#303 Little Manatee State Park

We went to Little Manatee and keep in mind that it is the 2nd week in May. Florida is no longer the winter wonderland where the temperatures of amazing. Now it's like early summer and it's like 95 and 100 degrees lately.

Little Manatee was one of our reservations for the following winter and this was our way of checking it out seeing if we are going to love it or not.

We were able to find other places that we felt were a like a prettier so we cancelled this one for the winter of 2020. Once we stayed there, it was okay but nothing incredible.

I think I had it confused with Lake Manatee which is what it sounds like a lot of water and a big giant Lake.

It was all natural which is good I'm glad it's there as state park but in a way, it was a little lie just kind of dry prairie. If you're willing to hike a good bit there is the little Manatee River. It's there and all but I don't think you're allowed to put in a kayak anywhere so that kind of takes the fun out of it a little bit. It's kind of a small shallow Little River.

I'm glad the state park is there I'm glad the land is protected and I'm glad the rivers protected but as far as a really gorgeous place to RV we wanted to see if we could do better.

It sounds like I'm talking trash about him when in fact it was a perfectly wonderful little place just there are prettier places which was our thing to compare it and make a decision you can't do that online.

We looked at the schedule of things to do and there was a ranger-led hike on Saturday morning.

This sounded interesting and so we went down to the area kind of where a playground was to meet and when we arrived there was only one other group there.

It was a lady with her grandchild. The ranger said it's typically designed around younger people and he really didn't advertise it well enough but he felt is if people we were interested it could be for all ages so we said it will be fine.

We went on about the walk and it was a kind of a slow easy walk down the sandy trail towards the Little Manatee River.

The ranger was probably under 30 and very informed and was had a way of making the walk very pleasant with lots of information.

He did mention it was very strange that you could not really put a kayak in on the River from the state park just because they had no good landing area so that was weird.

This was another reason why we decided maybe we should cancel the reservation for the 2020 winter.

We enjoyed the hike with the ranger in headed home back the pretty good workout but if anything, we were a little saddened by the fact that the little five-year-old was so busy missing his electronics he couldn't enjoy the hike