January 16
End: Platts Bluff Boat Launch
Miles: 25.4
Total: 349.3
The night was not nearly as cold as the one before it. The mosquitos eventually left me alone and I slept okay. Stinger and I started the trek into Buckhead Ridge. After meeting a knowledgeable local and a couple more with no concept of distance, we arrived at a gas station and store that don’t appear on Google Maps.
I picked up a couple of things and we both enjoyed Cuban sandwiches at the local store. We got to talk a good amount with the locals and even got to listen to a ‘true’ story of how Bigfoot mated with some human females, which is related to a new theory I have concerning the ancestry of a certain Buckhead Ridge resident.
Finally that was over and we continued out of the Lake Okeechobee region and on to the Kissimmee River. The walking was easy and along the way we got into discussions on some of life’s more important topics, which was cool.
Later in the afternoon we decided to push on and see if we could find a good spot to sleep just as darkness set in. We stopped to talk to a mother who had a monkey as a pet which was climbing on her while she drove, which I thought was incredible.
Darkness came and we still had not found our spot, but we knew where we wanted to go. Finally we arrived at Platts Boat Launch and set up camp hoping nobody would come by the boat launch, but that was not to be.
In the evening a truck playing bad music too loud parked about a hundred yards away, probably to fish. That was annoying, but not nearly as much as when two kids in a golf cart drove down the boat launch for some unknown reason. While there they fired off what sounded like a very loud, short handgun a couple of times. I’m not sure if they ever noticed us.
Besides the firearms going off yards from where I was lying, there were few interruptions. We had covered more miles than usual, my feet were tired, and so was I.