After arriving at the Crystal River KOA early Friday afternoon (March 7th), we took Saturday morning for some much-needed downtime, and then made a short drive in the afternoon to Three Sisters Springs. This area is popular for Manatees due to the springs that maintain a year-round temperature of approximately 72 degrees; when it gets too cold elsewhere, the Manatees migrate to this area for warmth. The Three Sisters Springs and nearby Kings Bay are part of the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, the only refuge created for the protection of the endangered Florida Manatee. We took the short shuttle ride out to the springs, and there were so many Manatees! They’re not particularly active, so they mostly just float under water, but once in a while, we’d see one come up for air or use their flippers to move through the water. They’re also known as “sea cows”, since they are large and slow-moving. This is the only place in Florida where you can swim with Manatees, so lots of people take advantage of that option; we chose to enjoy them from the land.

Sunday morning, we made a 30-minute drive South to Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, home of the famous “mermaid show” which has been around since the 1940s. The park itself is showing its age, and there’s some work going on, but the show was delightful! They tell an abbreviated story of The Little Mermaid, completely underwater, in a theatre uniquely designed for this show. It’s pretty impressive to watch these performers float, tread water, and breathe, while also lip syncing the script and lyrics. We also sat through a wildlife presentation where we learned more about turtles, snakes, and alligators.

We continued our recovery from Disney on Sunday afternoon and Monday morning, and in the afternoon, we drove about 15 minutes to Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. What a wonderful place! We started with a short river cruise to transport us from the visitor center to the wildlife park, and then followed the path through a wide variety of Florida wildlife. They’re all rescues who are injured and cannot live in the wild, with the exception of Lu the Hippo, the oldest known hippo in captivity at 65 years! He used to be in movies, and was granted honorary Florida citizenship in order to stay at the park when its focus switched to Florida wildlife.  Several areas of the park were affected by hurricane storm surges in 2024, so there’s lots of work being done and some areas are closed.

Nearby, we stopped at Yulee Sugar Mill Ruins…the ruins of an old sugar mill (duh!). The site was once part of a 5,000-acre sugar plantation that processed sugar cane into syrup, molasses, and rum.

Tuesday was another travel day, this one taking us North out of Florida and into Georgia, to Americus which is just Southeast of Columbus, GA. The final part of our drive took us past thousands of pecan trees, massive solar farms, and what we believe were peanut fields based on the bright yellow flowers. Yep, we’re in Georgia!

On Wednesday afternoon, we drove about 30 minutes to the small town of Plains, GA and the site of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Park. The park includes Plains High School, which both Jimmy and Rosalynn attended, Jimmy’s boyhood home/farm, and the depot which served as his presidential campaign headquarters. The high school serves as the visitor center and has some interesting exhibits about the education the Carters received there. The depot has an interesting story – it was selected as campaign headquarters because it was the only available building in Plains with a bathroom. This was in 1976! At his boyhood home and farm, you get a great sense of where his work ethic and humanitarianism came from, and the humble beginnings of our 39^th President.

Our campground transformed dramatically from when we arrived on Tuesday to Wednesday afternoon – apparently, an Airstream “convention” arrived, and suddenly the entire campground seemed to be filled with “silver bullets” or “toasters-on-wheels”…

We visited nearby Andersonville, a National Historic Site, on Thursday, to learn more about its time as a military prison during the Civil War. The site includes a National Cemetery, the Prison Site, and the National Prisoner of War Museum. We started with the guided audio driving tour of the National Cemetery, which includes over 13,000 Union soldiers from the Civil War and is still in use today for veterans and their families. The Civil War graves are identified only because a Union soldier who worked in the hospital kept records of the names and grave locations. He and Clara Barton worked together to ensure that the graves were marked after the war, enabling families to locate their loved ones.

From there, we did the audio driving tour of the prison site, which ultimately covered over 26 acres and housed about 3x more Union prisoners than it was designed for. It’s the largest and most famous of the 150 Civil War prisons, and more than a quarter of the prisoners held there ultimately died due to malnutrition and/or disease. It’s a somber place – awful to think of what happened there.

Finally, we walked through the POW Museum which was very well-done and did a wonderful job of honoring all American POWs, from all wars. It gave a real sense of what they went through, and how their families at home suffered, as well. All-in-all, an incredible history lesson from our National Parks Service.

On Friday, we continued our journey North, to the Chattanooga TN area. It was a LOOOOONNNNNG day of driving…we ran into lots of backups near Atlanta, and again near Chattanooga, so it took forever to get to our campground. During the drive, we were monitoring the massive storm that’s been heading East and could see that our campground was in an area with a risk of tornadoes Saturday night into Sunday morning. Tornadoes and RVs are not a good combination, so we started contemplating our options. We could stay, and head to a shelter or hotel, but we’d have to decide that pretty early since you don’t really have time to drive somewhere when there’s an actual tornado heading your way. Or we could just spend Friday night and then drive further North on Saturday to get into a safer area with less likelihood of severe weather. We looked at the options and the weather maps and decided to head North to Bowling Green, KY on Saturday – the risk of tornadoes there was much lower and we felt more comfortable doing that. So, we basically pulled into our campground, didn’t unhook the truck, slept, and pulled out early Saturday morning. It was already raining, and continued to rain for our entire drive, and is still raining as of 2pm on Saturday. Maybe it will stop sometime soon…but at least we feel safer here than we did in Chattanooga. Our trip is almost over…just a few more days and we will be back home (and it will be good to be home, as always!)

On the bright side, we saw our first real sign of spring at our campground…