First… whew. It’s been a wonderful and busy past week spending time with family. Now it’s time to get the blog caught up.
Comparing schedules with family and possible RV parking options in Spring Hill, arriving on April 1st looked the most ideal. Which would give us a few days to play around with between our stop at Eastbank Campground in the Panhandle area and our arrival.
We started our search with state parks heading down the west coast, where there are some lovely options we’ve stayed at before. Many of them had very limited availability however.
Santos Trailhead & Campground – Ocala, FL
When I saw Santos Campground (our review) in the state park system just south of Ocala, I was intrigued. A campground with mountain biking trails.. in Florida? It seemed kinda counterintuitive for a state known for its absence of mountains.
With our new folding electric bikes, we just HAD to try it out. And it didn’t hurt there was plenty of availability during our time frame. So, we clicked the reserve button and routed that way.
When we arrived, we were quite charmed. Even without the trail access, this little campground is adorable. Nicely spread out sites, many with a very private feeling.
Near a major-ish city with easy access to shopping & dining, but yet with a feeling of being out in the nature? A great combo, if you ask us.
But the reason people come here is access to the trails along the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway. The Santos Trailhead that accesses 30 miles of maintained trails by the Ocala Mountain Biking Association, as the campground’s name might imply, is right outside the entrance.
The Florida Trail also crosses right behind the campground, providing ample hiking opportunities.
Now, our folding electric bikes ( e-JOE Epik SE) are primarily city commuting bikes.
When shopping for bikes, we wanted something we could also comfortably take on maintained dirt paths. We’re not mountain bikers by any stretch of the imagination, but so many riding opportunities near campsites we enjoy are not on pavement.
We were assured the e-Joe’s could handle it, and we’ve been taking opportunities to test this out.
The easy ‘Yellow’ trails seemed just like our style – designed for more casual biking and the novice. We had a BLAST maneuvering through the lush hammock forest. Just challenging enough to keep us on our toes and provide a bit of a rush, but easy enough that we never felt out of our comfort zone.
By our second day, we had gained enough confidence both in our biking skills and the trails themselves to attempt some of the intermediate ‘Blue’ trails – many of which were just a bit curvier than their yellow counterparts. The bikes handled admirably on them, and we came off them giddy and wonderfully exhausted!
The trail system also had super challenging courses intermixed. We only stopped to take pictures:
While near a big city, we also handled the warranty swap on our Interstate 4D starting battery that had failed on the repositioning – which was a painless transaction at the local Cummins shop.
Camping in a beautiful location, with access to fun stuff to explore right our our doorstep? Simply awesome.
We love being places where we can take easy work breaks without needing to drive to explore.
This was a perfect stop and got us prepared for a week ahead focused on family time.
What’s Up Next?
We just left Spring Hill after an awesome but busy stop, and will spend the next couple of weeks roaming around Central Florida. We have reservations at some places that should give us ample opportunity to enjoy similar easy breaks for biking, kayaking and hiking.
Some catching up with friends is in the plans, but mostly we’ll be super focused on getting work done so that we can then take 3-weeks ‘mostly’ off for our upcoming cruise & exploring in Montreal.
We do hope that some of those projects will include some non-travelogue posts here on the blog. We appreciate you virtually following along on this repositioning and enduring a higher ratio of travel content – and we also have a pretty long list of content we want to create but just haven’t had time for.
Next Live Video Chat: The Sucky Sides of RVing
When: THIS Thursday, April 14
9:00pm EDT / 6:00pm PDT
Topic: The Sucky Sides of RVing
This month marks our 10 Year Nomadiverary of being on the road full time. Ob
viously, we love the full time RVing lifestyle — the freedom of location, the joys of boondocking, scratching our wanderlust while still pursing our career and escaping the default world.
But we all know it’s not constant unicorns and rainbows.
In this video chat session, we’ll talk about the not-so-great parts of RVing — keeping it real to balance out all of the amazing photos and stories.
This should be fun 
You will need to create a quick free account with Livestream to view the video cast. Just click the link and setup an account in advance… a couple minutes ahead of time should be sufficient, but you can do it anytime. At the end, we’ll be happy to field questions. And if you can’t make it, you can catch the archive later.
How would I watch your livestream on Roku? On there, I did a search for Technomadia, and browsed what was there (very little, as usual) but no luck. I caught you on livestream.com using FireFox on Windows 7, thank you very much.
I’m not sure Roku has a Livestream.com app to watch there… you found the way to watch us, direct on Livestream 🙂
Now that you have had some time to get used to your new Penguin II AC units how have you found them to be working out? We have some Mach 8s on our coach and even though our system is ducted, they are very loud, both inside and outside. We have thought about changing them out but are hesitant to do so until we can get some feedback about the Penguin II units from other owners.
They’re ok.. typical RV AC units, way too loud in general. Think they’re a bit quieter than our Mach 8 was, but hard to say with out a side-by-side comparison.
In general, we try to avoid needing air conditioning as much as possible.
Mountain biking and Florida don’t seem to belong in the same sentence, lol, but those trails look beautiful. Have a great time!
Wow! Those crazy mountain bike trails look awesome!
It looks like you guys might be stopping at Sydney, up on Cape Breton. We were there this fall, don’t remember the city being very interesting, but if you head up the Cabot Trail, (that’s the only real road that goes around the top of the island) the driving is totally gorgeous, especially the further north you get.
Have a great time, Cape Breton is really awesome!
They sure did look awesome, but way beyond our comfort zone to attempt. 🙂
I’ll have to research where Cape Breton is… assuming that’s up in New England somewhere? We’ve not made any definite plans for our stops up there at this point, other than intentions of making it to the VT Escapade.
What a lovely little gem of a park! Another (really) lovely central FL park with mountain biking trails is Alafia State Park. We stay there regularly when we pass thro’ the area.
Nina
We’ve gotten a couple recommendations for Alafia now, we’ll have to check it out sometimes, for sure!
2 parks that we liked were Rodman and Salt Springs, both just south of Palatka and only a few miles away from each other.
Cool.. thanks for the recommendations.
the bikes look like so much fun, glad they’re living up to your expectations!
They definitely are! Perhaps even exceeding them by a bit.
Because of your blog and a couple of others similar, my husband and I have just purchased a 5th wheel and plan to sell our condo this summer and hit the road full time in October. Your posts have been so intriguing and enticing – love your descriptions of the areas you’ve been and all the helpful content you’ve included that we hope to put into practice in 6 months. Keep up the good work! We’re super excited about our new venture! We’re both in our early 70’s and have decided this is the time to move forward (so to speak) – if not now, when!
Chronic lurker here! Just wanted to say that I’m so glad you keep this blog going. My wife and I talk about it with each other and others!
Thanks for de-lurking, always appreciating knowing the effort put into share is being seen.
That looks like a pretty secluded site. No neighbors on either side. Does the site have water? I see the electric cable in the photo.
Yup, all of the sites were water/electric. And there’s a dump station at the exit.
Nice write-up! We were there not to long ago, and really enjoyed it. My wife wrote up our experiences at the campground here – http://dougchartrand.blogspot.com/2016/03/spring-break-on-ocala-mountain-bike.html
Looks like you guys had a great time there too! We didn’t make it out to the land bridge, but definitely have intentions of returning!