An evening for Great Clouds

Ocean Pond Campground Site #9

Osceola National Forest

Lake City, Florida

Out for my morning run as usual.  Temperature was only 72 but the humidity was the worst I’ve experienced and I was covered with sweat by the time I was finished and oh so glad to be done.

The rest of the morning was taken up with checking into what turned out to be a hydraulic leak on the back slide, making sure the kayak tire would hold air, working on yesterday’s blog, paying bills, returning emails and those sorts of real life things.   Great to be doing them all outside

In a lounge chair

In the late afternoon we thought we’d go out for a paddle on Ocean Pond to see just how Ocean-like it was.   Now why do they call it a pond?  It is neither an Ocean nor a Pond  It is a bowl shaped lake 2 miles in diameter.  Cyprus trees border Ocean Pond with tall pines towering overhead.  Spanish moss hangs from the hardwoods under which is a dense understory of palmetto and young oak.

 We took one of the kayaks down to the launch and when we came back the wind picked up, leaves and pine needles started blowing everywhere and we thought, “oh well, it was a good idea”.    But it stopped just as quickly as it started.  While we were waiting to see if it was over or just fooling us we were joking about how soon the camp host would be out with the leaf blower to get those pesky pine needles off the road.   We both have serious aversions to leaf blowers and were just amazed to see that this was apparently one of the jobs for the camp host.   Perhaps there is some reason of which we are unaware that it is bad for pine needles to be on the blacktopped drive but I decided I would be Joan Henry and see if I couldn’t clear as much space with my broom as the leaf man could with his noisy polluting get no exercise blower.   So David timed me and in 5 minutes I could clear 65 feet.

But the blower never materialized for us to go head to head so we decided to do that paddle anyway.   The launch was just at the top of the campground circle so we took the kayaks by cart which worked very well.  We got launched

But the clouds still looked a bit ominous

And then we went around a bend and there was one of the biggest full rainbows I’ve ever seen.  My camera could not get the expanse of it because it was so close.  But here are a couple of partial shots.   It was more vivid and clear than these pictures show and it stayed forever.  I have probably 30 shots of it from which I took these two.   Wish we’d had David’s camera for this.

It turned out to be a great cloud day on the lake

Even at sunset, the clouds stole the show.

It was a wonderful display....

from every direction.

Including this final shot from what looked like a hole in the sky through which Penguins should march down onto the Antarctic looking mounds of snow.   Or it least that’s what it looked like to me.   What do you see?  Click this one before you decide.  :-)

This post was brought to you by the Main Street McDonald's in Lake City Florida because we have reached the end of our 5GB air card limit in spite of being told by everyone we talked to that if you didn't stream videos or watch movies (neither of which we do) that we'd never get close to using 5GB.  BUT something we are doing......email??  uploading pictures onto the blog????  paying bills????   using Google Maps???? is definitely using more than 5GB a month.   So if you are just starting out, consider our experience in deciding what to get for internet use.  Not sure when I'll post again but check back, you never know.  We'll be back in town again when we move on so I'll stop by my friendly McDonalds and update you on our past couple of days!   See you then.