Thanks to Ben, Sue, Howard, and Lucy for the photos.

Thanks to Sue for the following description.....

ADVENTURE, ADVENTURE, that is what we like and we accomplished that on our outing at Gum Slough during the weekend of April 4th.

Saturday morning after everyone arrived at the campground at Pott’s Preserve by Inverness and set up their individual campsites. Ben led the 9 of us up the creek to Gum Slough. This creek branches off the Withlacoochee River where the campground is located.

The creek is spring fed and therefore crystal clear the entire approximately 5 miles to the spring-head. Along the way we viewed cypress trees fresh with new spring leaves, turtles, birds and lush green growth everywhere. During the entire trip, we  heard lots of twittering birds throughout the treess.

The paddling was tricky at times with tree limbs to go over or around and the current which wasn’t hard to handle but kept us paddling at a good pace. There were a couple places we had to portage along the way a very short distance and at the end almost to the spring-head some of us walked and some paddled up to the spring.

And then there was Tom-who once before entertained us with his skills as to how not to fall over in the kayak-well this time he almost ran face first into a batch of poison ivy so instead of risking that performed a very graceful lean to the side and dumped himself out of his kayak and mid-calf deep into the muck-this was followed with a very nice grab the kayak and swim for it.

After reaching the gum slough spring we paddled and walked around a bit and then headed back downstream. It took us with stops about 4.5 hours to paddle up and about 2.5 hours to paddle back to the campground.

Upon reaching the campground it was time for dinner and settling in for the evening. No campfires are allowed because of the dry conditions so we set up a couple candles, chattered for a while and then headed to our tents.

The morning brought the sound of twittering birds and beautiful sunshine-with clouds accumulating later on. 4 of us bid a fond farewell to some of the group and headed out for a 5 mile walk on the Florida Trail. Along the way Ben and Howard found an orange tree-which they proceeded to pluck a few oranges. We chose Ben as our official taste tester-to say the oranges were bitter is an understatement-the rest of us took a nibble and declared them-awful-so they back to the tree they went. The trail is maintained by the Florida Trail Assoc and was well groomed.

After returning to camp after the hike some of us packed up and left, some went fishing, sun bathing or on a short kayak paddle back up the creek.

All had a great weekend—thanks once again Ben!!