#336 Tidewater trailhead equestrian boondock, Randalls Birthday

Equestrian RV boondocks are great because they have water spigots for the horses, Call me a horse

We found this boondock site several years ago. We were with Savannah on the first round going north from when we just touched the keys for a few days. I was curious to find out where the manatees were so I looked it up and it seemed like they congregated pretty heavily at a place called Crystal River. I believe there was no vacancy at Crystal Springs State Park or maybe I was just looking for something more affordable. I found something I'm free-camp.net and we went by to take a look. We stayed there for a few days and it was pretty cool. After all, it had water faucets at each site because it was an equestrian trailhead. You can ride your horses and then sleep there and was pretty laid-back. It was only about 5 or 6 miles from the Crystal River manatee center. The site was in a state forest much like the one we stayed at in Naples Florida.

We visited this glorified boondock again this year to use up the two days in between Manatee Springs and our Wekiwa reservation.

I was a little apprehensive because it is so far out in the boonies you never know who's going to be there. Maybe a bunch of crazy drunk serial killers or not and so there's always that when your semi boondocking. I hoped most people that don't go this far out into the woods do harm. There's a lot of harm you can do right in the city so why go this far out of their way to hurt people. I guess that was my thinking but you try to tune that out and assume good things instead. I decided to do this and since there's no electricity I wanted to get more serious about my battery situation. I had done some research and finally decided that buying four 6-volt golf cart batteries and putting them in in series-parallel to get 12 volts would give me a ridiculous amount of amp hours. I should be getting about 450 AH at 12 volts and I hope it works. I got that all redone and wired up. As we arrived and set up camp I walked over to the pay station but I wasn't exactly sure what my category was. I had looked at the website and it said something like if you want to make a reservation click here it took me over to reserve America. I don't think that's the way it was 3 years ago but they had tent sites for maybe 20 bucks a night. I felt that was a little weird because that's a lot to pay for nothing. The kiosk board said something like if you want to just use the trails in a day-use way for just riding your horses it's 4 bucks. I honestly couldn't figure out a category that would work so somehow, I think I saw something like $12 for using it for the whole day and I decided that since we were seniors, I would cut it in half and I wrote a check for maybe $6 for 3 days. I gave our name and number and of course they never really followed up on it so I guess it must have been good enough. We had the sun to solar charge the batteries just fine while we were there. It wasn't very cold but we used the 12-volt furnace some overnight. The brand-new batteries worked well enough but the weather was rainy and little sun so we had to charge some using the generator.

Tidewater trailhead was no frills but it was exactly what I had hoped it would be. I got over my nervousness concerning serial killers and the second night I started feeling much more comfortable.

I wanted to point out something funny that happened as we started our regular hike. We left the RV site we went up towards an outdoor bulletin board to look at some descriptions of the trails. We were about a hundred yards away and India said she thought she heard Bert meowing. I said no way but then I looked and here comes the little guy walking towards us with his belly swinging sideways left and right. He caught up with us and I said Bert what are you doing? He wanted to follow us and go on a hike with us or maybe he was afraid we were leaving him forever. I'm kind of okay with him joining us that but I was thinking that we might go off down a trail somewhere and with his little legs he might get kind of tired before the two-mile hike. Then he would want us to carry him back or he might get out there half away and get lost not being able to follow his scent back. I wasn't too excited about him going with us and so we tried to take a hook right and went up the road a little bit here he comes going down the dirt road with us. We walked him back towards the campsite and said okay you stay here we're going to go walk now. As soon as we left again he left again so basically we gave up on the hike that day.

Since Bert was being weird I think we only hiked 3/4 of a mile or so and we decided that was better than nothing. We have learned if we want to hike and Bert is around we just need to drive the truck a mile away to start so Bert won’t follow. It was a decent place to crash for two nights was about the extent of our stay at Tidewater at the Goethe State Forest.