Heavenly Hillsborough

During our stay in Miami, in mid-December, Chris had made reservations at campgrounds through April 1^st. The idea was to gradually work our way north as the weather warmed. She’d printed out a page listing the dates of arrival and departure, the names of the parks and other contact information. It all seemed to be in order until we left Bradenton and arrived at our next destination of Hillsborough River State Park, located a little northeast of Tampa in Thonotosassa, on the afternoon of Friday, January 29th. Upon our arrival the park rangers said we did not have a reservation and that they were completely booked. After further study they determined that we had arrived a day early. Great – now what do we do?

Chris began calling nearby RV parks to find one night’s lodging when Jay wandered back into the office. He must have had a leprechaun on his shoulder because they had just had a cancellation and we were in!! Whew!!

Getting our mail is a bit of a challenge as we need to let our mail service in Florida know where we’re going to be at least a day in advance of our arrival and many times we will have mail waiting for us at the park or local post office when we roll in. This was not the case at Hillsborough and, after a couple more days of no deliveries, we decided to investigate. You remember that page of campgrounds that Chris made up with all the contact information on it, right? Well, she had copied the address of the park listed below Hillsborough, in the State Park reference book she used for making reservations, as its address and all the mail had gone there. So, Tuesday was rainy and we decided it was a good day for a road trip to Highlands Hammock State Park, over eighty miles to the south, to retrieve our misplaced mail. Since we couldn’t hike or canoe, it was better than sitting in the trailer and we got to meet some nice people in the park’s café, while getting a bit of lunch, to boot! Max liked getting out of the trailer too.

Hillsborough River was the first State Park we’d stayed in since we left home in Sept. The main reason why we bought the 32’ long trailer we did, was because a lot of State Parks can’t handle anything larger and, they are primarily the types of parks where we want to stay. Most were built when a 16’ Airstream was “THE travel trailer to have”. We loved this park. It was far from the madding crowd and heavily wooded but the camping areas were open and free of understory growth. We had our pick of trails of different lengths, a pretty little river ran right through the heart of the park and they rented canoes!!

This bridge provides access to hiking trails across the park from the campground.

The great thing about State Parks is that their facilities are usually well maintained and rentals are very affordable. Wednesday’s forecast sounded perfect for a canoe ride and we took full advantage of it. A four hour rental was just over $32. When virtually everything you sit on in life is padded, the seats in aluminum canoes make your butt ache in ways you never dreamed of, despite using life jackets as cushions. That, coupled with the fact that we couldn’t take the canoes outside of the park boundaries, turned our four hour canoe ride into something we could easily have accomplished in two – with happier derrières.

We delighted in the laziness of drifting down and paddling up a few miles of the meandering river, taking in the flared trunks of cypress trees descending into the murky, tannic depths. Palm tree trunks, their root systems too small to support them so close to the edge, dipped into the water and provided convenient platforms on which birds and reptiles sunned themselves; their leafy crowns, straining to stay aloft, causing obstructions for inattentive boaters.

This small bit of rapids was pretty to view but we could not get past them with the canoe.

We experienced our first, up close encounters with turtles, alligators and cormorants. When canoeing in other states we found it difficult to get within 15’ of turtles sunning themselves on logs, before they plunged into the water, but that was not the case here. Maneuver within 5’ of them, they stayed put; usually with one or two legs stretched to their limits trying to absorb every particle of sunlight to warm their cold blooded bodies. Jay discovered a small alligator on a grassy bank and we finessed the canoe within 2 feet of it to grab a picture. It didn’t move a muscle.

We saw dozens of these large turtles warming themselves on trees and rocks all through the river.

This gator was about 4’ long and about 2 years old.

Once our lower extremities were pried from the confines of the bateau, we were much happier and, inclined toward maximizing our time outdoors on such a glorious day, we decided to loosen up with a walk. Max happily accompanied us to pick up the mail and trek one of the many trails through the woods, sniffing at every leaf and shrub and wishing he could climb trees to catch the squirrels that scampered up them out of his reach.

Our stay at Hillsborough was mainly just a week-long stop over to stall moving too far north too soon but we developed an attachment to its serene, isolated beauty and were disappointed when we could not extend our stay. We pushed further north to Bushnell, where we spent the majority of our time in Florida last year, on Friday, February 5^th.