As with many of my state park adventures, I headed out planning to conquer at least 4 parks & ended up seeing half of that amount! This time it was all due to the night before! I was at a concert until late and then decided to sleep in because it was Christmas Eve!
Brian Scott was in Orlando for the holiday so I met him at my mom’s and we headed out to Allen David Broussard Catfish Creek. I read in the book ahead of time and we were pumped up by the description. We also decided to follow the directions in the book on how to get there instead of using the GPS. It worked out for a while, for a little while. Finally we asked the GPS how to get there and discovered just how far off track we went!
The day seem to really heat up as we arrived at the park. We hiked, up the very soft sand for what seemed to be miles. All the hills just felt like they were going up; were we hiking to heaven? We made it to a beautiful watering hole, hiked around it and started on the next set of hiking trails. Looking around all I could think of was this must be what it was like to be stuck walking in the desert. Time felt like it stopped and everything began to look the same. I realized that this was just not the park for me. I asked Brian if he was good with moving on and off we went back to the truck, continuing to walk up those soft sand hills until FINALLY we found the one that led down!
I will admit, my spirit was dampened a bit by that experience but it was quickly restored when we arrived at Paynes Creek Historic State Park! We drove around until we found the hiking trails and off we went. We were not sure which one went to the catwalk and which one went to the bridge so we took them both. The catwalk went around Peace River. It was nice and shaded and the hike was just so very pleasant, filled with 1000 laughs as we talked about a bunch of nonsense. The walk to the bridge was even better because it led to a suspension bridge! We hung out on the other side for a bit and decided that maybe it would be best to head back home and spend some holiday time with our families.
