January 2021

Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park is a Florida State Park, encompassing a 21,000-acre savanna in Alachua County, Florida lying between Micanopy and Gainesville. It is also a U.S. National Natural Landmark. Paynes Prairie is unique in many ways. Nowhere else in Florida can visitors experience wild-roaming bison (all we saw were bison chips) and horses. Nearly 300 species of birds also frequent the park along with alligators, deer and many other animals. The day started out rainy and chilly but improved throughout the day. We started the day with umbrellas in hand on the Lake Wauberg trail – just .8 miles with views of the lake and the savanna. Then on to the Bolen Bluff Trail a 2.5 mile loop with a spur trail into the savanna with an observation tower which gave us a good view of this expansive park. Finally the 3 mile La Chula Trail which is a mix of boardwalks and a grassy trail around the Alachua Sink with sightings of alligators and many birds.

To break our bout with cabin fever we decided to take a road trip to Micanopy FL to do some hiking and sightseeing in a covid wary manner. We stayed at the Herlong Mansion B&B (mainly because only 3 of the 13 rooms were occupied). On the 12th we visited Rawling SP and on the 13th we hiked Paynes Prairie SP (see next post).

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same name. In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72-acre orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought the place to international fame through her writing. She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her “Florida cracker” neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land.