Trailer Travels: February 2013

Lucky Site #13

This is the first time we have camped at Trimble Park. This may be our new favorite campground! It's a beautiful Orange County Park. It only has 15 campsites, but most of the campsites are located right on Lake Carlton.

This is the view from the back of our campsite. They built benches around the fire pit...a nice feature. We had campfires for two nights and enjoyed sitting right by the lake and listening to nearby raccoons "talking" and two owls hooting it up.

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There are many old sprawling oak trees laden

with Spanish Moss throughout the Park.

This oak tree is so sprawling that they had to

prop it up with a trunk of a palm tree. Amazing!

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A blast from the past!

And no coins were to be had in the coin return :)

Something you just don't see very often anymore. There

were actually several pay phones located throughout the park.

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There were beautiful azaleas of all

different colors blooming by the lakes.

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Sunset our first night over Lake Carlton. Taken from our campsite.

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We visited Downtown Mt. Dora where there are several unique

shops and restaurants. We ate dinner twice Downtown while

staying at the Park...Fiesta Grande Mexican Restaurant and

Odom Thai Restaurant. Both were very good.

Downtown Mt. Dora is less than three miles from the Park.

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There are acres of orange groves right by the entrance of
the Park and the trees were just loaded with ripe oranges.

Our state flower - the Orange Blossom.

You could smell the Orange Blossoms at our campsite.

Just heavenly!

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A beautiful Osprey.

This is a great Park for birding. There are hundreds of birds inhabiting the Park and its surrounding lakes. We saw Ospreys, Great Blue Herons, Vultures, Cormorants, Gallinules, White Ibises, Red-Winged Blackbirds, Tri-Colored Herons, Great White Herons, Anhingas, Eagles, Cardinals, Sea Gulls, Wood Ducks, and many, many Palm Warblers.


Our National Symbol sitting in a tree right beside our campsite. So awesome!

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I was watching this eagle ( for quite some time) soar
around the perimiter of the lake just minding his
own business, when all of the sudden...

this hawk came out of nowhere and literally knocked the
eagle for a loop! What an event to have witnessed.
Thankfully, the eagle was okay and flew off to fight another day.

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This Cormorant caught himself some sushi. The Cormorant is

also called the Snake Bird because of his snakelike neck.

Unfortunately, it dropped the fish while trying to

jockey it into position to swallow it.

I think the bird's eyes were bigger than his stomach.

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Of course, you can't help but to see at least one of these guys

lurking in the weeds if you are near a body of water in Florida.

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Sunset on our final night. We will be back!


Site #25

This was a last minute "let's go camping" trip, so we went to our

favorite nearby campground...Moss Park in Narcoossee, FL.

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See those little black specs in the above photos, well those are Purple Martins. There were thousands of them flying above the campground when we first arrived. It was a good thing we have an awning on the camper, as we could hear little round balls of reprocessed insects being deposited on the top of the awning and could also hear them falling on the dead leaves on the ground :). However, we like Purple Martins because they do help keep the insect and mosquito population in check.

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As usual, we saw several Sandhill Cranes. This one came right up to our campsite several times. He or she was solitary, so either it lost its mate, or it was a juvenile and was on the prowl. They are such beautiful, graceful birds. They can be very loud at times; however, I love hearing their honking calls (even at sunrise :-).

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I was able to get fairly close to this Fox Squirrel; they are usually very elusive, but this particular guy was more interested in digging for goodies, than he was in me.

I don't know what he was digging up and eating, but it looked dirty, gooey and gross to me, but I guess they were like caviar to him, as he was very intent on finding as many as he could and devouring them.

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My husband received a beautiful handmade turkey caller for Christmas.
We saw several turkeys and did have some answer his calling.

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