The Ichetucknee River is 73 degrees all year. Our tent at O'Leno State Park, at 10 p.m. on a Saturday in July, was 84. Those two numbers are the whole story of our weekend, but I'll tell the rest anyway.
Back where I learned to camp
I grew up in Gainesville, and O'Leno is where my Scout troop camped. It's where I learned to pitch a tent badly and then less badly, and the Ichetucknee is where that same troop took us tubing every summer. I've wanted to show both to my kids since we started camping, so we went the weekend of July 18 to 20: two nights at O'Leno, with the float on Saturday.
The drive from Kendall is about five hours. We left Friday at noon and pulled in at 5:15 with the Pilot reading 94 degrees. O'Leno sits on the Santa Fe River, dark tea-colored water that disappears underground at a spot called the River Sink and comes back up miles away. There's an old suspension bridge across the river, built in the 1930s, that bounces a little when you walk on it. Nico jumped on it. Once. Dana's look stopped him.
Shade, bugs, bathroom: good shade on our site, mosquitoes at dusk that the Thermacell mostly handled, and a bathhouse with hot showers a short walk away.
Tubing the Ichetucknee
Saturday morning we drove about 25 minutes to Ichetucknee Springs State Park. Park entry was $6. We'd rented four tubes from a shop on the highway outside the park, $60 for the set. The park doesn't allow food or drinks on the river, so we ate a big breakfast and left the snacks in the car.
Both kids wore life jackets from the tube shop the whole time. That's our rule, not necessarily the park's. We launched from the midpoint, which is the shorter float, about an hour and a half to the take-out, and rode the shuttle back to the parking lot afterward.
The water is so clear you can see every blade of eelgrass waving on the bottom, and every fish. The first touch of 73-degree water on a 92-degree morning made Nico yell loud enough that a family ahead of us turned around. Five minutes later he was trailing both hands in it and saying it was "air conditioning for your arms." Maya saw a turtle on a log and a mullet jump clear out of the water. She was frustrated she couldn't bring her journal, and drew both from memory that night.
It was exactly as good as I remembered. Floating under the trees with my kids, in the same river where I floated with my Scout troop at 12, I kept quiet for a while, which Dana noticed and didn't say anything about.
My mistake: I put sunscreen on everyone's face, arms and shoulders and forgot that when you sit in a tube, your feet stick up out of the water for 90 minutes. All four of us came home with sunburned tops of our feet. Nico calls them "tube feet."
The nights were the hard part
Dana's 70 rule says no tent camping in Florida when the forecast dew point is over 70. That weekend it was 74 and 75. We bent the rule because the plan was "springs weekend," and our thinking was that cold water by day would make up for warm nights. It didn't.
I'd bought a Ryobi 18-volt bridge fan the week before for $40, specifically for this trip, and between that and our clamp fan we had two fans moving air in the tent all night. At 10 p.m. the tent was 84 degrees. The kids were so worn out from tubing that they slept anyway. Dana and I lay on the tent floor with our bags unzipped flat, sticky and wide awake. Around 1 a.m. Dana said, very quietly, "This is why there's a rule." I didn't argue.
Friday, our first night, had been a little easier. A thunderstorm rolled through at 8 and dropped it to 79 by 10, which felt almost reasonable at the time.
What it cost
- Campsite, 2 nights: $56
- Gas: $99
- Tube rentals: $60
- Ichetucknee park entry: $6
- Groceries: $64
- Ice: $14
- Cat sitter, 2 visits: $30
Total: $329, about $165 a night. The ice line would have been a lot worse with our old cooler.
Next time, I think we'd do the Ichetucknee as a day trip from Ron and Linda's house in Ocala, a little over an hour away, and sleep in a bed with air conditioning. Same river, no 84-degree tent.
One more thing. Sunday morning, heavy dew and a storm building to the west meant I packed the tent into its bag wet, in a hurry. It's in the carport storage room right now, still damp. I keep meaning to set it up in the yard to dry, and every afternoon the forecast says 3 p.m. storms. It's on the list.
