Day 26 - Clayton Myers, Spring Hill, Florida

We had the full day to visit with Uncle Clayton. Sandy squeezed in a couple of loads of laundry. The night before Uncle Clayton had said that he was going to fix us blue berry pancakes for breakfast, but he didn’t have any good Vermont maple syrup, so he wasn’t going to make them. HOWEVER! We had bought a pint of real Vermont maple syrup to bring to Kate and then forgot to give it to her. So, we gave it to Uncle, he made the pancakes in the morning and we ended up having one of the best breakfasts ever.

After breakfast we headed out to Homossassa Springs Wildlife State Park. We had visited this park many years ago, and had told Barb Kroon (previous blog) that it might be a good place to take her mom or grand kids. We thought more about it and thought we would like to go back. This state park has all animals native to Florida – and one misplaced hippo. The story with the hippo is that it was part of a private circus/road show, and it retired to the Florida park. When the park decided to go with all native animals, there was a letter writing campaign to the governor to keep the hippo. In order to keep with the “all Florida animals”, they made the hippo an honorary citizen of Florida. Right now the hippo is 49 years old and weighs around 6000 pounds. We also saw many alligators, bob cats, panthers, birds, birds and more birds, red wolves, red and silver foxes to name a few. (oh yeah, lots of snakes too.)

After the park we stopped at one of my Uncle’s favorite places to go when he is in this area. It was called “Margueritagrill” (yep, all one word). He insisted that we get three orders of the Buffalo Shrimp because he wasn’t about to share his and he knew we would love them. Think Buffalo Wings, only big crisp shrimp. He knew what he was talking about. We also ordered a serving of gator bites and some onion rings. And then we were too full for dinner, but that’s quite ok! Uncle also had a medium margarita, but the medium was HUGE – We put three straws in it, but we were drinking beer (Landshark beer: Jimmy Buffet’s beer), so we really only had a taste of his. Getting into the mood of Margaritaville, Joe noticed one of the waitresses had a Route 66 T-shirt on, and he asked her if she knew anything about Route 66. She said it was in Las Vegas, so Joe gave her a little history by singing the Route 66 song to her.

When we got home Sandy challenged her uncle to a game or two of cribbage. She got the lead early on, winning the first three games in a row. One more for a clean sweep and a skunk. But it rapidly turned around, with Uncle winning the last three games. And the last game he skunked Sandy, so that counted as two games, and he won. We’ll have to have a rematch!