tacked on a trailer for Season 2 at the end.
What does Walt Whitman‘s “Song of Myself” have to do with the Clone Club? I have no idea, but it must mean something as a sharp-eyed Clone Ranger, Valerie Anne of the website AfterEllen, noticed that at the end of each of the sneak peek is a bit of binary code that converts into a line from that poem.
On Sunday John Travolta mangled the name of the singer for Frozen’s Oscar nominated song “Let It Go,” Idina Menzel calling her Adele Dazeem . Now if you’d like, thanks to Slate.com, you can find out how John would has mispronounced your name had you been her. Brian Bogardus would have been Benn Bozowens…
Now if I had known about this around Christmas time last year I would not have wasted my money on that quadcopter that lasted a week. Instead I would have commissioned my very own likeness as a rubber stamp.
I think I have said here before that my ideal Miata would be my first one reincarnated with about 20 to 30 thousand miles on it. Well here is one that is almost exactly fits the bill – Hemmings Find of the Day. It is not Smurf Blue, but I almost bought one in white when the wait for a blue one got past 100 days.
Renunciation Of Citizenship
For the past 10 years I’ve been listening to the Red Sox baseball games on the internet, because it was a throwback to a simpler time when I was a kid and my mom would always have the game on the radio. It also gave me something to listen to in the background while I wasted time surfing the web. Eight years ago I joined the Red Sox Nation because there was a couple dollar discount on the MLB Gameday Audio I was using to listen to FRS games and I got some cool benefits (that would have been more helpful if I actually lived within driving distance of Boston.) Oh, and there was a membership card I could carry around in my wallet to prove my citizenship.
Last August, MLBTV ran a special of $19.95 for their Premium service for the rest of the season and I took advantage of it. Turns out with that I can have the best of both worlds by watching the game on TV in HighDef and listening to the radio announcing team make the call. It was good. So this year I decided to spend the $130 for the full year of MLBTV Premium. Unlike the deal they had for audio, there is no corresponding package with TV, so this year I won’t be card carrying member of the Red Sox Nation. I’ll still be a citizen in my heart, but I won’t be able to watch batting practice from the Green Monster or get 10% off at the fan shop at Fenway.