Sunday, February 09, 2003
It was raining hard in the morning, so we went out to eat breakfast and came back to use the recreation hall for writing, choosing pictures, and burning a CD to send to Sarah. The recreation hall was warm and had a nice, comfortable sofa for us to sit side by side as we did this, which made it quite pleasant. It was still raining around 1:00, so we drove over to the town to have lunch at a Subway. The rain let up after lunch so we drove north to see the section of Rainbow Springs State Park that had the springs—our section was just a camping area and a boat ramp downstream from the springs.

The Rainbow Springs area had much more to look at than we expected. The springhead is unremarkable—the water just wells up out of the ground. Since the water was 72 degrees and the air considerably colder, we were treated to the sight of steam rising off the surface of the water, which was very pretty. The other things we saw were the remnants of an amusement park that operated there from 1967 to 1974. Judging by the pictures in a section of the gift shop, it was quite an operation. It had a steamboat ride on the river, a monorail running thru the forest, an aviary and zoo, artificial waterfalls, and even a rodeo that gave daily presentations. The only things still functioning were the artificial waterfalls, which were nicely landscaped. We wandered the trails past the ruins of some of these attractions, took some pictures, and returned to camp.

The rain started up again and we just had yogurt in the tent rather than struggle with cooking and eating in a driving rain. That went all right but we were awakened by the all-too-familiar sound of raccoons batting at our things around 2 a.m. All the food was locked away, but they could apparently smell the food on the utensils stored in the orange boat box, and they were batting at that. This time, however, they succeed in opening it and were starting to drag things off when I shined a flashlight on them to scare them and Monika went out to gather the things and lock them in the truck. Altho we scared them away, they had succeeded in getting at our stuff so I had to score this as a raccoon victory. The score now stands Raccoons 3, Holts 1.