January 13 - 18: Clearwater Lake Campground in Ocala National Forest

After leaving Juniper Springs in the Ocala Forest we headed to nearby Clearwater Lake. We stayed on the exact same site as last year but this year by having our "portable" solar panels we were able to take much better advantage of solar power. We placed the panels in between our site and an adjacent site as can be seen below.

With this amount of solar power Jane was able to use her sewing machine to sew and our Insta-Pot for cooking. Her sewing machine doesn't use much power but she uses a small iron for pressing freezer/craft paper to the fabric. She adds the pattern to the paper using our printer before doing the pressing. She also uses the iron to flatten sewn seams. The iron does use a fair amount of power, about 300 watts, when it cycles on.

Last time we were at Clearwater I didn't try out a nearby bicycle trail. Since the soil is basically sand and I hadn't any experience with biking in the sand I thought my regular mountain bike tires wouldn't work well. After gaining experience later in last year's Florida stay where I found hard packed sand a good surface for my mountain bike tires, I decided I should try out the bicycle trail during this year's visit. It ended up being a very nice ride. Most of the trail was hard packed sand with an occasional section of loose sand. The bicycle trail crossed multiple OHV trails. The OHV trails consisted of loose sand presumably due to the more aggressive interaction with the OHV tires. With the exception of one crossing, I could ride through the loose sand of the OHV trail to continue on the bicycle trail. The trail is called the Paisley Woods bicycle trail and it resembles a jaggedly figure 8. I only biked on the southern part of the figure 8. Here is a link to the trail's web site: https://pwbt.weebly.com/.

 We will be staying with family for quite a while, close to three weeks, after we leave Clearwater Lake. Therefore we won't be at a campground for some time and there won't be an associated blog post.