Our last stop was at Dunn’s Creek State Park with a nifty trail that winds around some wet spots and full of good ol’ Florida vegetation. The drawing is from there.

Now for a rant involving two other parks we visited:

We did go to parks I didn’t care for. One was a Civil War site in northern Duval County. The Milton Encampment was the middle stop for confederates to stop in between Jacksonville and Olustee. It should be a fascinating park. Instead some landscape architect went nuts and given free reign to ignore the history and just make a pretty place and spend lots and lots and lots of taxpayer dollars.

Can you imagine a historic site where symmetry is the rule??? Or a ton of cash poured into creating a log bridge out of concrete that has concrete logs molded to look like logs and then a slab of concrete put on top to hide the logs? And that the bridge is thought to look like this but not even sure if the bridge was even in the area??? There is a farmhouse being reconstructed with two giant banners as large as the house surrounding it to let everyone know it’s being renovated. Two? Did they need two? I’d question one. With a seven foot tall fence surrounding the structure you’d get the ides that the place is being worked on.  That there are no roadway signs to this financial sinkhole. I could go on. All of this in a very rural and well hidden area. Clearly Duval County had truckloads of cash to burn. The Dade Battlefield should be the historic park that others strive for. It’s easy, accurate and considerably cheaper than the mess of the Milton Encampment. Let history speak for itself.

The other park is in St. Johns County and was deplorable for it’s asphalt roadways slicing all over the park along with the asphalt trail that has an incline that a person in a wheelchair would be smart enough not to traverse. The human use of this park is reduced by all of this to only a third of the “park space”. Three oversized retention ponds leads one to believe a developer traded land so they wouldn’t have to have the retention area in their project. Such projects are directly across the street from the park. Sad also to see sod being laid out in the retention ditches. In a month mowing will begin in the rention areas that tax payers will have to cover. Why are we mowing so-called rention areas???? Why were chunks of forest torn out for the ponds??? Why did this happen at all when the park is full of very deep sinkholes that the park is keeping the public out of???? Ugh! This is an aspect of the Growth Management laws that needs to be revised.