Last night I decided to sleep in my car at the local Walmart. I swear that was the biggest Walmart I have ever seen. I headed into Ocala National Forrest for some mountain biking and hiking. My lovely gps decided to take me and my trailer off on a dirt road into a swampy ATV trail. I got about 2 miles into the forest and realized that despite what my GPS was telling me, this was not the way to go. My car and trailer were wider than the path and were both getting severely scratched by the tree branches. It took me about an hour and a half to finally cut down enough tree branches to turn around my car and trailer. Once I noticed the damage on my car and trailer, I decided to use everything possible to cover the car and make an armor to plow through the trees and return to the main road. Finally I made it out of the forest and headed to Alexander Springs. I had originally intended on mountain biking the trail, but once I parked I notices some signs about diving at Alexander Springs. I asked the forest ranger to tell me about the place and come to find out , this was a natural spring that had some decent cave diving. Best of all, it was free. So after the frustrating commute, I decided to do some surface diving at the spring. The cavern was pretty cool. Since it was only 30’ deep, I was able to dive without a tank. I just grabbed my mask and snorkel and dove down as many times as I wanted. After the spring, I decided to go ahead a do the mountain bike trail. This was a very hard trail that consisted mainly of a sandy/pine needle covered path. After about an hour, I decided to turn around and head back to the spring for an evening swim. On my way back, I got lost on the trail and ran into some pretty crazy looking spiders. Come to find out they were Banana Spiders. While swimming at the spring, I met an old man named Bob. He was a park ranger and was making sure that everyone exited by 7:30. I talked to him briefly about the park. He kept telling me to behave my self and to have a good night. I responded for him to do the same. He replied, “at my age son, there is not much I can do to misbehave”. I told him to just be creative. I then headed to St Augustine FL. Since the Walmart’s in St Augustine are not RV friendly, I decided to head into town to stay at the Pirate Hostel in downtown. This was actually a very nice hostel. The beds were comfortable and the room was spacious. They even gave me an all u can eat breakfast in the morning.
http://www.floridasprings.info/2006/08/alexander-spring-part-of-ocala.html
http://www.stateparks.com/ocala.html
http://www.piratehaus.com/
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