This non-travel update is for the first two weeks of April in Jacksonville, Florida, April 1 – 15. As a reminder, we’ve been staying at the Flamingo Lake RV Resort in Jacksonville, Florida, USA since January 23 so I could get a cochlear implant in my right ear at the Mayo Clinic here. So, we’ve been settled down for 3 months, unfortunately, and our travel life has been relatively dull.

Fort Clinch State Park:

This is a nice park, we read that it’s the northernmost Florida State Park. It’s on the north end of Amelia Island and it took us about an hour to get there.

“The Fort Clinch State Park is a Florida State Park, located on a peninsula near the northernmost point of Amelia Island, along the Amelia River. Its 1,100 acres include the 19th-century Fort Clinch, sand dunes, plains, maritime hammock and estuarine tidal marsh. The park and fort lie to the northeast of Fernandina Beach at the entrance to the Cumberland Sound.

Fort Clinch is a 19th-century brick fortress begun in 1847 after the end of the Second Seminole War. It was named in honor of General Duncan Lamont Clinch, important figure in the First and Second Seminole Wars. No battles were fought at Fort Clinch. Confederate troops occupied the incomplete fort in 1861 when Union forces were withdrawn from Florida. In 1862 Confederate forces were withdrawn from the fort because their manpower was needed elsewhere and Union forces regained control of the area without any shots being fired. Union forces restarted construction of the fort and continued through the end of the war. The fort would become a base of operations for Union forces in the area for the remainder of the Reconstruction Era.

In 1935, the State of Florida bought 256 acres that included the then-abandoned fort and the surrounding area. Fort Clinch State Park including the fort, opened to the public in 1938.”

The Historic Canopy Road leading through the park to the fort is shaded by Live Oak trees from both sides, it’s a pretty road.

The old fort has been well restored and sometimes is populated by re-enactors who bake bread, work in the blacksmith shop, and talk to visitors about what life was like back then. Here’s a rendering of the fort, it’s laid out in a pentagon.

Inside the walls they’ve restored the red brick buildings.

There were some nice big canon.

Here’s Patti in a tunnel leading out to a bastion.

We enjoyed exploring the fort and afterwards drove over to the beach which was very nice.

We enjoyed this park.

Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge:

I had been here as a kid on a family trip but I wanted to see it again.

“The Okefenokee Swamp is a shallow, 438,000-acre, peat-filled wetland straddling the Georgia–Florida line in the United States. A majority of the swamp is protected by the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge and the Okefenokee Wilderness. The Okefenokee Swamp is considered to be one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Georgia and is the largest “blackwater” swamp in North America. The Okefenokee Swamp was named after the Choctaw phrase, “Land of the Trembling Earth”.”

It was about an hour’s drive to the northwest.

At the visitor center Patti put her foot in an alligator’s mouth.

That was actually a fake alligator, but we saw plenty of live ones too.

The alligators are fun to see, from up on the boardwalk.

We got a selfie with the swamp.

At lunchtime we had a nice picnic, we were the only ones in the pavilion.

Here’s one of the gator ponds, with longleaf pine trees reflecting in it.

We did some hiking, the trees with the white ring painted on their trunk are nesting trees for Red Cockaded Woodpeckers. We’d heard that they only nest in mature Longleaf Pine trees.

Here’s a picture I found online.

You can see the woodpecker nest hole in this picture.

In one area there were a lot of Pitcher Plants, which I think are cool, since they’re carnivorous.

“Pitcher plants are several different carnivorous plants that have modified leaves known as pitfall traps—a prey-trapping mechanism featuring a deep cavity filled with digestive liquid. The traps of what are considered to be “true” pitcher plants are formed by specialized leaves. The plants attract and drown their prey with nectar.”

The Pitcher Plants were along the edge of this “borrow ditch”, where the construction workers dug out sand to make the road, and the ditch filled with water and became a wetland.

We walked a boardwalk on Chesser Island.

This softshell turtle was settled down in the mud.

I got a closeup of his head. He was a pretty big turtle.

At the 40-foot observation platform Patti found a friend to talk to.

We had a nice view from up there and a pleasant breeze was blowing.

We both saw this frog at about the same time. I don’t know what kind he was but he was a lovely green color.

Sometimes you have to walk slowly through the swamp to see the animals.

There were lots of dragonflies.

We had a nice time in the swamp.

Future Plans:

• April 23 – May 2: We’ve got an Airbnb reserved in Cocoa Beach, Florida about 3 blocks from the beach and we hope to see some rocket launches from nearby Cape Canaveral.
• May 2 – June 13: we’ve got a mobile home reserved at the Twin Shores Mobile Home Park on Longboat Key near Sarasota. We’ve stayed at that park before but in a different unit.
• Jun 13 – 29: We’ve got our first House Sit scheduled in St. Augustine, Florida. We’ll be taking care of a dog and 3 cats while their owners go on vacation to the British Isles. It’s a nice 3-bedroom house in a gated community about 5 miles from all the touristy stuff people do in St. Augustine, we think it will be a good time.
• June 29 – July 5: we’ve got an Airbnb reserved in Ellijay, in the north Georgia mountains. We’re planning on doing some hiking in the mountains there.
• July 5 – 11: We’ve got our second House Sit scheduled in Columbia, South Carolina. We’ll be taking care of two dogs while their owners go on vacation.
• July 11 – 12: We’ll be staying with friends of ours at their house in Bonneau, South Carolina
• After July 11, no firm plans yet, but we’ve been talking about possibly spending a couple of weeks in the Cincinnati area and after that flying Norse Atlantic, the new long-haul, low-cost airline, from JFK to Oslo then spending a couple of months in Norway. Then maybe a month in Denmark.