An ongoing history of almost everything: ARE YOU FOR SCUBA?

So one trip down memory lane didn't quite go as planned, but Ryan also wanted to take us to Blue Springs State Park, one of his favorite places to visit when he lived in Florida as a kid. It turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip...but given Ryan's description we didn't have particularly high hopes for the place. Granted, it'd been a long time since he'd been there but he certainly didn't sell the place.

"So Ryan, what's it like?"

"Oh, you can just go play in the river. It's kind of cool. You can rent inner tubes. You can swim to a hot spring too if you get far enough."

"Ok, so is there somewhere the kids can play?"

"No, not really. You pretty much just have to get in the water."

"What about somewhere to sit when we get out?"

"There's not really anything there but the water."

Well given that description, poor Mike who'd gashed his leg decided he better not come since he couldn't swim and he wouldn't be able to sit and watch, or read. And Becky and I were happy to go but were seriously expecting to be roughing it. Here's what it's actually like:

The first thing Ryan forgot to mention is that Blue Springs is a Manatee Refuge. The water stays at a steady 72 degrees since it's fed from a natural hot spring, which makes it the perfect place for the manatees to stay safe and warm. There's a boardwalk that leads down to the water and when we arrived there were manatees swimming underneath it that you could catch a glimpse of if you were quiet enough. We thought that was pretty amazing in itself and there was quite to crowd gathered to watch them. Little did we know that once we got in the water we'd be able to swim with them (which, supposedly is prohibited, but nobody was there enforcing that rule the day we were there). With the kids in a raft we swam our way upstream towards the Spring and watched in amazement as Manatee's literally swam right past us (along with some other massive fish but I preferred to pretend I didn't notice them touching my feet. Gross!).

You can just about see the boardwalk where the Manatee's were swimming:

And here we see the absolute opposite of Nevada:

We took a little break half way up the river, since swimming against the current whilst pushing a giant rubber raft with two kids in it was quite the workout. It turned out that there's a boardwalk which follows the river bank so we could relax on solid ground. Once the toddlers got a taste for running around, though, they weren't too excited about getting back into the boat so, though the hot spring was just around the corner we figured we'd just walk back. Ryan's description didn't make it sound particularly exciting after all- "It's kind of cool. It's just a Spring"-seen one seen them all, apparently. In my head it was a little trickle of water coming out of a rock; he certainly didn't make it sound anymore interesting than that. Thankfully, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to make the swim and see it for myself. The Spring was certainly no tiny trickle of water; turns out it's the largest Spring on the St. John's River and it's enormous. To see it you dive underwater where an enormous cavern opens up beneath you, a sheer drop into total darkness. There were a couple of divers swimming down into the blackness with their scuba gear (I guess they thought it was 'kind of cool' too), but the rest of us could only swim down a few feet before the water pressure made going further too painful. Even so, I'd never seen anything like it; it was incredible. Just a Spring, indeed!

Manatee's only beyond this point:

And there are the giant fish we pretended not to notice:

It turned out there was somewhere to go once we got out of the water. We found pic-nic tables and a big grassy field so the kids had fun playing, chasing bugs, and getting thoroughly covered in sand.