Florida - Day 34 - back to Starke

Starke/Gainesville NE KOA, Starke

Sunday, 19 February 2023

today's route -
from south to north

Google said it wouldn't take longer than 2 hours for today's drive, so I didn't get on the road until after 10:00.  Some of the route was through places we'd been earlier, such as The Villages, "World's Friendliest Hometown."  I missed that nickname when I visited before, but my impression then would make this characterization doubtful.

We stopped at a Winn-Dixie Grocery in Ocala and continued north.  I don't care for the store's name: it was formed in 1925 (and weren't those the enlightened days), at a location on the Dixie Highway, and operates entirely in Deep South states.  But in Florida the only real alternative is Publix, which has great stores but I really don't want to be contributing to the owner's choice of politics (e.g. she was a big donor to the infamous Jan. 6th rally).  Just a personal preference of mine.

Alachua County says it's "Where Nature and Culture Meet."  This county includes Gainesville, though I bypassed it today.  I passed through lots of small towns: Lochloosa, Hawthorne, Campville, Waldo.  I think the county's population must almost all be in Gainesville.

I heard an interview on the radio of a survivor of one of the Nazi concentration camps, who said it wasn't enough just to want to survive.  It turned out it was more important to want to survive for a specific purpose.  A sense of purpose is like a superpower.  

Words that help inspire, like these, are themselves a superpower.

We were in our campsite by 3:00.  I had made the reservation online and asked for a specific type of campsite.  When I checked in, I found they'd given me a completely different one.  Nothing wrong with it, except it was a long way from the office/showers/laundry, so I couldn't realistically walk there as I had been able from my previous campsite.  They said the campground was actually full - some kind of rally or something somewhere in the area - and I'd gotten the last site available.  But I asked them to keep me in mind if one of those I preferred opened up.