Well, time for the annual Christmas Campout with the Florida Pop-Up Campers (FPUC), so we headed off to the west coast of Florida south of Sarasota last weekend to Oscar Scherer State Park. The park is located off of US 41 just outside of the town of Osprey.
We arrived on Friday afternoon around 3. The park has over a hundred sites, and most of them are tight. We were able to get parked with out too much trouble, even though the site was very narrow. After putting out the slides, I could not get into the storage compartments on the driver’s side as it was hard up against all the palmetto bushes. If we’d showed up here in the fifth-wheel, I think I would have just turned around and driven home. There are some pull through sites (about five or six), but even some of these are very tight. We walked around and there are a number of wider sites in the campground, if we go back there are about 15 – 20 of the sites that we think would be better.
We took advantage of the nice weather (highs in the mid 80’s) and took a canoe trip on South Creek. The creek runs through the park, and is very slow moving. Canoes can be rented from the ranger station for a little over five bucks an hour. You are allowed to go down the creek to the US 41 bridge, and up the creek to a damn location right near the nature center. We were able to do the whole trip in right at an hour. The creek is tidal, and we were canoing at low tide, so there were some low spots on the down creek trip. The creek was fairly active with canoers and kayakers.
Saturday night was filled with the FPUC pot luck dinner, a rig decorating contest and the annual FPUC auction. That always makes for a good time. The CurbCrushers won 3rd place in the decorating contest, the only one to place that didn’t have one of those inflatable lawn decorations. Maybe next year.
We were up early Sunday morning for the trip home. Little CurbCrusher had a number of Christmas performance obligations at church. So we meandered through the park to the dump station. From our site location, we pretty much had to do three-quarters of the campground loop to get to the dump station. There are lots of low hanging limbs in this park. None that will do real damage, but they make a heck of a racket as you drive through the park, and it really got the ol’ adrenaline flowing driving through the campground at five miles an hour and listening to the screeching on the roof.

Pictures of our trip are here.