Travel Update 11

Our plan after leaving Big Mike's was to hang out in northern Florida for a while, catching a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center on December 5th before heading down the South Florida parks. We would then take our time heading back north to the two parks we skipped near Atlanta and ending up in Atlanta in time to fly to the Dominican Republic on January 15th. Over the course of Thanksgiving our plans changed and we decided to meet up with Kathleen's family in Austin for Christmas, meaning that we ended up hurrying south faster to have time for those three parks before we needed to move fairly quickly West.

On recommendation from our new friend Christopher, whom we met at Big Mike's, we started the week by going to check out the  Hare Krisha Temple in Alachua, which is the biggest in the US. We were also told that they do free lunches everyday.

It is a beautiful property and they invite people to come walk around. Because cows are sacred in the Hindu religion they have many cows around the property. Some are "rescues" that are bulls they got from other places. They also have a milking herd. Food is also a very important part of their religious beliefs so the property also had an organic garden where they do gardening demonstrations and grow the food they use in their meals.

After wandering around the property for a while we were shown around the temple by a Chaplain who answered some of our questions about their beliefs. We didn't end up staying for food but it was very interesting to talk to the people around the temple. Even if we didn't really understand their beliefs.

Through football season, we were able to catch every duck game by going out to eat at a sports bar once a week. Unfortunately with games as often as four times a week during basketball season we won't be able to keep that trend up. Especially since many of them won't be televised. Hopefully we'll be able to catch a fair number of them online. 

However this week we were lucky to get to catch the top ranked ducks play 17th ranked Syracuse in women's basketball on ACC network since we were in ACC territory. We found a Red Robin that was more than happy to play the game for us at the bar since it was a during a lull in business on a Sunday afternoon. The women's team is so much fun to watch this year and this game was no exception. The Syracuse newspaper wrote a great article about it after the game. 

For the early part of the week, before Thanksgiving, we decided to hang out in Ocala. We found a nice cracker barrel, a dog park at a very nice park to go to in the morning and then a nice library to catch up on internet things in the afternoon. A great little rhythm for three days.

The dog park had cement tunnels where she picked up a new trick: "go through." After which she was rewarded by being allowed to lay in the kiddie pool.

 

After Thanksgiving we went off in search of showers, which we had a bit of a hard time finding. We thought the national forest had showers in their day use swimming area, but it turned out that they were only for camper. We decided to return to our favorite Ocala library to watch some sports before staying at one of the camp sites further south in the forest to shower and spend the night before heading to Southern Florida.