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.