Ft. Desoto 2016, our 4th time down. Routine drive down, had to crash in two separate Walmarts (Paducah and Tallahassee) getting there. Given our vast experience with Fort DeSoto, it took us about an hour to settle in. We were so close to the Camp Store that we could pull in wifi right at our campsite.
Not too many pics of this scene. I’ve taken them all before. We ate really well – mostly cooking in the camper. Salads every night, a lot of grilling. When we ate out, it was fish most of the time. Grouper!
(Click pictures to see photo galleries.)
It took us a while, but we finally discovered the St. Petersburg Tennis Center. Sixteen beautifully maintained clay courts. A very reasonable fee of $10/player, good for the entire day. Friendly staff. Once they got to know us they filled us in on the local talent. Eileen will have lots of hitting partners next time down there.
If it’s maintained well, clay is a sweet surface, and even more so for anyone suffering from bad knees. I could run for several hours with little pain. The ball slows down, the points are long. It’s very tiring, but not damaging.
Our riding routes expanded. From Tierra Verde, there is now a complete bike path along Pinellas Byway going East. It connects to a connector route heading north to the main Pinellas Bike Trail. We also found two other alternate routes through town, on roads with bike lanes, that could get us downtown.
Another new route was the Sun Coast Trail, an “out and back”. It parallels I-275 as it goes south towards the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. This trail doesn’t get all the way to the main bridge, it ends at a park, way out there in the bay. Kiteboarding is hugely popular these days. We passed a beach where a bunch of this was going on. Kitboarders cluster around a beach with good conditions like a tribe of Fishheads. It’s a lifestyle.
We went over to Pass A Grill twice for really good fish. It’d be fun to pedal over there, and there’s a good bike path across the big bridge heading that way, but at the entrance to Pass A Grill the road was all torn up, horrible bike access to get into this area. We ate at Sea Critters once, really good spot. That evening was very cool, and the wind was just howling. We strolled to the beach after dinner. It was Wedding Central. Four or five different wedding were in progress on the beach. Everyone looked miserable, battered, cold, 30-35 mph winds. The wind chill took things down to about 45 degrees. Bad luck for those folks.
Another dinner out on Pass A Grille was at Paradise Grill, right on the beach. We watched some very competitive bean bag tossing. I think it was a league.
Gulf Port – an appealing smaller town due north from Tierra Verde, across the Boca Ciega Bay. Cute small downtown, appealing neighborhoods with smaller homes, looked like Old Florida. Interesting location, mid way between the Gulf Shore and downtown St. Petes, and also very close to the Pinellas Bike Trail. We met our friend Anna there for some casual dining.
After two weeks, we got the heave from Ft. DeSoto. We could come back, but the rule is you have to take 16 days off. So we hooked up and drove to Athens, GA, a rest stop on the way to Asheville. Stayed a day, walked the campus of UGA. It’s a very large school, large, spread out campus. They love their football, and their Bulldog! Athens has a smaller downtown than we would have expected, the usual college town. We did take a few hours to tour the State Botannical Gardens of Georgia, located just out of town. Apologies for all these Botannical pics. Near the end we came across 2 gals who’d smuggled in their 8 week old puppy. Eileen had to pick it up (but he wanted down). Check it out.
Asheville was half a day’s drive from Athens. We camped at Mama Gerties, in Swannanoa, 15 miles east of Asheville. Interesting campground, carved into a steep valley. (Everything around Asheville is steep). Gerties is without a doubt the cleanest, most put together campground we’ve ever seen. The grounds were meticulously maintained. The showers, the bathrooms, the laundry room, all spotless. The roads in here were very steep, and each camp site was a graded, flat gravel pad. The also had cabins and some tent sites.
Asheville is surround by mountains, and “altitude”. The springtime development of trees is very dependent on that altitude. Down in town, most things were fully leafed out, but you’ll see from pictures that much of the higher vegetations was still far from that.
West Asheville is a funky, hippie commercial district, separate from downtown. We had a fabulous meal there at a local icon, The Admiral. Nearby is an artists row called River Arts. I surrepticiously snapped pics in my favorite gallery.
We drove 25 miles south down the Blue Ridge Parkway. Stopped in at the main visitor’s center. Our destination was a hike near Mt. Pisgah. We got a good look at the road conditions on the parkway. There’s a lot of talk out there for the Blue Ridge Parkway being a bicycle destination, but we disagree. The road is relentlessly narrow. There is nothing that coud be construed as a bicycle shoulder. It’s also a lot steeper than what I’d read. Long, very steep grades where you’d be climbing at 6mph, with cars passing you relentlessly. Downhills would be “interesting”. It’s not for us. It is, however, a perfect place for motorcycles.
It’s a requirement to tour the Biltmore Estate. A spectacular example of excess. The tour was interesting, we rented little phones that gave us an overview of each room we passed through. The stories and statistics of this place would take weeks to digest, I can’t begin to cover it here. There had previously been a ban on indoor photography, lifted a few weeks earlier. I was able to shoot indoors. It’s a very dim place. The lightbulbs (very modern at the time) are equivalent to 15w, and that’s how the place was illuminated. Excellent verisimilitude. Outside pictures first.
Indoor Pictures. Various large production movies have been filmed in part at the Biltmore. The Biltmore owns a great many wedding dresses of renown, all on display in the various room, with references to the movies in which they appeared.
We enjoyed a final cocktail at the massive Grove Park Inn, which featured a stunning view over Asheville. And that was all she wrote. We drove the 923 miles home the next day in one pull, punctuated by a disturbing number of fuel stops.
