About a month ago, Matt and his cousins wanted to start planning a last minute camping trip. They found that apparently since Florida has all the snowbirds coming down to our nice weather, that planning a trip like this was going to be a bit difficult. They managed to find a date open for camp ground in Alexander Springs, located in Ocala National Forest to stay overnight for a weekend, which happened to be planned for this past weekend!
Ocala National Forest encompasses over 600 square miles of nationally protected land in Marion, Lake, and Putnam Counties in North Florida. According to the USDA website, the forest has over 600 lakes and rivers, as well as several trails and recreational areas. Interestingly enough, there is also the Navy’s Pine Castle Bombing Range located within the forest as well. I also just learned that a ghost town named Kerr City is also located here, although not open to the public.
I want to say this was my second time going to Ocala National Forest, the first being the first time ever off-roading in my first Jeep Wrangler (there were a lot of firsts there). I specifically remember it being super pretty, as well as getting stuck in a clay pit. It’s a location I would love to go back to with my most recent Jeep, with so many trails and things to look at and explore. Even to just hike or check out the many springs, I would love to explore more of it (as well as reading up on it, I’ve seen some stories of weird and strange events that have occurred there, so I would like to do more research on that stuff as well).
We had a small group, with Matt, his two cousins, their significant others, and then another friend of the group. Their friend booked the campgrounds, so we had two locations side by side, which was really nice so we weren’t crowded with tents. There were also many bathrooms and showers located all over the campgrounds, which was super helpful! The campgrounds were really clean and orderly even with the large amount of camp sites, and we could get a really good idea of how many people were camping once the sun went down.
It had been a while since I last went camping, but I always look forward to it! Matt had bought a new tent for us to use, and honestly it was super easy to set up. There was plenty of room for the two of us with an air mattress, and our bags. We didn’t use our campground to hang out or have a fire since it was a little bit smaller than the other, but there was a nice path behind the two connecting them to walk back and forth.
As soon as we were done setting up our tents, we went on a hike on what I believe was part of the Florida Trail (or at least a connector). It was right across the street from the campgrounds, and the first part of it was shaded with a clear path. It was a good time to be able to talk to everyone for a good while, but then once we got to a second road and crossed it, there was zero shade. We turned around soon after to head back to the campgrounds to start a fire and have dinner.
The fire went up quickly once we got back, and Matt got the grill going with charcoal to grill some hotdogs. It was a really good time, and dinner was quick and easy. We ended up all sitting around talking, and then once the sun went completely down we moved around the fire to stay warm and make some s’mores! The guys occasionally had to go and look for some branches to burn because we ran out of firewood, which was actually more difficult than you’d expect because they didn’t want people cutting live stuff down (and I looked for a while myself then got scared off when I saw a rather large spider in a tree). They ended up locating some, but eventually it started raining so we had to call it an early night.
Sleeping was really nice with the rain, and our tent held really well! It was honestly perfect outside so I didn’t even use my sleeping bag because it was such a nice temperature out. Later in the night it actually stopped raining, and although I did wake up numerous times throughout the night I felt awake in the morning!
I was given the task to pick up some of our supplies while Matt tried making breakfast and coffee, but the food part didn’t work very well because we had ran out of coal and the fire was too low to heat up the cast-iron pan. The coffee half of breakfast was good though, and we had some good coffee in the morning! Picking up was quick, and finished just in time for it to start sprinkling again, but all in all I would say the trip was a success and that we are looking forward to next time (when I will actually take photos)!
