April Fools day and we are off to St. Marks (pop. 200), about 215 miles along Hwy 19. The first hour or so was an endless landscape of billboards advertising personal injury lawyers, vasectomy doctors, clinics, hospitals and sinkhole(?) repair. These were interspersed with run down motels, trailer parks and fruit stands. As soon as we entered Dixie County, the road straightened and the traffic thinned right out as we passed by hundreds of Baptist Churches with their parking lots full.
The last half of the trip was a fairly bland drive with little habitation and endless pine forests. Don't think I had to touch the cruise control for over an hour.
We arrived in the St. Marks area at around 1:00 pm and decided to tour the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge.
Our plan was to do a bike ride from the Visitor Centre to the Lighthouse, about a 15 mile round trip. When we went to unload the bikes, we found that Chris's bike had a flat. The valve stem had failed and I only had a patch kit for a tube repair.
We ended up driving to the Lighthouse and doing a couple of short hikes in the park. Unfortunately the Lighthouse was not open for tours.
The park features a number of man-made and natural wetland areas with a variety of wildlife and scenery.
On our hike around one of the trails, we were about to go into a photo blind overlooking one of the ponds to hopefully get some pictures of some waterfowl we we ran into one of the volunteer park rangers who was brandishing a snake stick. He was responding to a recent report of a rattlesnake haven taken up residence in the photo blind were were about to enter!
Couldn't find the snake so I was able to get some photos of some White Pelicans.
We spent about 3 hours in the park and then made our way to the "Sweet Magnolia Inn" in the little town of St. Marks.
An interesting building with a long history. Throughout its time it had been a general store, a City Hall, a church, a brothel, a hotel, a 5 star restaurant and eventually remodelled into a nice B&B in 1996.
Seems we were just down the street from a popular weekend biker's bar. (Not sure what's with the Toyota Prius)
After some brief research, this appeared to be the only place to eat in town that was open so, off we went..... nothing like a little local flavour.
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